A Nation That Bathes Together

A Nation That Bathes Together: New York City's Progressive Era Public Baths
Author(s): Andrea Renner

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 67, No. 4 (December 2008), pp.
504-531
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians
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A Nation That Bathes Together

New York Citys Progressive Era Public Baths
andrea renner
[Columbia University]
The bath and its purposes have held different meanings for different ages. The manner in which a civilization integrates
bathing within its life, as well as the type of bathing it prefers,
yields searching insight into the inner nature of the period.1
Siegfried Giedion
n Gilded Age America, social classes were divided not

only by wealth and culture, but also by smell. From the
perspective of the upper classes, the working-class
body possessed a distinct and repulsive odor. The lower
classes were described as having the sickening odors of the
tenement-house, their bodies were too rank and malodorous for the nostrils of the rened, and in their stench . . .
decency [and] purity have a hard struggle for their very existence. Malodor also came to mark the recent immigrants
who composed a large section of the working class. Have
you ever stood near an Italian or Greek street vendor, or
have you ever been within ve feet of a low-class Polish
Jew? asked one writer for Health. If so, the stench arising
from their unwashed bodies must have turned you sick!2
This malodor was in part due to the nature of working-class labor and their limited access to bathing facilities,
but the visceral reaction of the upper classes also registered
an anxiety about the working class as both alien and threatening to American values. The upper classes encoded contempt for what they felt was wrong with Americaurban
poverty and inassimilable immigrantsin sensorial repugnance. When Harpers Weekly chose to express its disdain
for the 1894 Pullman Strike, it did so in a decidedly olfactory manner, describing the rebellious workers as a malodorous crowd of anarchistic foreign trash. Faced with new
urban problems, Progressive Era reformers aimed to bring
about a humanity without smell, a utopian vision in which
everyone shared white, Protestant ideals.3 The bath, the site
where this transformation would take place, was enlisted in
their reform movement.
This article analyzes Progressive Era public baths built
for New York Citys tenement-house population and
focuses on the impact of class issues on the evolution of the
building type between 1891 and 1914.4 Following the
intense economic and social upheavals of the 1890s, the
Progressive Era was dened by a network of broad reform
efforts that sought to tackle problems brought about by
industrialization. Urban reformers were, for the most part,
middle-class professionals, distressed by the impact of rapid
urbanization, heated class tensions, and swelling immigration on their cities; a patrician sense of obligation motivated
them to steer society in the proper direction. Reformers
promoted the construction of public bathhouses in New
York Citys slums, rst through charity organizations and
then through municipal intervention, as both a public
health measure and an assimilationist effort to introduce
middle-class norms.5
As structures built by middle-class reformers for lowerclass patrons, public baths can be categorized as institutions
of social control established by reformers to advance their
own class interests, but Progressive Era reforms are too

often understood as top-down enterprises carried out by
paranoid actors.6 Although this article charts how the design
of early public baths reinforced the class divisions and
power relations they were supposedly built to eradicate, it
also shows that working-class behavior inuenced bathhouse design, and reformers adapted their efforts to suit
working-class needs. Architecture was central to the moralizing aims of reformers, and focusing on public bath design
brings to light the reciprocal relationship between public
bath advocates and lower-class patrons.7
How the Other Half Bathes: Working-Class

Hygiene Becomes an Issue
The conception of cleanliness underwent dramatic changes
during the nineteenth century as improvements in plumbing led the bath to become an integral part of the middleclass home.8 The start of the revolution in New Yorks
habits of hygiene can be pinpointed to 22 June 1842the
day the Croton Aqueduct opened and introduced the city to
the advantages of a clean and continuous water supply.
Because each individual residence had to underwrite the
cost of connecting to city plumbing, upper- and middleclass residents were the chief beneciaries of the new system, as few tenement-house landlords were willing to pay
the expense of piping water into their buildings.9 While
working-class bathing practices remained unaffected, middle-class rituals transformed once Croton water and a sewer
system, begun in the 1850s, entered their homes. Before the
aqueduct, bodily cleanliness had necessitated only a basin,
pitcher, and washstand, but by the latter half of the nineteenth century, cleanliness required routine full-body
bathing.
While the middle class poured over mail-order catalogs lled with mass-produced bathtubs, 97 percent of families living in New York Citys tenement district did not have
access to bathrooms.10 When Jacob Riis titled his photograph of a bathtub suspended sideways in the airshaft of a
tenement building The Only Bath-Tub in the Block, it was not
hyperbole, but a reection of a real situation (Figure 1).
Tenements cloistered residents in crowded and lthy environments that barely provided enough room for living, let
alone bathing in a tub. Bathtubs were shared between several families, and if a building provided water, it had to be
procured from a dilapidated communal sink and often
lugged up several ights of stairs. Not surprisingly, when
Henry Moscowitz, who lived in fourteen different tenement
houses, was asked about bathing practices, he replied,
many tenants do not bathe more than six times a year, and
Figure 1 Jacob Riis, The Only Bath-Tub in the Block, ca. 1897
often less.11
While children could bathe in a tenement-house sink
(Figure 2), the absence of adequate plumbing, space, and
privacy led residents to take their infrequent baths elsewhere. The options were limited and unsanitary: small, private bathhouses and some barbershops provided bathtubs
for a fee; Russian and Turkish baths, types of communal
steam baths, and Jewish mikvehs also dotted the tenementhouse district.12 City ofcials did not completely neglect
working-class bathing needs. Between 1870 and 1888, the
city erected twenty free, oating baths over the Hudson and
East rivers that provided the poor with a place to swim during the hot summer months. Yet, lled with polluted river
water, these baths were recreational rather than hygienic
facilities. It was a common joke that river swimming
required breaststroke to push the garbage away.13
Discoveries in the emerging eld of public health
focused Progressive Era reformers on the lack of workingclass bathing options. With the rise of germ theory in the
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
505
Figure 2 A boy bathing in a tenement-house sink, 1905
1880s came the growing realization that disease was preventable and urban lth was dangerous. New York, an
exceptionally dirty city, suffered cholera, typhoid, and
tuberculosis outbreaks and the highest death rate of any
major American city, higher than either Paris or London.14
As Daniel T. Rodgers has shown, the common economic
and social experience of the United States and Europe led
Progressive Era reformers to accept urban models from
across the Atlantic.15 New York imported English sanitation measures for refuse disposal, street cleaning, and wastewater systems, but as in Europe, these efforts soon turned
to cleaning the human body, one of the most efcient carriers of contagion. While middle- and upper-class residents
typically had private bathrooms in which to take the prescribed weekly bath, working class individuals went
unbathed and, by reason of their bodily lth, [were] a menace to the safety of the community.16
Poor working-class hygiene was viewed as a sign of
moral failure as well as a threat to public health. When the
New York Board of Health described the tenements as
offensive and disgusting, these terms were aimed at the
506
JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008
germs of disease.17 But disgust is a strong form of repugnance; it views its object through a moralizing lens, collapsing aversion for the germ with disdain for the carrier.
Clean and dirty took on connotations that ran deeper
than bodily hygiene as bathing habits diverged along class
lines. As a distinctly middle-class attribute, cleanliness
became a sign of renement, virtue, and personal responsibility, while lth, tied to the working class, came to be perceived as its moral negation, representing immorality and
poverty.18 Like other abstract qualities, such as white or
middle class, cleanliness became part of the normative
discourse surrounding Americanness.
Nineteenth-century discussions of the bath, the instrument of cleanliness, were laced with the language of class.
In descriptions written by doctors and Progressive Era
reformers, the bath emerges as a strong corrective for social
ills, an antidote to dirty working-class habits that was
superior to missionaries as civilizers of slums . . . more
potent than preaching.19 As a New York medical doctor
explained: giving the working-people the opportunity for
personal cleanliness and purity . . . would do much to rid
the world of vice and crime, for to be clean increases a mans
self-respect; so that in many instances he would be ashamed
to do those deeds of darkness which his very lth now
engenders.20 In the eyes of reformers, slum conditions
fomented radical politics and class antagonism, threatening
to fracture wider society. Violent outbursts, such as
Chicagos Haymarket Square conict, served to illustrate
the dangers that could result if these simmering troubles
were left unchecked. Reformers visualized bathing as one
of the disciplinary mechanisms the slums needed.
Reformers believed that the bath could especially help
immigrants assimilate to American ways and free them of
their uncouth foreign habits. In calling for public baths for
the poor in New York, The Sun touted the baths ability to
transform . . . some of these grimy Anarchists, and some
of these Poles, Russians, and Italians into good Americans,
and asked, how can we expect to make patriotic citizens
out of individuals to whom so much of their native land still
clings, unless methods are provided for ridding them of
these foreign reminiscences?21
Part of the draw of the bath was its unique power to actualize a metaphor: bathing literally removes and sanitizes the
unwanted elements from the body. The leap from visualizing
bathing as purging physical substances to eliminating vice and
foreignism was a seductive jump that reduced the complex
troubles of urban poverty to manageable, everyday problems;
a little cleaning, and almost magically, the negative effects of
industrialization would wash away. One contemporary summarized the process as an Americanization by Bath.22
Figure 3 Alfred W. S. Cross,

design for the Liverpool
Baths, elevation, 1906
Figure 4 Cross, design for the Liverpool Baths, plan, 1906
The Bathhouse as Civic Monument: European

