Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [951]
The Strong administration took steps as well to implement the establishment of public baths, for which reformers had long been calling. In 1888 the Department of Public Works’s fifteen outdoor baths were tremendously popular with the poor, drawing an average 2.5 million males and 1.5 million females during the limited season (June 10—October 1) they were open. The baths afforded youthful patrons recreational relief from broiling summers, though as the city’s goal was promotion of cleanliness it imposed a twentyminute time limit on their use, leading boys to travel from one to the other, dirtying themselves on the way to gain access. But as river water grew ever more polluted by sewage—despite Waring’s garbage reforms, liquid effluvia was still channeled into surrounding waterways—and as the baths were hi any event closed most of the year, calls were raised for indoor, all-weather washing facilities stocked with filtered and purified water.
The most vigorous proponent of public baths was Simon Baruch (father of Bernard)—a German immigrant, surgeon, and professor of hydrotherapy at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. After visiting the impressive German municipal bath systems in the late 1880s, Baruch began a campaign stressing that baths, in addition to benefiting the poor and helping create “civic civilization” out of “urban barbarism,” were in the interest of “the better situated classes”: no longer unwashed, the employees, servants, laborers, and tradespeople next to whom they sat on crowded cars would not carry so many deadly germs. At Baruch’s urging, the AICP, long interested in such programs, erected a People’s Baths in 1891, charging a five-cent fee for use of the twentythree showers and three bathtubs (the Colgate Company donated free soap samples). Though the program was well patronized, Tammany governments proved uninterested in expanding it. It was not until 1895 that the state legislature mandated a campaign, and Mayor Strong constituted a committee to press ahead.
HOUSING FRONT
In housing, the reform administration moved to enact recommendations of a stateestablished Tenement House Committee chaired by Century editor Richard Watson Gilder. During 1894, with Gilder’s close friend Jacob Riis serving as unofficial adviser and settlement house workers acting as investigators, the committee examined dwelling places and took public testimony from housing experts, health inspectors, landlords, and residents. They discovered that over 70 percent of the city’s population of roughly 1,800,000 now lived in multifamily domiciles, four-fifths of which were tenement houses, vast numbers of which were experiencing the familiar litany of housing ills, including high rates of disease, terrific overcrowding, and a lack of accessible parks and playgrounds.
The Gilder Committee debated a variety of potential solutions. Felix Adler, picking up where Henry George had left off, recommended the municipality purchase lowcost land in still undeveloped outlying areas, then lease it cheaply to individuals or companies, who would in turn provide low-income housing. European cities were moving in this direction, as the researches of Elgin Ralston Lovell Gould made clear. Gould, a professor of political science at Columbia, made a thorough survey of domestic and overseas approaches (which he would publish in 1895 as The Housing of the Working People). Gould reported that many English, Scottish, German, and Belgian cities were either building low-cost worker housing themselves or providing loans to cooperatives