The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [73]
Stowe recovered, and the water cure’s lessons of exercise, plain food and, above all, the importance of water stayed with her. Water was too valuable an element, she decided, to be restricted to the sick. Everyone must have the means to open their pores, let out noxious matter and stay healthy. Almost twenty years after she visited Brattleboro, Stowe wrote an article called “Our Houses—What Is Required to Make Them Healthful” in the Water-Cure Journal. A “great vital element” in every house, she insisted, was “‘water water everywhere’; it must be plentiful, it must be easy to get at, it must be pure… There should be a bath room to every two or three inmates, and the hot and cold water should circulate to every chamber.” In the 1860s, a bathroom with hot water for every two or three inhabitants was beyond utopian, but within a century Stowe’s vision had become reality in the majority of American houses.
The national penchant for cleanliness was also spurred on by a more prosaic, entirely profit—driven corner of American life—the hotel. When the Duc de Doudeauville was asked if he intended to install bathrooms in La Gaudinière, the extraordinarily opulent château he was planning near Vendôme in the 1860s, the Frenchman answered haughtily, “I am not building a hotel.” The duke may have disdained to follow the example of hoteliers, but there is no denying that when it came to bathrooms, hotels, especially in the United States, were trailblazers.
American hotels differed from European ones in that they were big, new and designed for a population willing and able to pay for luxuries once limited to the gentry. In 1829, when Boston’s Tremont House opened its Greek Revival doors, the hotel world changed forever. Its innovations included individual patent locks on each of the 170 rooms, French cooking, gaslight in the public rooms and a substantial chunk of hard, yellow soap to go with the ewer and bowl in each bedroom. Most important for the history of cleanliness, the hotel advertised the presence of eight basement “bathing rooms where guests could wash themselves all over.” Plumbing in those days extended no further than the basement or first floor, so the location was a given. Baths made sense for travellers, who journeyed on muddy roads or in stuffy coaches, and public bathing establishments occasionally rented space in hotel basements or set up near hotels. But the Tremont House, which charged a princely two dollars per day, was the first hotel to provide bathrooms for the exclusive use of its guests.
THE BATH OF THE FUTURE
“‘There is always a bath prepared in the hotel, and I do not even have to bother to leave my room in order to take it. If I just press this switch the bath will start moving, and you will see it appear all by itself with water at a temperature of 37 C.’ Francis pressed the switch. There was a muffled noise which swelled in volume… Then one of the doors opened and the bath appeared, sliding on its rails.”
—Day in the Life of an American Journalist in 2889, Jules Verne, 1889
Seven years later, in 1836, John Jacob Astor launched the Astor House in New York City. Even more lavish than the Tremont, it had, astonishingly, a bathroom and water closets on each floor, supplied with water from a roof tank with a steam pump. After that, each new luxury hotel tried to top the Tremont