Models
By the middle of the nineteenth century, European cities
had already dealt with the problem of poor working-class
hygiene by altering their public bathhouse traditions to suit
working-class needs. American reformers believed this
model offered the best solution for the slums, even though
the country lacked a bathhouse tradition.
Emulating the Romans, Europeans viewed bathhouses

as important civic institutions on par with museums and
libraries. In Europe, only the wealthy had bathtubs in their
homes, and public baths were primarily built for the middle
class. The English were the rst to reevaluate this tradition
and adapt their bathhouses to the needs of the urban poor.
Europes rst bathhouse built at public expense for both the
upper and lower classes appeared in 1829 in the industrial
city of Liverpool. Named the Pier-Head Baths, it provided
facilities for each class, resulting in two large swimming
pools, two small, private plunge baths, eleven private tub
baths, two vapor baths, and one douche bath.23
The Public Baths and Wash-Houses Act, passed by
Parliament in 1846, enabled cities to erect bathhouses with
swimming pools and stipulated that municipal facilities
should provide twice as many baths for the lower class than
the upper class. The act was voluntary, but in a game of
architectural posturing, each city followed Liverpools lead
and erected monumental bathhouses to serve all classes. By
the end of the century, English bathhouses throughout the
country, as exemplied by plans published in popular compendia by Robert Owen Allsop and Alfred W. S. Cross,
were designed along standard lines. The structures were
divided by class and gender, at times resulting in four distinct entrances. Inside, one could nd a luxurious combination of Turkish, Finnish, Russian, and Roman baths, as
well as douche, tub, and shower baths. Crosss own architectural proposal for a bathhouse to replace the Pier-Head
Baths, which were rundown by the late nineteenth century,
housed a multitude of bathing options within a grand edice (Figures 3, 4). In 1897, when Edward Mussey Hartwell,
a leading American physical educator, investigated European baths, he whittled the character of English baths down
to three adjectives: large, handsome, and costly.24
Germans also viewed bathhouses as opportunities for
507
Figure 5 Oscar Lassar, Volksbad, plan,

1896
lavish displays of civic pride. Their bathhouse building boom

occurred in the 1860s, following rapid urbanization in the
rst half of the nineteenth century. Their most inuential
contribution to public bath design was the Volksbad, or Peoples Baths, a new type of bathhouse designed by Dr. Oscar
Lassar and introduced at the 1883 World Hygiene Congress
in Berlin (Figure 5). The Volksbad was the result of Lassars
desire to provide a weekly bath for every German, and it
represented the rst successful attempt to erect baths solely
for lower-class use.25 His structure was one story, measuring
36 by 16 feet, and divided down the middle to provide separate sections for men and women. The design placed the Austrian armys latest invention, the rain bath (or modern-day
shower), within a simple corrugated iron structure.26 Because
it used less water, was easier to clean, and was more hygienic
than bathtubs and communal pools, Lassar saw the rain bath
as an ideal solution for working-class bathing. The design
was functional, economical, and easily reproducible, and
introduced the concept of efciency into the heretofore relaxing, public bathing experience. By instituting individual
shower stalls, Lassar transformed the public bath from a collective to an individual activity.
England and Germany were at the forefront of the public bath movement, and their innovations were introduced to
the United States through journal and newspaper articles and
inspection visits to Europe. Looking across the Atlantic,
reformers in the United States presented the options for
lower-class bathing as a choice between a centralized, Romanstyle bathhouse and a system of several small and economical
Peoples Baths. That bathing would be institutionalized was a
given; the debate was over type. Reformers tended to dismiss
the idea of legislating bathroom requirements in tenements
508
and extending private bathing privileges to the poor. In Scribners Magazine, Robert Alston Stevenson offered a standard
response: A bath-tub in every tenement is an idle dream, they
cost too much and run very good chances of being used for
coal. A public bath around the corner is another matter and
seems in reason. . . . Besides, they might succumb to the temptation and get into the habit of using water frequently.27
Behind these excuses lay a real policy issue. In creating the
1901 tenement codes for the state of New York, the Tenement
House Commission compromised between a desire to eradicate the most serious evils of the tenements and respect of
propertied interests. Aware that any legislation that signicantly increased the cost of building new structures or altering existing tenements would worsen conditions by decreasing
the supply of housing, the 1901 codes mandated that each
apartment include a private water closet and running water,
but left out private baths as an unessential expense. The commission believed that public baths, built by philanthropic institutions and the city, offered the best solution.28
The public bath movement was initially propelled by a
loose organization of concerned individuals. In 1890, John
Brisben Walker, the socially conscious editor of Cosmopolitan,
held a design competition for public bathhouses with an
awards committee that included Richard Morris Hunt, Seth
Low, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The selection of John Galen
Howards planan ornate, Beaux-Arts structure housing
plunge pools, Turkish baths, and steam roomswas an
attempt to place the United States in competition with
Europe (Figure 6). Knowing that the legislature was unlikely
to act, Walker hoped that men of large resources would
donate such a bathhouse to the people, for this act would be
an American imitation of the noblest work of a Roman
Figure 6 John Galen Howard, winning design for a public bath, elevation, section, and plan, 1890
509
emperor.29 However, the call for a monumental bathhouse

was drowned out by the inuential voice of Dr. Simon
Baruch, who favored a policy of economy before beauty.
Baruch is popularly referred to as the father of the
public bath, but he did not so much father a new institution as adopt the Volksbad as his own.30 Born in Germany in
1840, Baruch emigrated at age fteen to South Carolina,
where he served as a Confederate Army doctor. After moving to New York in 1881, he worked at various dispensaries,
hospitals, and asylums, and became known as a pioneer in
hydrotherapythe curing of diseases through water treatment. His sanitary activism began in 1889 when he published an article introducing the country to the German
rain and douche baths, and advocated their use in a system of public baths for the poor.31 The rain bath represented a radical evolution: man bathed upright. Requiring
a new posture, a different manner of cleansing, and a complicated technological apparatus, Baruch knew that the rain
bath needed a strong advocate if ancient bathing habits were
to be transformed. He published in medical journals and
popular newspapers, wanting no less than the abolition of
the old-fashioned tub.32 In order to advocate by example,
Baruch installed the countrys rst rain baths in the New
York Juvenile Asylum, replacing their common plunge pool.
Convinced that Lassars efcient baths would solve urban
bathing problems, he worked with the rm of Brunner &
Tryon to design plans for an exemplary bathhouse of ninety
rain baths.33
Because the shower was a recent invention, its descriptive vocabulary had not yet been formalized at the end of
the nineteenth century when reformers sought to import it
to the United States. In publications, showers were variably called rain baths, douche baths, ring baths, or shower
baths, among others. These terms sometimes referred to
different bathing techniques. For example, a douche bath
usually involved spraying an individual with a powerful jet
aimed at ailing body parts while a rain bath was similar to
todays shower, a term that came into common usage in the
1920s. Bath was more broadly dened in the nineteenth
century, where it referred to almost any kind of water
procedure.34
Baruchs zeal and status as a doctor made him the most
authoritative among public bath reformers. In 1890, when
the New York Association for Improving the Condition of
the Poor (AICP), one of the most inuential charity organizations in the country, decided to build the citys rst public baths, it invited Baruch to speak before its board.
Founded in 1843 by Protestant middle-class professionals,
the AICP sought to ameliorate urban poverty through a
variety of methods, including the creation of model tene510
ments, the collection of statistics on slum life, and home visitations. Concerned with sanitary conditions, the AICP
advocated health inspections and municipal regulations as
well as public bath construction.35 Baruch aimed his appearance before the AICP to spread his Lassar-inspired philosophy and Brunner & Tryons prototypical plan. He argued
that New Yorks slums needed a system of small bathhouses
equipped with rain baths so that a large percentage of the
poor population could easily access them. Baruch described
the rain baths economic use of space, water, and time, and
the way in which the danger of contagion . . . is entirely
obviated.36 Colonel William Gaston Hamilton, the grandson of Alexander Hamilton and chairman of the AICPs
Building Committee, was convinced but hired the architectural rm of J. C. Cady & Co. to implement Baruchs idea.
A small rivalry developed between Hamilton and Baruch
over control of the citys emerging bathhouse movement.
Once the AICP had absorbed Baruchs ideas, Hamilton
minimized his role.37
The Bathhouse Movement Begins:

Philanthropic Baths
In August 1891, a crowd of city ofcials, notable citizens,
members of the press, and tenement residents gathered in
the Bowery to witness the opening of a new civic institution, the rst, year-round hot- and cold-water public bath
in New York City.38 Named the Peoples Baths, this inuential structure was Lassars iron Volksbad remade as a brick
and mortar building. One hundred thousand circulars were
distributed in the neighborhood to announce the advent of
this new institution, and while local residents lined up to
get their free cake of Colgate soap and test the rain baths,
AICP ofcials addressed the audience. John Paton, the president of the association, spoke of the enterprise as an
experiment, referring to both its role as a test model and
the scientic precision of the institution, while Hamilton
spoke of the bathhouses motto as Cleanliness Next to
Godliness, reminding its patrons that bathing was also a
moral endeavor.39
If the slums were lthy, chaotic, and immoral, then the
Peoples Baths was designed as its conceptual negation:
clean, orderly, and respectable (Figure 7). The AICP hoped
that the buildings light-colored brick and terracotta exterior as well as the interior showers would inspire cleanliness
in the city. The faades simple design resulted from budgetary pressures and the idea that these were baths designed
for the people. Their exterior must be modest, claimed
Baruch, expressing a prevalent belief that they do not repel
the poor and lowly by architectural pretensions.40 Never-
theless, wanting their structure to recall ancient thermae,

the architects decorated the faade with Roman-inspired
arches and pilasters, and a simple expansive arch marked the
doorway.
Designed to accommodate ve hundred bathers daily,
the Peoples Baths occupied one city lot (25 by 100 feet) and
was comprised of three oors: the basement housed the
boiler, ventilating apparatus, laundry machine for towels,
and seven shower compartments, while the rst oor
housed eighteen compartments (Figure 8). Although the
building had only one general entrance, its interior followed
the Volksbad model and provided distinct waiting areas and
bathing facilities for men and women. Cement, iron, slate,
and enameleasy to clean industrial materialscomposed
the bathing halls. Shower compartments were lined along
long hallways, and each was made up of a small changing
room and shower area, separated by a white, rubber curtain. The bathhouse was the rst in the country to use the
new German system, and patrons washed themselves under
ring showers, which consisted of a perforated circular
pipe that stood directly over the bathers head. Bathtubs
were also installed at the rear of the rst oor for those who
were too young or old to stand in a shower. A large glass
skylight lit the bathing hall, and a small janitors apartment
occupied the second oor.41
Figure 7 J. C. Cady & Co., Peoples Baths, New York City, 1891
Figure 8 J. C. Cady & Co., Peoples Baths, section, 1891
511
The City Gets Involved: The First Municipal

