The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [78]
When a public bathhouse was proposed in the late nineteenth century near Tompkins Square in New York City, the German and Irish inhabitants protested that they weren’t so poor as to need one. They petitioned that it be built instead in the Jewish and Italian neighbourhood.
By the early 1890s, most European countries had public bathhouses, some almost fifty years old. Ironically, although it was committed to a hygienic society, America had none, while fewer than 3 per cent of tenement dwellers in New York and Chicago had bathrooms. In that decade, America found a bathhouse hero in Simon Baruch, a doctor and the father of the financier Bernard Baruch. On a visit to his native Germany, the senior Baruch was inspired by the country’s municipal baths, and he determined to import them to America. A prolific author of medical articles, an expert on hydrotherapy and the surgeon who reportedly performed America’s first appendectomy, Baruch wrote, “I consider that I have done more to save life and prevent the spread of disease in my work for public baths than in all my work as a physician.” His first success, in 1891, was the opening of the People’s Baths on the Lower East Side. Wesley’s proverb, “Cleanliness Next to Godliness,” greeted bath—goers and passersby from above the door. Equipped with twenty—three showers, three bathtubs and an initial gift of eighty pounds of soap from the Colgate Company, the baths were welcomed as the herald of a clean, progressive future.
The national turning point came four years later, in 1895, when the New York State legislature ordered that medium—sized and large cities build municipal baths. Within six years, seven cities in the state had opened baths. By 1904, there were thirty—nine municipally run baths in the country, as far west as Chicago and Milwaukee. New York City alone had twenty—six baths by 1915. American bathhouses were designed only for the poor, because by the end of the nineteenth century, most urban middle—class Americans had baths in their houses. The Americans followed the German model, providing showers instead of baths. (Baruch thought tub baths were “dangerously relaxing,” and the architect responsible for New York’s West Sixtieth Street Baths disallowed tubs because they were “a source of jealousy and confusion.”) And, true to the national temper, they were speedy. Once an American patron picked up his two—inch bar of soap and towel, he had twenty minutes for undressing, showering and dressing, in contrast to the European standard of half an hour.
VISITING A PUBLIC BATH IN NAGASAKI
“On my visit I should say there were from thirty to forty in it, packed like herrings in a cask, where they remained until they were, as you would say, parboiled… In the lounging department I saw both male and female, old and young, not wrapped in white sheets, but all in a nude state, lying in every conceivable position, quite unconcerned as to sex or age, or what we call decency.”
—Captain Henry Holmes, 1859
But whether they were modest, neighbourhood bathhouses, as in Chicago, or lavishly equipped complexes, as in New York and Boston, the American public baths suffered the same fate as many of their European counterparts. They were underused, except during the hottest days of summer. In America, they came too late. After hesitating for half a century, Americans began building bathhouses just as private bathtubs were becoming common. New York’s Model Tenement House Reform Law of 1901 required that each floor of a new apartment be furnished with water; a later expansion of the law ordered that water be available in every apartment. Other large cities followed with similar laws. In practice, since the builders had to install plumbing, a tub was usually added at the same time. Of the tenement apartments built in the first decade of the twentieth century, 86 per cent had bathtubs. Once a tub became the norm in new tenements, older ones had to install bathrooms to stay competitive. The building of American public bathhouses ended by the First World War, and by the mid-1930s, 89 per cent of