This is not a tale from the 1950s. It is straight out of 21st century New York City. With an amused smile but an earnest tone, Ms. Lienhard (who warned the embarrassed tenant that she would get “no second chances”) recalled the incident the other day  just one small drama from a slice of life that many people assume vanished from the city decades ago.

The Webster, on West 34th Street, is one of the few remaining all-female residences in a city that used to have many. Hotels and apartment houses that provided temporary refuge for young ladies hoping to find fame, or start a career (or snare a husband) in the big city occupy a distinct sliver of New York lore. The most famous, the Barbizon Hotel for Women on East 63rd Street, was memorably depicted in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel “The Bell Jar” as populated by well-to-do “girls” whose parents “wanted to make sure their daughters were living in a place where men couldn’t get at them and deceive them.”

Plath gave the place a thinly fictionalized name, the Amazon. In real life the Barbizon is known for sheltering Grace Kelly while she was studying acting, as well as a young Joan Crawford, Candice Bergen, Ali McGraw, Liza Minnelli and Plath herself. An ad for the hotel that ran in The New Yorker in 1966 boasted, “Many of the world’s most successful women were Barbizon girls.”

Image EVERY NIGHT IS GIRLS' NIGHT One of the “beau parlors” at the Webster Apartments, home to 370 women — and no men. Credit... Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

Though the Barbizon and others, such as the Parkside Evangeline on Gramercy Park, have succumbed to developers’ offers over the years, sold and remade into condos or luxury hotels, the smattering of all-female residences that remain are thriving, most with waiting lists of prospective tenants. The appeal today is not so different than it was in the past: safety, cleanliness and  especially attractive in modern-day New York  a good real estate deal.