Bath
Figure 9 Brunner & Tryon, Baron de Hirsch Baths, New York City,
plan,1891
In its opening year, a combination of American, German, Irish, Jewish, and Italian patrons took 10,504 baths in
the Peoples Baths, leading Baruch to view his role in its
founding as the most useful act of my life.42 Other philanthropic organizations quickly emulated the AICP and
established their own public baths in New Yorks tenementhouse district, but to keep costs low, they installed rain baths
in preexisting buildings. After a conference with Baruch,
the Baron de Hirsch Fund hired the architects Brunner &
Tryon to convert the basement and street oor of a brick
apartment building into a bathhouse with rain baths (Figure
9). The Demilt Dispensary and the Hebrew Institute similarly installed rain baths in their buildings. With public
bathing implanted in New York, the Medical News concluded that the people of Gotham will see their foreign
population looking clean and civilized.43
512
The City of New York had a rather lethargic response to

bathhouse agitation. A small but vocal community of public
health ofcials and middle-class reformers promoted public
baths, but they did not exert enough public pressure to induce
municipal action.44 Feeling that the success of the Peoples
Baths proved that the poor desired and needed a place to
bathe, the AICP lobbied the city to nish the work the organization had started and erect a system of bathhouses. Momentum gathered when Goodwin Brown, a member of the state
legislature, secured the passage of an 1892 bill that allowed
cities to establish municipal baths. As a member of the State
Lunacy Commission, Brown had introduced showers into
state asylums, an experience that led him to advocate their
use for the general public. Following English precedent, his
bathhouse bill was simply enabling, and lacking a local bathhouse tradition, such legislation was not enough to induce
the City of New York to act.
Public baths became part of the citys political agenda
during the mayoral campaign of 1894, when the Committee
of Seventy, an inuential anti-Tammany citizens group,
called for a variety of reforms, including municipal baths. In
this effort, an exploratory Sub-Committee on Baths and
Lavatories was appointed with Hamilton of the AICP as
chair. Not surprisingly, their 1895 Preliminary Report backed
New York precedent over European tradition and called for
the implementation of a system of municipal bathhouses
based on the Peoples Baths. The 1894 Tenement-House
Committee had recommended municipal baths on the best
European models, affording every kind of bath desirable,
including swimming pools, as their popularity would help
foster a bathing habit.45 The sub-committees Preliminary
Report acknowledged the communitys great desire for swimming baths, but its members were guided by the view that
because cleanliness constituted a pressing need, public
funds could only be used to establish baths for cleansing.
Swimming pools were unhygienic and a recreational luxury,
and therefore beyond the citys responsibilities. The report
further recommended six sites in different immigrant neighborhoods and requested that Peoples Baths architects J. C.
Cady & Co. submit a plan for a forty-shower bathhouse that
could be built on an ordinary city lot.46
When the Committee of Seventys candidate, William
L. Strong, won the election of 1894, he asked the sub-committee to reconvene in order to implement its suggestions.
Brown secured passage of stronger legislation that same
year, mandating all cities with populations above fty thousand people to establish as many public baths as their local
Figure 10 Cady, Berg &

See, proposed public bath
for Tompkins Square Park,
New York City, 1897
boards of health required. Further municipal action in New

York City made two hundred thousand dollars available for
baths and included a provision to place them in public
parks, so that the city could avoid purchasing additional
land. With the selection of Tompkins Square Park, on the
Lower East Side, the Mayors Committee asked Cady, Berg
& See (a reorganization of J. C. Cady & Co.) to design an
eighty-shower municipal bath that followed the general
principles of the Peoples Baths, doubling the size of their
earlier recommendation. Budget issues may have accounted
for the larger scale of the bathhouseone large structure
costs less than two smaller onesbut the committees
Report, which was not published until 1897, hints at an ideological motivation: the members wrote that a municipal
bath should possess the dignity and massiveness necessary
to prevent its appearing insignicant or trivial.47 In the
shift from a philanthropic to a municipal institution, civic
pride entered New York City bathhouse design.
The architects took advantage of the site and created a
large, freestanding structure whose interior resembled the
Peoples Baths layout, while the exterior looked to the bathhouses of Old Europe (Figure 10). The design reected a
shift in American architecture following the Worlds
Columbia Exposition of 1893, but its grandeur also conveyed the importance the city placed on bathing and advertised its responsible involvement in the issue. With an
arcaded center block anked by end pavilions and punctuated with rows of large arched windows, the structure
housed water closets and wash sinks in the basement, showers on the rst oor, and following the English model, a
public laundry on the second oor. Swimming pools still
were omitted for easily understood hygienic reasons.

Tompkins Square residents protested the plan, complaining that their park was too small for a municipal bath. The
city relented and eventually, after a series of missteps and
bureaucratic delays, built on a city lot on Rivington Street
where Cady, Berg & See reworked their Tompkins Square
palazzo plan for a double city lot.48
When the Rivington Street Baths nally opened in
1901 (Figure 11), Riis praised it as a nail in the cofn of the
slum, but the AICP and other public bath advocates were
not so convinced. Instead, they saw a pretentious brick
structure, a bathhouse whose large cost threatened the goal
of a system of cheap, small baths.49 The structure cost the
city one hundred thousand dollars, half of the allotted public bath money and much more than the twenty-seven thousand the AICP paid for their building. After learning that
the city had also granted the institution thirty-ve thousand
dollars to cover its rst year of operation, the AICP
addressed a complaint to the mayor, resulting in a reduced
appropriation of eleven thousand a year.50
The Golden Age of Public Bathing, 190114:

The Emergence of a Typology
The Rivington Street Baths ushered in a golden age of bathhouse construction: in a period of thirteen years, at least
twenty-ve municipal baths and one charity bath were built
in four of New Yorks ve boroughs (see Appendix).51 Most
of the baths were placed in immigrant neighborhoods; in
Manhattan, this resulted in a cluster of baths in the congested Lower East Side.
513
Figure 11 Cady, Berg & See, Rivington Street Baths, New York City, 1901
Their dissatisfaction with the Rivington Street Baths

led the AICP to play a more assertive role in shaping the
citys future strategy. In 1902, the organization submitted a
report to Jacob Cantor, the Manhattan borough president
(each president had aegis over his borough), with recommended sites and architectural plans, designed by York &
514
Sawyer, for future bathhouses. The architects developed

two standard designs: one for a single lot and one for twice
that size (Figures 12, 13). Because land in densely populated
slums was expensive, the report advocated maximizing
bathing capacity on the smallest possible sitea test the
Rivington Street Baths had failed. Factoring the cost of
Figure 12 York & Sawyer, public bath

design for a 50-by-100-foot lot, elevation,
1902
Figure 13 York & Sawyer, public bath

design for a 50-by-100-foot lot, plan, 1902
515
Figure 14 York & Sawyer, West

41st Street Baths, New York City,
1904
land, construction, and maintenance, the AICP determined

that building on a double lot was more economical (its cost
per bathing compartment was 746 dollars, compared to
1,300 dollars for the Rivington Street Baths).52 Cantor
agreed, and the borough subsequently purchased three double lots and hired York & Sawyer to design the new municipal baths.53
The rst bathhouse to open, the West 41st Street Baths,
implemented the double-lot design from the AICP report;
it combined the Peoples Baths plan with a more decorative
Beaux-Arts faade that spoke to the City Beautiful impulse
of the era (Figure 14). As a result of budgetary constraints,
the nal structure was more sober than the initial scheme,
replacing Ionic with Doric pilasters and eliminating much
ornament. Running the length of the building, an inscription advertised both the buildings function and the citys
generosity: Free Public Baths of the City of New York.
With large arched windows in the waiting room and glass
skylights punctuating the roof, the bathhouse was designed
to maximize sunlighta rare building strategy in the
slumsto help uplift the bather morally and hygienically.
Entrances, on end bays, led into separate waiting rooms,
but because more men visited the baths, they were provided
with a larger spacea gender differentiation that occurred
in all of New Yorks bathhouses. Womens halls were also
likely to have more bathtubs for bathing small children.
516
York & Sawyers two other municipal bathhouses

