The Last of the Old New York.

Billy’s Topless was a bar where women danced without their shirts on, and where the cover charge was zero dollars, and where a beer cost four bucks, and where nobody — not the dancers, not the bartenders, not the regulars nursing their drinks at two in the afternoon — was pretending that any of this was something it wasn’t.

The atmosphere was warm in the way that only a place with no pretensions can be warm. A free buffet that nobody touched. Dancers who ranged from stunning to ordinary to the kind of faces Diane Arbus would have wanted to photograph.

Milton Anthony, who owned the place, forbade breast implants. He forbade lap dances. He forbade touching the dancers. This was not a gentleman’s club.

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