A restaurant and nightclub, the Café des Beaux Arts, occupied the ground floor of 80 West 40th Street when the building, now called Bryant Park Studios, first opened, according to David Seeve, the current property manager. (Mr. Seeve gives tours of its little museum of memorabilia to anyone who is interested.) The cafe was known for its creative crowd — and the women-only bar tucked inside. The movie star and speakeasy maven Texas Guinan sometimes worked there, according to Mr. Seeve.

In 1920, the building was leased to L.K. Schwartz Company, an entity that in 1928 tried, and failed, to evict Colonel Anderson. The building survived a fire in 1936. Colonel Anderson died in 1940, and by 1943 the building was sold at auction. But it continued to attract artists.

In 1959, a painter named Dorothy Hart Drew moved into the penthouse.

Born in Missouri in 1910, Ms. Drew studied art in New York and specialized in portraits. Eleanor Roosevelt, Helen Keller, the actress Lillian Gish and President Herbert Hoover were among her subjects.

However, Ms. Drew may have been spying on her fellow artists in the building. In 1957, she testified before Congress, accusing the abstract art movement of harboring “radical elements” and Soviet influence. The year before, she painted a portrait of Representative George Dondero, Republican of Michigan, and some historians concluded that she secretly provided Mr. Dondero with information about fellow artists — some of which he submitted to the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1959, Ms. Drew received the Gold Medal of Honor from the American Artists’ Professional League “for courageous and patriotic service to American art.”