opened on Allen and East 109th streets in 1905. Beaux-Arts,
two-stories, multibayed, and designed with large windows,
glass skylights, separate entrances, and a utilitarian layout of
showers, these baths replicated the ideas worked out on 41st
Street. After a long delay in city action, the standard municipal bath type was established quickly. Arnold W. Brunners
East 11th Street Baths (1905) and Stoughton & Stoughtons
building on 76th Street (also known as the John Jay Park
Public Bath; 1906) followed this model (Figure 15).54 When
ve public baths were built in the borough of Brooklyn
between 1903 and 1905, they also married the plan of the
Peoples Baths to a Beaux-Arts faade.
The Peoples Baths plan offered efcient showering in
minimal space. Elaborate entrance halls, grand staircases,
and rooms for other types of baths or purposesentities
common to European bathhouseswere omitted to create
a facility strictly devoted to cleansing. Although the Peoples Baths plan was occasionally deformed to t irregular
plots, its basic, rational rectangular layout comprised the
standard public bath type. Representatives from other cities
also visited the Peoples Baths and built local variations of
this archetype, rendering it a national public bath type.55
The most experimental element of the bathhouses was
hidden from view: the plumbing. The ability to distribute
clean, hot water to multiple showers while draining sullied
Figure 15 Stoughton & Stoughton, East 76th Street Baths (John Jay Park Public Bath), New York City, 1906; and Arnold W. Brunner, East 11th Street Baths, New York City, 1905
517
Figure 16 Werner & Windolph, West 60th Street Baths, New York City, 1906, interior photographs showing exposed plumbing
water required sophisticated plumbing that had yet to be

fully developed. Bathhouse architects and engineers wrestled with problems of low water pressure, scalding water,
and leaks. Although reformers publicly praised the clean,
pure Croton water used in bathhouses, in reality, early
structures needed more water than the aqueduct could supply, and bathers washed themselves under ltered wellwater mixed with Croton water.56 In early charity
bathhouses, water was heated by a noisy and temperamental steam boiler, then mixed with cold water in a central
apparatus, and carried by a single main to the showers.
Patrons could not control their own water temperature, but
this system simplied plumbing and prevented accidental
scalding. In some baths, attendants also controlled the ow
of hot water to prevent its waste.57 Heating issues were
resolved by the development of the German Gegenstrom
Apparat, which allowed water to be instantly warmed to any
desired temperature and for each patron to have individual
control. The constant need to repair old and install new
technology increasingly led to a design with exposed
plumbing, rendering parts accessible (Figure 16). Each
structure had an engineer on premises to x plumbing
problems as well as a reman to care for res. While the
average cost of a municipal bath built between 1901 and
1906 was 125,000 dollars, maintenance cost an additional
30,000 dollars a year.58
The use of showers instead of traditional bathtubs
brought progress and efciency to the bathhouse. Behind
the showers lay a practical rationalethey were more
518
hygienic and easier to maintainbut also a philosophical

motivation that had begun to inltrate the character of American institutions with the quest for efciency. Baruch originally explained the benets of the shower as used in the New
York Juvenile Asylum as such: When the sprinklers are all
turned on, the children stand in a shower. . . . In ten minutes
this batch is clear and another takes its place. Two hundred
and eighty are now bathed per hour, while formerly only
eighty could be cleansed in the plunge-bath. The quantity of
water is only one-eighth of that formerly used.59
Baruchs factory-like rhetoric reects a wider national
focus on efciency that followed the depression of 1893,
when the concept, born in the realm of industry and engineering, permeated other aspects of daily life. Progressive
reformers equated efciency, with its groundings in science,
with improvement, and it spread into a variety of institutions, heralded as a cure for a range of urban problems: for
instance, efcient government could eliminate corruption
while efcient cities could alleviate poverty.60
If reformers believed that a good society was efcient,
organized, and cohesive, then their bathhouses were this
mantra writ small. As one contemporary writer described
them, New Yorks public baths were wholly devoted to scientic and expeditious getting clean.61 Just as Frederick
W. Taylor studied the individual motions of a factory in his
famous time-study experiments of the 1880s and 1890s,
bathhouse reformers planned each step of the public bath
operation in order to process as many bathers as possible,
calculating that a shower required twenty minutes, studying
Figure 17 Drawing of a bathroom

interior, 1888
the output of showerheads, and implementing a rational and

well-organized design.62 The zeal for efciency was in part
due to high land prices and maintenance costs, but it also
rendered reformers blind to actual working-class wants and
needs. Even though the citys public baths were not used to
capacity for most of the year, and despite reports suggesting
that the working class desired a place to swim more than
cleanse, the city and the AICP continued adding showers, in
pursuit of greater capacity.
Private versus Public Baths

To understand New York Citys early bathhouses, one must
envision how reformers intended them to functionthat is,
how the building structured the patrons visit. The repeated
use of the Peoples Baths plan created a predictable system
whereby a bather at any municipal bath experienced the
same standardized bathing process. Unlike European bathhouses, where patrons enjoyed a leisurely circuitous visit,
there was only one path through New Yorks municipal
structures. Passing through street entrances clearly marked
for men or women, an individual came into a single-sex
waiting room where he or she was handed a numbered
ticket. Under the supervision of an attendant and sometimes
a policeman as well, the communal waiting room was the
only space that fostered socialization. At public baths run
by philanthropic institutions, the patron paid ve cents (a
fee waived for those too poor to pay) in exchange for a
clean, standard-issue towel and a cake of soap. The munic-
ipal baths were free, but the patron provided the supplies.63
Once the patrons number was called, after a long wait in
the summer and almost no wait in the winter, he or she
walked down the hallway and into a stall. After disrobing in
one compartment, the patron entered a second compartment to take a shower bath. Under the control of the
attendant, the patron was allotted twenty minutes in the
shower, after which he or she dressed and was supposed to
immediately leave the building.
While reformers institutionalized bathing for the working poor, their own middle-class bathing experiences were
constituted by a different set of circumstances. By the late
nineteenth century, the bathtub had not only become an integral part of the middle-class dwelling, but in order to have a
proper home, it was deemed necessary to provide the bath
with its own private spacethe bathroom (Figure 17). No
house is considered complete, wrote E. P. Miller in Herald
of Health, without its bath-room with hot and cold water,
and all the appliances requisite for a delicious bath.64 In
comparison to the shower-equipped, working-class bathhouse, the middle-class bathroom was the site of luxury and
freedom. Hidden behind bathroom doors, middle-class
bathers could sit in a bathtub, draw an unrestricted amount
of water at a chosen temperature, and bathe for an unspecied amount of time. The middle-class bath thus induced
something denied public bath patronsrelaxation.65
The popularization of private bathtubs in middle-class
homes led to a change in attitude toward bathing. The cold
plunge bath was banished as the new bathing method called
519
Figure 18 Rain bath compartment in the Peoples Bath, 1897
for invigoration and regeneration through warm water.

Bathing literature of the 1880s, how to guides for the new
bathtub initiates, specically prescribed baths for both
health and pleasure. However, it was this latter benet
pleasurethat was stamped out of the public bathhouse
experience, where bathing was carried out with efciency
and regularity, and where patrons could be criticized for
possessing more of a pagans than a Puritans love of a
bath.66 Although conceived as structures that would unify
the nation by producing one sweet-smelling and virtuous
population, in reality, bathhouses reinforced class differences by implementing divergent bathing experiences.
A bathhouse patron underwent a well-organized
bathing process whose purpose was the control of disease
and the transformation of behavior: an input of lthy,
unwieldy, and immoral tenement dwellers with an output
of sanitary, uplifted, and virtuous Americans. The shower
520
stall afforded a degree of privacy, but by denition, public

bathhouses moved this private act into the public realm,
where patrons were subject to greater control. The invasive
nature of promotional photographs taken of bathhouse
patrons naked in the shower displays the ease with which
reformers intruded into and exposed even the most private
realm of the public bath (Figure 18). The straight-shot axial
plan both simplied plumbing and facilitated supervision to
ensure that patrons behaved in an orderly fashion.67 Illustrations and photographs, such as one used by the Milbank
Memorial Bath for publicity, often included policemen and
attendants ensuring the smooth workings of the institution
(Figure 19). Accounts in the media praised the citys bathhouses as reformatory institutions, oases of perfect order
in the slums. Frank E. Wings 1905 Charities article offers a
standard story of how a group of Italian children entered
the 109th Street Baths acting like monkeys, but once
inside, an attendant with a policemans stick disciplined and
ordered them.68
The architecture of the public bath inhibited the communal, providing little space for congregating and prohibiting long stays. The social organization of municipal baths
hindered the formation of a class or group identity, as
occurred in the citys Russian baths, but Victorian values
regarding sexuality and the body may have also contributed
to the individualization of public bathing. While private
showers better mimicked the middle-class ideal of a domestic bathroom, they also discouraged sexual activity.69 A fear
of deviant homosexuality may have informed the one-person-per-shower rule enforced in municipal baths as well as
the original design of the Tompkins Square bathhouse,
which included separate bathing halls for men, boys, and
women. Although never built, such segregation was implemented in two municipal baths in Brooklyn, where shower
compartments for boys were placed on a second story.70
George Chauncey has shown that the relaxed and communal environment of New Yorks Russian and Turkish baths
made them more attractive to gay men seeking sexual partners than the regulated and individualized nature of the
citys municipal baths.71
The Bathhouse Negotiated: The Swimming

