u/Al89nut

These photos have been associated with Kubrick's UFO sighting at 145 E 84th St, the address given on the report he filed with the USAF. In the story associated with it, he and Clarke looked at the mysterious object - actually the Echo satellite - through Stanley's new telescope from the roof of the building.

After a bit of digging, I was able to determine that the photos were actually taken at a different location, the next place he lived, the penthouse of 239 Central Park West. Given the angle of the telescope, they were looking at people in the park. The photos were likely taken by his wife Christiane.

If you wanted to buy the penthouse now, it would cost you $6m plus.

It is widely stated that this is the terrace of Kubrick's penthouse apartment at 145 E. 84th St. NY or the roof of the same.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/52ywuLQ7YSRpK2wi6

That comes from the address given on the UFO report that Kubrick submitted to the USAF on May 17, 1964 (he and Clarke saw a bright object, looked at it through the telescope, climbed to the roof for a better look, could not account for it and only later learned it was an Echo satellite.)

However, 145 was a new building, only built in 1963/4 and these surroundings don't look new to me. Equally, 145 had grey-white bricks and these bricks don't look that color and look older, more beat-up. Also 145 doesn't seem - at least now - to have a roof space that matches. It's very difficult to match the buildings alongside it as that area has changed so much since 1964, but they do have some distinctive features. There is a tower of some sort in the background of the two landscape images and some distinctive windows at the corner of a building next door. There may also be a church or some such building in the background of the portrait image.

I did wonder if it was instead not the roof of the Chelsea Hotel, where Arthur Clarke was staying, but that doesn't seem to fit. Nor does it seem to fit 239 Central Park West, where Kubrick moved later that year.

Anyone with a familiarity with photographs of NY of that period, please assist.

UPDATE 2: It's not him! Discovered that Antill worked before Puckpool at the Minster Holiday camp on the Isle of Sheppey. There's a newspaper report with a photo and he's a very different looking man. Back to the drawing board... amazing where the rabbit holes lead. Photo in comment below.

UPDATE: Amazingly I have corresponded with a 90 year old gentleman who knew Antill at Puckpool in the late 1950s into the mid 1960s. He is unable to confirm that Antill is the man with a moustache, but says that the photo of the bar is pre-war, so presumably 1939 when the camp ran for a season before WW2, and thus he can't be sure what Antill looked like then. Photos of the bar in 1946 do show the same wicker chairs.

So no yes or no yet. Still looking for a clear photo of Antill in later life.

Last year I found the original of the July 4 ballroom photo and identified the location as the Empress Rooms of the Royal Palace Hotel, the event as a Valentine's Day Ball in 1921, and the man who Jack Nicholson was pasted over as Santos Casani, previously known as John Golman, Joe Goldman and Josef Zisling. He won 2 dance competitions that night.

Few other people could be definitely identified. The crowd includes several striking figures, including a man standing a row or two behind Casani who many have remarked resembles Nikola Tesla (he isn't.)

For a while I thought he might be Col. Walter Elwy Jones, manager of the Piccadilly Hotel at the time.

In an image taken of newly re-de corated Empress Rooms in early 1921 or late 1920 and used to illustrate an account of the Valentine's Day dance in The Dancing Times, there is visible the figure of a tall man with a moustache. Is it the same man? There is evidence it might be and that he might have been a professional dancer who worked at the Empress Rooms.

Casani was a contemporary of a better remembered figure, Victor Silvester, who worked at the Empress Rooms as a male dancer (Casani didn't himself). In his autobiography Silvester recalls that time and mentions two others he worked with - Fred Wade-Brown and Sidney Ampthill. Wade-Brown I have found images of, but I can't find him in the July 4 crowd. Sidney Ampthill I could find no trace of - until I checked the 1921 Census and discovered that Silvester had mis-remembered the name of his room-mate - it was Sydney Antill.

Antill was - like Casani, Silvester, and Wade-Brown - as WW1 veteran, in his case the RAF. He too was working as a dancer in the 1920s, but vanishes from the record until he returned to service in 1940 and eventually became a squadron leader. There is little of him in the British Newspaper Archive, but I found reports after the war, that he managed holiday camps, and two in particular, Puckpool on the Isle of Wight, and Minster, on the Isle of Sheppey.

Looking for images of both camps from the 1940s and early 1950s I found one of the bar at Puckpool and standing there to one side, is a man with a moustache who does look suspiciously like "Tesla." I assume the photo is a posed shot, so isn't guests but staff.

And in one of those coincidences that mark all this - you may remember another, that when interviewed by the Metropolitan Police in 1925 about his immigration status, Casani claimed his father was called Stanley - the holiday camps were run by a company with the same name as the film company that financed Kubrick's later film - Warner.

So, is it him? What do you think?

And incidentally, if it is, perhaps he looks so disgruntled in the original because Casani beat him in a dance competition...