Īccording to a 1979 advertisement in SCREW magazine, the club offered, besides a heated swimming pool, a steam sauna, whirlpool baths, disco dancing, free bar and buffet, "cozy living rooms and lounging areas", a "variety of swing areas", and a backgammon lounge. In later years prostitutes did frequent the premises and there was "rampant" use of drugs (most often quaaludes) by patrons. Drugs (at the time alcohol was not considered a drug) and paid sexual services were also forbidden, but the prohibitions were not enforced, which would have been difficult at best. This rule was intended to control the male–female ratio. Once a woman left a room after a sexual encounter, her male companion had to accompany her within two minutes. Unaccompanied women were welcome, often at a discounted rate, or free. Woman on woman sex, however, he encouraged. This of course blocked male homosexuals, and he also prohibited male-male sexual activity between the men that did get in.
Levenson did not allow men unaccompanied by a female to enter. This meant that members had to follow the club's rules. Plato's Retreat was a "members-only" establishment that was legally not a public business. The hotel used to house the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse where singer Bette Midler, often accompanied by Barry Manilow on a baby grand piano, first became a national figure. After organizing swinging parties himself for a time, he opened a club "for swingers" in 1977, in the basement of the Kenmore Hotel on East 23rd Street between Lexington and Third Avenue (145 E 23rd St), and called it "Plato's Retreat." The same year, he moved it to the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, an early 20th-century building on 2109 Broadway between West 73rd and West 74th Streets on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In 1976, Larry Levenson, a high school friend of Al Goldstein and a former fast-food manager who was selling ice cream at Coney Island, was introduced to the swinging lifestyle by a woman he met at a bar.