Pool Enters
It is not difcult to imagine that compared to daily life in
the slums, a soapy shower in a public bath provided a pleasurable sensory experience. Salvatore Mondello, a Sicilian
immigrant, recalled that his brother enjoyed the municipal
baths for their hot water, luxurious towels, and the opportunity to walk on tiled oors, summarizing the experience
Figure 19 Milbank Memorial Baths, New York City, view of the waiting room. Photographed 1904
as paradise for us kids. But in practice, the pleasures of

the bathhouse did not overshadow the limitations imposed
by its efcient and controlled organization. Henry Roth,
who emigrated to New York in 1907 and grew up in its
Lower East Side tenements, describes a visit to the baths in
his novel Call It Sleep. The main character, David Shearl,
enjoyed the coolness of the public showers on hot days and,
against the rules, transformed the baths into a site of recreation: One could slide on ones belly down the chill, slippery marble aisle for almost a blockat least it looked that
long.72 Indeed, newspaper articles and other reports suggest that working-class individuals negotiated the system in
order to act out their own bathing desires. Middle-class
frustration over lower-class disobedience surfaces in complaints that the bathhouses were used for socialization, that
more supervision was needed, and that bath attendants
sometimes accepted illegal payments in exchange for allowing baths longer than twenty minutes.73
But the greatest source of disappointment came from
the low attendance numbers of the citys bathhouses.
Records show that while the baths were frequented in the
summer, patronage in the winter was scattered at best.74
This evidence indicates that the lessons of habitual cleanliness had failed to resonate with the poor and that bathhouse
patrons had a seasonal and recreational interest in baths.
The AICP mounted an aggressive campaign, visiting
schools and settlements, advertising in local papers, and distributing circulars that informed local residents that Nothing gives you pep like a Daily Bath.75
The public bath movement did not initially arise in
response to working-class demands for a place to bathe.
William Howe Tolman, a member of the Mayors CommitA N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
521
Figure 20 Bathroom in a new-law tenement on the east side, 1903
Figure 21 F. Joseph Untersee, Brookline Public Baths, Brookline, Mass., 1897, plan
tee on Public Baths, noted the poors apathetic indifference toward bathhouse construction in contrast to their
popularity in Europe.76 Instead, popular demand led to the
increasing inclusion of private bathtubs in new tenements
(Figure 20). Although the new tenement codes of 1901 had
excluded bathing facilities and the creation of public baths
further absolved landlords from placing them in their buildings, 72 percent of tenements erected in Manhattan
between 1903 and 1905 had private baths. By 1910, 97 percent of new tenements in Brooklyn had them.77
The strategy of the AICP and reformers had failed, but
the popularity of European bathhouses and New Yorks own
river baths offered an alternative solution. Swimming pools
could lure patrons, but their inclusion would represent a
fundamental shift in bathhouse ideology: from cleansing to
522
play. Reformers accepted the pool but only if implemented

as an educational tool subordinate to the cleansing mission
of the bathhouse, as Robert E. Todd argued in a 1907 Charities article: A natatorium can have, of course, only partial
value as a cleansing place; but as an instrument for teaching
the habit of bathing in cool weather, the natatorium could
be far more useful than any other feature that might be
introduced into a public bath. . . . They would accelerate . . . the acquisition, especially in the formative period of
life among the young, of the habit of bathing.78 Such odd
logicthat pools were not particularly clean, but could
teach cleanlinesspoints to the strange predicament in
which reformers found themselves. After years of dismissing pools, their ineffective strategy led them to reevaluate
their ideology.
Figure 22 Werner & Windolph, West 60th Street Baths, New York City, 1906
The city selected Werner & Windolph to design the

60th Street Baths with rain baths and a pool, but this building type was not without precedent. In 1897, the countrys
rst municipally owned indoor pool had opened in Brookline, Massachusetts (Figure 21). Copying European custom,
the architect F. Joseph Untersee selected a plot of land large
enough to accommodate a swimming pool and baths on one
oor. Built as a recreational facility for Brooklines middleclass residents, the structure required few private baths.
Although this model was also popular in other cities and
had been used by the New York Athletic Club (1886), New
Yorks high land prices prohibited the acquisition of such
large lots by public means.79
Werner & Windolph implemented the standard New
York solution; they vertically stacked the program on four
levels, including a two-level basement (Figure 22). The pool

resided below the rst oor, and the boiler and other
plumbing equipment were in a subbasement. Waiting
rooms, located on street level, led to dressing rooms and
lockers, and the architects stretched the partial second story
of the standard municipal bath into a full oor of axially
planned showers. With three oors of activities, the architects designed a system of aligned skylights that allowed
light to pass through the roof, second oor, and a spectators
gallery, into the plunge room. Men and women had access
to the pool on alternating days and daily access to segregated baths on the top oor. As patrons descended from
dressing rooms to the pool, staircases rst led them to a preliminary cleansing room in order to keep the pool water
clean and to inculcate the patron in the virtues of bathing.80
523
Figure 23 William Martin Aiken and Arnold W. Brunner, East 23rd Street Baths, New York City, 1908
524
While the West 60th Street Baths was nearing completion, the citys strategy continued developing in the direction of the public pool. Opening in 1908, the East 23rd
Street Baths represented the most ambitious offspring of
City Beautiful and the New York City municipal bath (Figure 23). Four pairs of freestanding columns divided the
faade, surmounted by a full entablature with modillioned
cornices and a decorated frieze. Designed by Arnold W.
Brunner, the architect of the East 11th Street Baths, with
William Martin Aikin to accommodate eighteen thousand
bathers daily, the building sat atop a large plot of land that
the Department of Docks and Recreation had surrendered
in 1903, allowing the baths to stretch horizontally and echo
the European model of a single-story bathhouse. The original plans contained two pools so that men and women
could swim everyday, but failed to offer separate cleansing
showers. When the AICP complained that cleanliness, not
recreation, should be central to the design, it was reworked
to include one swimming pool anked by gender-segregated shower halls. A rear entrance for spectators acknowledged the new role of recreation.81 The opening day
festivities, a day of aquatic sports, corroborated the message
embedded in the design of the bathhouserecreation was
overtaking cleansing.
The AICP worked to ensure the cleanliness of pools,
lobbying the city to test new sanitation devices. Medical literature continued to describe the transmission of intestinal,
eye, ear, and venereal diseases in public baths.82 Early pool
water was puried by crude methods: water was changed
daily and an apparatus constantly recirculated, heated, and
ltered it, but a proper method of disinfection was
unknown. Yet, as with rain baths, pool technology quickly
advanced once it entered the citys baths. New Yorks municipal bathhouses, with their large patronage, were ideal laboratories for sanitary science and served as some of the
earliest sites in the country to test chlorine.83
Although reformers regarded the pool as subservient
to the shower, patrons were more interested in recreation.
As public pools, municipal baths lled a real need for recreation centers in the slums. One resident recalled, There
were no parks at the time. . . . The only recreation was to go
down to the East River where the barges were. The people
would swim in it, but they also moved their bowels there.84
The opening of the pools dovetailed with a rise in competitive sports and rugged exercise that spread through the
United States at the turn of the century. Attendance
increased as a larger swath of the city, cutting across class
lines, came to municipal baths for swim meets or free swimming lessons provided by the city (Figure 24), and organizations, such as the Boy Scouts, the Police Department
Training School, and the Hudson Boat Club, frequented

the bathhouse pools. The popular image of the baths
changed as newspaper reports of community aquatic events
and swim meets replaced stories about the civilizing effects
of the baths.
Although it appeared that the bathhouse pools were
coming closer to enabling class integration, not all could
share in the municipal pools equally. The rude treatment
awaiting them kept the citys black population away.
Werner & Windolph dismissed the racial tension found
within the West 60th Street Baths, which was situated on
the border between white and black neighborhoods, claiming, While the mission of the bath is to promote homogeneity, it can hardly be expected to solve the race
question.85 Segregation persisted from earlier private bathhouses, and African Americans primarily established and
frequented their own bathhouses, such as the Mount Morris Baths, which opened in 1893 off 125th Street.86
Bath reformers of the 1890s had failed to understand
that European bathhouses were popular in part because
they were sites of sociability. Despite the fact that recreation
was antithetical to the initial ideology of the bathhouse,
reformers supported their conversion to community centers once their popularity became evident. The AICP
shifted its focus to develop bathhouses into community centers, commissioning studies of neighborhoods and collecting statistics on the geographic reach of bathhouse
patrons.87 The transition from hygiene to recreation was
eased by that fact that sports were also believed to morally
uplift participants; reformers could promote public baths
with similar rhetoric, describing how competition in municipal pools encouraged independence and manliness among
its patrons.88 The design and function of the bathhouse
could be altered to suit real working-class needs while maintaining the same efcient character and moralizing purpose
that reformers desired. As outlined by Werner & Windolph, the rapidity of handling the bathers, a steady inand-out ow and uninterrupted movement of the bather at
all times, and control were still the primary design
philosophies of the bathhouses with pools.89
The city tried a new strategy and opened four bathhouses with gymnasia between 1908 and 1911.90 Almost
from their inception, these bathhouses were criticized as
monumental blunders in that they do not include swimming pools. Pressure for more city pools had increased as
the citys oating river baths became more polluted.91 The
AICP retrotted the river baths with water-tight interiors to
ll them with Croton water and lobbied the city to open
more indoor pools. In 1911, the city established the Public
Recreation Commission, which took over the operation of
525
Figure 24 Organized races in a public bath, 1913
municipal baths from the Department of Public Works, and

