An elderly resident at an upscale Manhattan hotel for women that once housed notable tenants including Grace Kelly and Liza Minelli was strangled to death in her luxury suite — and her chilling demise remains unsolved 50 years later.
When Ruth Harding’s body was found on Aug. 15, 1975, the iconic Barbizon Hotel at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue — a gilded refuge for ambitious unmarried women chasing big-city dreams, celebrated authors and Hollywood’s elite that opened in 1927 — had lost its charm and glitz.
“I wouldn’t say it was a lavish hotel by then, that’s for sure,” historian Paulina Bren, who authored “The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free” in 2021, told The Post.
“Really, the heyday of the Barbizon was the ’40s and ’50s. In the ’60s, it already started to somewhat deteriorate, and by the ’70s, much like New York itself, it was very much sort of rundown of its grandeur.”
The 23-story hotel — boasting 700 guest rooms — had fallen into disrepair, with a gaping hole in the lobby ceiling, grim rumors of women plunging from the roof and Harding, a reclusive and lonely resident, becoming its only recorded murder victim.
However, her vicious slaying has remained cold — and largely forgotten by city authorities and prosecutors — since she was found on the bathroom floor of her posh 11th-floor room with abrasions on her throat.
While the NYPD did not answer multiple requests for comment — only asking why The Post was writing about Harding’s case — police in 1975 said they had “no clues” after her murder.
“There were abrasions on her throat, but we have nothing else, no next of kin, no clues,” Detective Sgt. James Stewart told the New York Times after her body was discovered.
The extent of the investigation remains unclear, including whether there was ever a suspect — or if the case had been revisited over the years with advancements in DNA forensics.
Law enforcement sources — including former officers and members of the city’s Cold Case Squad at the time of Harding’s murder — told The Post they had no memory of her case and didn’t know of anyone who worked on it.
“It is never too late to pursue justice for New Yorkers, and our Cold Case Unit welcomes information from the public about this tragic matter, and any other unsolved homicide,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said Thursday
‘A place for young women’
The historic salmon-hued hotel served as an exclusive boarding house and majestic sanctuary for single women striving to make their mark in the Big Apple and launch careers during an era when they were expected to marry young and start families.
“It was a place for young women, usually outside of New York from sort of small-time USA, coming to New York … to play out their ambition and try to see if they could actually take flight,” Bren said, noting how women had a short window before reaching their “sell-by” date for marriage.
“The Barbizon represented that window, and I think the anxiety of these women, in the ’50s especially, of everything they’d been taught, and they wanted to do, and how restricted their lives were, and how they tried to find a space at the Barbizon to accomplish what society was telling them they couldn’t do.”
Aspiring artists flocked to the women-only residence — not just for its safety, since men were barred from entering the residence beyond the lobby until it went co-ed in 1981 — but because it was known for sheltering future stars before they made it big.
Among the legendary figures who lived there were Joan Crawford, Cloris Leachman, Joan Didion, Kelly and Minelli — whose mother, Judy Garland, was known for driving the front desk staff crazy by constantly checking in on the young actress, Bren wrote.
Resident Sylvia Plath famously threw all her clothes off the Barbizon’s roof on her last day as a magazine intern — an act she later immortalized, along with the hotel, in “The Bell Jar.”
The iconic address, however, also became a hideaway for starving artists, lonely wallflowers and spinsters who checked into the Barbizon in the 1930s and 1940s — and never left.
Those, including 79-year-old Harding, were known as “The Women,” a divisive label coined by the hotel’s much younger guests, who pitied and feared that the senior occupants represented a grim future if they failed to achieve their dreams.
“There was definitely this rift,” Bren said.
“And Ruth Harding was one of ‘The Women.’”
She lived on the 11th floor in a “luxury room” with a private bathroom — a rare perk found in only about a quarter of the rooms — that reportedly cost about $77 per week.
Most of the temporary occupants shared communal bathrooms on other floors.
The elusive and seemingly lonely senior would leave her lavish room each night in her nightgown and coat to wander down to the lobby, where she’d linger and talk to anyone who’d listen.
“Apparently, she had no friends there,” Bren said.
“She would go down to the lobby, as many of these women did every evening, and just kind of chat up the sort of dates of the younger women who had to wait in the lobby for them, because they weren’t allowed to go upstairs.”
While Harding chatted with the eager escorts, she and the other alienated senior residents would unleash “snide comments to the young women about how they were dressed,” the historian said.
The enigmatic elder moved into the Barbizon nearly two years before her death, Heidi Schichida, the hotel’s assistant manager, told The New York Times in 1975 — though Bren believes she settled there in the 1940s.
Many described Harding as an intelligent yet talkative woman who craved conversation but remained friendless and never received visitors.
“She was not employed, but she told people she had been an actress, a journalist, a ballerina and everything else,” a hotel employee told the outlet.
“She dropped so many names, made so many claims you didn’t know what to believe.”
Bren received countless letters after publishing her book, but not from anyone familiar with Harding’s puzzling death — and only uncovered two Times articles briefly referencing the case in her research.
“It’s really bizarre,” she said, adding that Harding’s room was left “undisturbed” after her strangling.
“All of these original sources from the hotel itself, the letters, the registry books, it’s all gone. You just can’t find that information.”
The once-famed hotel was eventually gutted and transformed into luxury condominiums in 2006 — after nearly 80 years of operation — effectively erasing any trace of Harding’s memory and unexplained murder along with it.
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