Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
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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
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
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
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
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
507
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
509
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
511
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
513
Figure 11 Cady, Berg & See, Rivington Street Baths, New York City, 1901
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
515
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
517
Figure 16 Werner & Windolph, West 60th Street Baths, New York City, 1906, interior photographs showing exposed plumbing
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
519
Figure 19 Milbank Memorial Baths, New York City, view of the waiting room. Photographed 1904
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 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
Figure 22 Werner & Windolph, West 60th Street Baths, New York City, 1906
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
525
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
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
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;
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
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
A N AT I O N T H AT B AT H E S T O G E T H E R
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