one of their rst acts was to install pools in three of the
municipal baths with gymnasia as well as one in the Rivington Street Baths.92 When the last bath of the golden age of
municipal bathhouse construction opened in 1914 on 28th
Street, it was, needless to say, designed with a public pool.
The golden age of municipal baths ended as bathrooms
entered the tenements, immigration declined due to the
526
war, and the city shifted its focus to recreation and public
pools in the following decades. By the mid-1920s, the West
60th Street Baths could be described as almost as much of
a Summer resort as Coney Island, and one that was not
far behind Miami as a Winter playground. When women
in four-door sedans began to swim in the citys municipal
baths, their status as a lower-class cleansing institution was
effectively terminated.93
Appendix
This appendix offers the rst comprehensive list of New York City public baths built by philanthropic institutions and the city government. It
is organized by borough; within each borough, buildings are listed by
the type of baths offered. Unless otherwise indicated, the buildings do
not survive, and architects and dates of construction are unknown. * indicates a public bath with a later swimming pool addition.
Manhattan
Philanthropic Baths
Rain baths only:
The Peoples Baths, J. C. Cady & Co., 1891 (9 Centre Market
Place)
Demilt Dispensary Baths, William Paul Gerhard, assisted by
Brunner & Tryon, 1892 (23rd Street and 2nd Avenue)
Baron de Hirsch Baths, Brunner & Tryon, 1892 (Henry and
Market streets)
Riverside Association, 1895 (259 W. 69th Street)
Milbank Memorial Bath, 1904 (32527 E. 38th Street)
Municipal Baths
Rain baths only:
Rivington Street* (later named the Dr. Simon Baruch Municipal
Bath), Cady, Berg & See, 1901 (326 Rivington Street)
Forty-rst Street, York & Sawyer, 1904 (347 W. 41st Street)
Allen Street, York & Sawyer, 1905 (133 Allen Street)extant
One Hundred Ninth Street, York & Sawyer, 1905 (243 E. 109th
Street)
East Eleventh Street, Arnold W. Brunner, 1905 (538 E. 11th
Street)
Seventy-Sixth Street / John Jay Park, Stoughton & Stoughton,
1906 (523 E. 76th Street)
Shower baths and swimming pool:
West Sixtieth Street Bath, Werner & Windolph, 1906 (232 W.
60th Street)extant
Twenty-Third Street, Arnold W. Brunner and William Martin
Aikin, 1908 (23rd Street and Avenue A)extant
Twenty-eighth Street, William Emerson, 1914 (407 W. 28th

Street)
Shower baths and gymnasia:
Carmine Street, Renwick, Aspinwall, & Tucker, 1908 (83
Carmine Street)
Cherry and Oliver Streets, 1909 (100 Cherry Street)
Rutgers Place*, Horgan & Slattery, 1909 (5 Rutgers Place)
Fifty-Fourth Street*, Werner & Windolph, 1911 (342 E. 54th
Street)extant
Brooklyn
Municipal Baths
Rain baths only:
Hicks Street, Axel S. Hedman, 1903
Pitkin Avenue, Louis H. Voss, 1903
Montrose Avenue, Louis H. Voss, 1904
Huron Street, Axel S. Hedman, 1905
Dufeld Street, 1905
President and Fourth avenues
Nostrand Avenue
Hamburg Avenue, Bernstein & Bernstein
Nostrand Avenue, Helmle, Huberty & Hudswell
Rain baths and swimming pool:
Public Bath No. 7, Fourth Avenue, Raymond F. Almirall, 1910
extant
Bronx
Public Baths
Rain baths only:
Elton Avenue and 156th Street, 1909
Queens
Public Baths
One; location unknown
Staten Island
None
527
Notes
I would like to thank Hilary Ballon, Bernard Herman, and Michael Leja
for their invaluable help.
1. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to
Anonymous History (Oxford, 1948), 628.
2. Suburban Resident, Another Railway Travelers Complaint, Letters
From the People, New York Times, 5 Apr. 1872, 5; Alcinous B. Jamison,
Rational Sanitation and Hygiene, With Special Reference to Personal
Cleanliness, Health 52, no. 7 (1902), 657; William S. Rainsford, The Rich
and the Poor, Harpers Weekly 35 (26 Dec. 1891), 43; and Jamison, Rational Sanitation and Hygiene, 659.
3. Frederic Remington, Chicago under the Mob, Harpers Weekly 38 (21
July 1894), 680; and S. A. Knopf, The Tenements and Tuberculosis, Sanitarian 45 (Sept. 1900), 210.
4. In this paper, I use the term public bath as it was used by Progressive
Era reformers. Public bath does not necessarily refer to a publicly funded
institution (the term municipal bath does), but to a bathhouse that is open
to the general public. The Progressive Era public bath movement was not
just a New York phenomenon but one that arose in every major city of the
United States. These various movements were in conversation and tended
to erect similar structures. Many of the patterns detected in New York Citys
bathhouses can be applied to the public baths that sprung up across the
country. The dates of this study mark the opening of the rst philanthropic
public bath in New York and the year of the last bathhouse built by the city
during an intense period of bathhouse construction.
5. There has been much wrangling over dening the Progressive Era. It
was not a coherent reform movement, but a loose network of coalitions,
each with its own cultural and political agenda; see Daniel T. Rogers, In
Search of Progressivism, Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982),
11332.
6. The idea that middle-class Progressive Era reformers used charity work
and introduced reform in order to institute a seemingly noncoercive system
of social control over the working class has been advanced by many historians. See Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America,
18201920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Marvin E. Gettleman, Philanthropy
as Social Control in late Nineteenth-Century America, Societas 5 (Winter
1975), 4959; and Don S. Kirschner, The Ambiguous Legacy: Social Justice and Social Control in the Progressive Era, Historical Reections 2 (Summer 1975), 6988. For a critique of the social control thesis, see F. M. L.
Thompson, Social Control in Victorian Britain, Economic History Review
34 (May 1981), 189209.
7. This article builds on earlier studies, such as Marilyn Thornton
Williamss historical study of bathhouse movements throughout the country, by focusing on class dynamics and moving beyond the rhetoric of
reformers to analyze their architectural output. Williams, Washing The
Great Unwashed: Public Baths in Urban America, 18401920 (Columbus,
1991). Prior studies also include David Glassberg, The Design of Reform:
The Public Bath Movement in America, American Studies 20, no. 2 (1979),
521, which broadly outlines public bath movements across the country
and how bathhouses were built for efciency; and Susanne Hand, New
York City Public Baths (masters thesis, Columbia University, 1977),
describes the history of the bathhouse movement as well as the structures
that were erected.
8. Claudia L. and Richard L. Bushman, The Early History of Cleanliness
in America, Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (1988), 121338; and
Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York,
1995).
9. Nelson Manfred Blake, Water for the Cities (Syracuse, 1956), 10071; and
528
Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, 2000). The

Tenement House Act of 1867 only mandated that structures built after the
act had to have running water, supplied through a tap in the yard or house.
Twenty years later, the act was amended so that water had to be provided
on every oor and the Board of Health had the right to force any tenement
house, old or new, to supply their residents with running water. Most buildings only provided cold water.
10. Mayors Committee of New York City, Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations (New York, 1897), 16.
11. Tenement Evils as Seen by the Tenants, in The Tenement House Problem: Including the Report of the New York Tenement House Commission, ed.
Robert W. De Forest and Lawrence Veiller (New York, 1903), 43436, 412,
415.
12. For a discussion of the poor sanitation of these baths, see Wallace A.
Manheimer, The Sanitary Condition of Mikvehs and Turkish Baths, in
Collected Studies from the Bureau of Laboratories, Department of Health, New
York City 9 (191619), 40715. The communal nature of the citys Russian
and Turkish baths created a group identity among Russian immigrants.
Konrad Bercovici describes how patrons shared jokes and stories in the
intimacy of the common room. Bercovici, Dust of New York (New York,
1919), 176.
13. Jeff Kisseloff, You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan
from the 1890s to World War II (New York, 1989), 501.
14. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City (Baltimore, 2000); and Charles E.
Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine
(New York, 1992), 126.
15. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
16. Unlike today, a bathroom was dened as a room with a bath and did not
necessarily include a toilet. Marcus P. Hateld, The Physiology and Hygiene
of the House in which We Live (New York, 1887), 140; and Municipal Free
Baths in New York, Medical News 70, no. 12 (20 Mar. 1897), 372. Immigrants were viewed as especially dirty and disease prone; see Alan M. Kraut,
Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the Immigrant Menace (New York,
1994).
17. Metropolitan Board of Health, Fourth Annual Report of the Metropolitan
Board of Health of the State of New York (New York, 1870), 112.
18. C. and L. Bushman, The Early History of Cleanliness in America,
121338 (see n. 8); Hoy, Chasing Dirt, (see n. 8); and Williams, Washing
The Great Unwashed, 2226 (see n. 7).
19. George Frank Lydston, The Diseases of Society (the Vice and Crime Problem) (Philadelphia, 1906), 569.
20. E. P. Miller, How to BatheNo. IV, Herald of Health 9, no. 2 (1867),
79.
21. Public Baths, Sun, 31 Mar. 1891, in box 21, folder 45, Community
Service Society Archives (hereafter CSSA), Columbia University, New York.
22. Americanization by Bath, Literary Digest 47 (23 Aug. 1913), 280.
Immigrants learned to view cleanliness as a rst step toward Americanization. For example, on her rst day as a Russian migr in Boston, Mary
Antins father instructed her on assimilation, a lesson that included eating
bananas, sitting in a rocking chair, and visiting a public bath; in Mary Antin,
The Promised Land (New York, 1912), 185.
23. Edward H. Gibson III, Baths and Washhouses in the English Public
Health Agitation, 183948, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 9 (Oct. 1954), 391406; and Thomas A. Markus, Cleanliness is Next
to Godliness, in Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of
Modern Building Types (New York, 1993), 14656.
24. Robert Owen Allsop, Public Baths and Wash-Houses (London, 1894);
Alfred W. S. Cross, Public Baths and Wash-Houses (London, 1906); and
Edward Mussey Hartwell, Public Baths in Europe, in Monographs on Social

Economics VI, ed. Charles H. Verrill (Washington, D.C., 1901), 8.
25. Oscar Lassar, quoted in Dirk Meyhoefer, Public Swimming Baths: A
Building Type of the Second German Kaiserzeit, in The Water Temple: Gruenderzeit and Jugendstil Public Baths, ed. Kristin Feireiss (New York, 1993),
15. For more on the German public bath movement, see Brian K. Ladd,
Public Baths and Civic Improvement in Nineteenth-Century German
Cities, Journal of Urban History 14 (May 1988), 37293; and Hartwell,
Public Baths in Europe, 3536.
26. Like the modern shower, Lassars design consisted of a small compartment that required the individual to stand under an overhead nozzle that
sprayed water downward and was immediately drained. Before Lassar,
water-spraying nozzles were always used in conjunction with a tub or
another type of bath. See also William Paul Gerhard, The Modern RainBath, American Architect and Building News 43 (10 Feb. 1894), 6769.
27. Robert Alston Stevenson, The Poor in Summer, Scribners Magazine
30, no. 3 (1901), 262. One of the few editorials calling for bathrooms in
tenements includes Public Baths, New York Times, 18 Aug. 1891, 4.
28. Advance Sheets of Part of the Report of the Tenement House Commission
(New York, 1901), 79, 62.
29. John Brisben Walker, Public Baths for the Poor, Cosmopolitan 9 (Aug.
1890), 42021.
30. Calls Soap Greatest Civilizer of Mankind, The Washington Post, 27
Sept. 1912, 2; and Public Baths Here Will Be Renovated, New York Times,
sec. N, 1 Sept. 1935, 1.
31. Simon Baruch, Public Baths, Times and Register 20, no. 572 (24 Aug.
1889), 397.
32. Simon Baruch, A Plea for Public Baths, Together with an Inexpensive
Method for Their Hygienic Utilization, Dietetic Gazette 7 (May 1891), 94.
33. Baruch mentions the Brunner & Tryon plans in his talk The Status of
Water in Modern MedicineAn Address Delivered Before the Society Science Association of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., published in Dietetic and
Hygienic Gazette 8 (Jun. 1892), 99101; and 8 (Jul. 1892), 119122.
34. Lawrence Wright, Clean and Decent: The Fascinating History of the Bathroom and the Water Closet (London, 1960).
35. Roy Lubove, The New York Association for Improving the Condition
of the Poor: The Formative Years, New York Historical Society Quarterly 43,
no. 3 (1959), 3089, 319. See also Lilian Brandt, Growth and Development of
AICP and COS (New York, 1942).
36. Baruch, Public Baths, 397.
37. William G. Hamilton, 10 Jan. 1891, box 21, folder 45, CSSA (see n.
21); and Patricia Ward, Simon Baruch: Rebel in the Ranks of Medicine,
18401921 (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1994), esp. chaps. 13, 14.
38. The Peoples Bath was located on 9 Centre Market Place, but it was
not the AICPs rst attempt to erect a public bath in New York. In 1852, the
organization opened a public bath in the Lower East Side, which was primarily modeled on London bath- and washhouses. It closed in 1861 due to
a decrease in funds resulting from the Civil War. The 1891 Peoples Baths,
built close to the rst AICP bath, was New Yorks rst year-round hot- and
cold-water public bathhouse. Peoples Washing and Bathing Association,
First Annual Report of the Peoples Washing and Bathing Association (New York,
1853), contains drawings and descriptions of this rst bathhouse.
39. Baths Worthy the Name, Commercial Advertiser, 17 Aug. 1891, in box
21, folder 45, CSSA; A New Thing in New York, New York Times, 18 Aug.
1891, 8; and Peoples Baths Opened, New York Daily Tribune, 18 Aug.
1891, in box 21, folder 45, CSSA.
40. Baruch, A Plea for Public Baths, 95. This was an oft-repeated idea. See
also Bertha H. Smith, The Public Bath, Outlook 79 (4 Mar. 1905), 571.
41. New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, The
Peoples Baths, Founded A.D. 1891, by the New York Association for Improving
the Condition of the Poor (New York, 1891).
42. Ibid., 17.
43. New York, Medical News 59, no. 10 (5 Sept. 1891), 283.
44. For more on the lack of public pressure for bathhouses and its effect on
New York Citys mayors, see Harvey E. Fiske, The Introduction of Public Rain Baths in America: A Historical Sketch, Sanitarian, no. 319 (June
1896), 49394.
45. Mayors Committee, Report on Public Baths, 2223 (see n. 10).
46. Committee of Seventy, Preliminary Report of Sub-Committee on Baths and
Lavatories (New York, 1895), 3, 67, 15.
47. Mayors Committee, Report on Public Baths, 16668.
48. For a history of public bath laws and mandates in New York City, see
Marilyn Thornton Williams, Tammany Hall versus Reformers: The Public Baths of New York City, in Washing The Great Unwashed, 4167 (see
n. 7).
49. Although ground was broken in 1897, the Rivington Street Baths took
four years to complete. Jacob Riis, The Battle with the Slum (New York,
1902), 283; and G. W. W. Hanger, Public Baths in the United States, Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor 9, no. 54 (1904), 1332.
50. Stanley H. Howe, History, Condition, and Needs of Public Baths in Manhattan (New York, ca. 1912), 7, in box 37, folder 218, CSSA (see n. 21); and
Necessity for More Public Baths, Magazine Supplement, New York Times,
4 Aug. 1901, SM4.
51. The citys public baths were erected under the Department of Public
Works. Although these structures were the focus of reformers efforts, other
municipal entities also provided the working class with public rain baths. In
1901, the Department of Education began installing them in schools while
the Department of Parks erected pavilions in public parks that included a
limited number of rain baths. Pavilions in the New York Parks, Architectural Record 17 (Mar. 1905), 24854.
52. The public laundry in the Rivington Street Baths proved unpopular and
was not reproduced in subsequent baths. New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, Communication on a System of Municipal Baths
for the Borough of Manhattan, City of New York: To the Honorable Jacob A. Cantor, President of the Borough (New York, 25 Feb. 1902), 522.
53. In 1901, the AICP convinced Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, an heiress
of Bordon Milk, to purchase land on East 38th Street to build a model bathhouse, which the organization would run. The Milbank Memorial Baths
opened three years later as an example of economy and efciency for city
ofcials. Daniel M. Fox, The Signicance of the Milbank Memorial Fund
for Policy: An Assessment at Its Centennial, Milbank Quarterly 84, no. 1
(2006), 69.
54. Free Public Baths for the City of New York, East 76th St. and John Jay
Park, American Architect and Building News 88 (1905), 200, pl. 13.
55. Williams, Washing The Great Unwashed, 3233.
56. Five Cents Gets You a Bath, New York Recorder, 18 Aug. 1891, in box
21, folder 45, CSSA; and New York AICP, Peoples Baths, 1112 (see n. 41).
57. Rain Baths at the DeMilt Dispensary, in American Plumbing Practice
(New York, 1896), 2034; and Hanger, Public Baths in the United States,
1350.
58. A Novel Hot-Water Apparatus for Rain or Douche Baths, American
Architect and Building News (2 Jun. 1894), 9798; and Report of the President
of the Borough of Manhattan for the Year 1906 (New York, 1907), 81. This
average does include the West 60th Street Baths, which included a swimming pool and was more expensive than prior municipal baths.
59. Municipal Free Baths in New York, 37273 (see n. 16).
60. Melvin G. Holli, Urban Reform in the Progressive Era, in The Progressive Era, ed. Lewis L. Gould (Syracuse, 1974), 13352, esp. 14344;
529
Samuel Haber, Efciency and Uplift (Chicago, 1964); and Roy Lubove, The
Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 18801930
(Cambridge, Mass., 1965).
61. Ralph D. Paine, The Bathers of the City, Outing XLVI (Aug. 1905),
569.
62. William Paul Gerhard, Modern Baths and Bath Houses (New York, 1908).
63. At rst, municipal baths charged a fee in order to eliminate the stigma
of charity and to ensure that the patron maintained a feeling of independence. The fee was heavily debated but eventually eliminated in order to
encourage higher patronage.
64. Miller, How to BatheNo. IV, 79 (see n. 20).
65. In a report Simon Baruch wrote as chairman of the Committee on
Hygiene of the New York County Medical Society, he listed as one of eight
benets of using showers rather than baths that The refreshing effect of the
shower, whose temperature may be gradually reduced after the cleansing,
is valuable, and prevents danger from the relaxing effects of a warm bath
tub. Quoted in Hanger, Public Baths in the United States, 1247. The different uses for the bath and shower exist to this day: one typically takes a
shower to wash oneself and a bath to relax.
66. Jacqueline S. Wilkie, Submerged Sensuality: Technology and Perceptions of Bathing, Journal of Social History 19 (1986), 65455; Baths for
Health and Pleasure, Harpers Weekly 7 (1884), 453; and Smith, The Public Bath, 573 (see n. 40).
67. Harold Werner and August P. Windolph, The Public BathV. Plan
and Construction, Brickbuilder 17, no. 6 (1908), 115.
68. For examples of illustrations that portray policemen or attendants maintaining order in the citys public baths, see the drawing accompanying the
articles They Bathe in Trenches, World (25 Aug. 1891), in box 21, folder
45, CSSA; and The Swimming Season, Harpers Weekly 37 (12 Aug. 1893),
764. See also Mayors Committee, Report on Public Baths and Comfort Stations, 48 (see n. 10); and Frank E. Wing, The Popularization of a Public
Bath-House, Charities 14 (29 Apr 1905), 69496.
69. Contemporary social and literary writers equated public swimming with
sexual, especially homoerotic, potential. Jeffrey Turner, On Boyhood and
Public Swimming: Sidney Kingsleys Dead End and Representations of
Underclass Street Kids in American Cultural Production, in The American
Child: A Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Carol J. Singley (New Brunswick, 2003), 21014.
70. The baths were on Pitkin Avenue and Hicks Street. Hanger, Public
Baths in the United States, 13078.
71. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay World, 18901940 (New York, 1994), 20810.
72. Salvatore Mondello, A Sicilian in East Harlem (Youngstown, N.Y., 2005),
29; and Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934; New York, 1964), 262.
73. August P. Windolph, Model Bath Houses and Recreation Centers,
Proceedings of the American Association for Promoting Hygiene and Public Baths
(1916), 4954; Attacks Public Baths, New York Times, 28 Nov. 1905, 10;
and Manhattan Borough President Annual Reports 190204, cited in Hand,
New York City Public Baths, 48 (see n. 7).
74. For example, during its rst fteen years of existence, the Peoples Baths
saw three times as many people in the summer than the winter, and the Rivington Street Baths operated at 25 percent capacity in the winter months.
Robert E. Todd, The Municipal Baths of Manhattan, Charities 19 (19 Oct.
1907), 898.
75. AICP Circular, box 48, folder 135.1a, CSSA (see n. 21).
76. William Howe Tolman, Public Baths, or the Gospel of Cleanliness,
The Yale Review 6 (May 1897), 51.
530
77. Report of the Tenement House Department of the City of New York for the Year
1905 (New York, 1905), 77; and Report of the Tenement House Department for
the Years 1910 and 1911 (New York, 1911), 44.
78. Todd, The Municipal Baths of Manhattan, 901.
79. N. B. Crosby, The Brookline Public Baths, Current Literature 26, no.
3 (1899), 255; and Baths of the New York Athletic Club, American Plumbing Practice (New York, 1896), 19394.
80. Harold Werner and August P. Windolph, The Public BathIII. The
American Type, Brickbuilder XVII, no. 4 (1908), 7879. See also Branch
Public Bath, West Sixtieth Street, New York, N.Y., American Architect and
Building News 90, no. 1600 (25 Aug. 1906), 7172.
81. AICP to Arnold W. Brunner and William Martin Aiken, 1905, box 37,
folder 218, CSSA.
82. Wallace A. Manheimer, Studies in the Sanitation of Swimming Pools,
Journal of Infectious Diseases 15 (1914), 159; Alfred Fournier and George
Miller MacKee, The Treatment and Prophylaxis of Syphilis (New York, 1907),
42122; and Prince Albert Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage: Social Prophylaxis (New York, 1904), 120.
83. Wallace A. Manheimer, The Swimming Pool, American Architect 114
(2 Oct. 1918), 41014; and Manheimer, Comparison of Methods for Disinfecting Swimming Pools, Journal of Infectious Diseases 20 (1917), 19.
84. Robert Leslie quoted in Kisseloff, You Must Remember This, 19 (see n.
13).
85. Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York
(New York, 1911), 198; and Werner and Windolph, The Public Bath
V, 115 (see n. 67).
86. James Flint, an English traveler to New York, noted in 1818 that public baths either did not admit blacks or provided a separate space for them.
Flint, Letters From America, Early Western Travels, 17481846, ed.
Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, 1904), 47. In 1924, the city eventually
opened a public bath in Harlem, which included a gymnasium and roof
playground, located at 35 West 134th Street.
87. Bureau of Public Health and Hygiene, (1913), box 54, folder 325-11A, CSSA.
88. Jeff Wiltse, A Good Investment in Health, Character, and Citizenship, in Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
(Chapel Hill, 2007), 4777; Werner and Windolph, The Public Bath
V, 11617.
89. Werner and Windolph, The Public BathIII. The American Type,
7079.
90. The baths with gymnasia were located on Carmine Street (which also
included a rooftop classroom for anemic children; 1908), Cherry and Oliver
streets (1909), Rutgers Place (1909), and West 54th Street (1911). For architectural drawings, see Public Baths, Carmine Street, New York, Brickbuilder 17 (Nov. 1908), pl. 140; and Werner and Windolph, A Public Bath
and Gymnasium in the City of New York, American Architect 101 (5 May
1912), 226, 23339.
91. Robert E. Todd, Four New City Baths and Gymnasiums, Survey 23
(5 Feb. 1910), 680.
92. Report of the President of the Borough of Manhattan of the City of New York
for the Year 1912 (New York, 1912). Swimming pools were installed in the
Rutgers Place and West 54th Street baths. Although plans were made to
build a pool in the Carmine Street Baths, it is undetermined whether these
plans were actually executed, but the roof of this bath was opened as a school
for anemic children.
93. Bertram Reinitz, On Public Bathing, Special Features, New York
Times, 21 Mar. 1926, XX2.
Illustration Credits
Figure 1. Museum of the City of New York, Jacob A. Riis Collection, Riis
#ST5
Figures 2, 11. Outlook 79 (4 Mar. 1905), 568, 566; Fig. 2, photograph by
Bertha H. Smith
Figures 3, 4. Alfred W. S. Cross, Public Baths and Wash-Houses (London,
1906), 3334
Figures 5, 9. American Plumbing Practice (New York, 1896), 199, 201
Figure 6. Cosmopolitan 9 (Aug. 1890), 416
Figures 7, 10, 18. Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations (New
York, 1897), 33, frontispiece, 33
Figure 8. The Peoples Baths, Founded A.D. 1891 (New York, 1891), 13
Figures 12, 13. AICP, Communication on a System of Municipal Baths (New

York, 1902).
Figure 14. Manhattan Borough President Annual Report (New York, 1912).
Figures 15, 2123. The Brickbuilder 17 (Apr. 1908), 71, 75, 77, pl. 51
Figure 16. The Brickbuilder 17 (Jun. 1908), 115
Figure 17. Catalogue G, Illustrating the Plumbing and Sanitary Department
of the J. L. Mott Iron Works (New York, 1888), plate 3-G
Figure 19. Museum of the City of New York, Byron Collection,
93.1.1.17261
Figure 20. First Report of the Tenement House Department of the City of New
York, vol. 1 (New York, 1903), pl. 76
Figure 24. The Literary Digest 47 (23 Aug. 1913), 280
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A Nation That Bathes Together - New York City

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A Nation That Bathes Together: New York City's Progressive Era Public Baths

Author(s): Andrea Renner

n Gilded Age America, social classes were divided not

own class interests, but Progressive Era reforms are too

How the Other Half Bathes: Working-Class

Figure 2 A boy bathing in a tenement-house sink, 1905

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Figure 3 Alfred W. S. Cross,

Figure 4 Cross, design for the Liverpool Baths, plan, 1906

The Bathhouse as Civic Monument: European

Emulating the Romans, Europeans viewed bathhouses

Figure 5 Oscar Lassar, Volksbad, plan,

lavish displays of civic pride. Their bathhouse building boom

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

emperor.29 However, the call for a monumental bathhouse

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

The Bathhouse Movement Begins:

theless, wanting their structure to recall ancient thermae,

The City Gets Involved: The First Municipal

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

The City of New York had a rather lethargic response to

Figure 10 Cady, Berg &

boards of health required. Further municipal action in New

were omitted for easily understood hygienic reasons.

The Golden Age of Public Bathing, 190114:

Their dissatisfaction with the Rivington Street Baths

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Sawyer, for future bathhouses. The architects developed

Figure 12 York & Sawyer, public bath

Figure 13 York & Sawyer, public bath

Figure 14 York & Sawyer, West

land, construction, and maintenance, the AICP determined

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

York & Sawyers two other municipal bathhouses

water required sophisticated plumbing that had yet to be

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

hygienic and easier to maintainbut also a philosophical

Figure 17 Drawing of a bathroom

the output of showerheads, and implementing a rational and

Private versus Public Baths

Figure 18 Rain bath compartment in the Peoples Bath, 1897

for invigoration and regeneration through warm water.

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

stall afforded a degree of privacy, but by denition, public

The Bathhouse Negotiated: The Swimming

as paradise for us kids. But in practice, the pleasures of

Figure 20 Bathroom in a new-law tenement on the east side, 1903

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

play. Reformers accepted the pool but only if implemented

The city selected Werner & Windolph to design the

levels, including a two-level basement (Figure 22). The pool

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Training School, and the Hudson Boat Club, frequented

Figure 24 Organized races in a public bath, 1913

municipal baths from the Department of Public Works, and

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Twenty-eighth Street, William Emerson, 1914 (407 W. 28th

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Gerard T. Koeppel, Water for Gotham: A History (Princeton, 2000). The

Edward Mussey Hartwell, Public Baths in Europe, in Monographs on Social

JSAH / 67:4, DECEMBER 2008

Figures 12, 13. AICP, Communication on a System of Municipal Baths (New