The American Public Bath: Prevent Crime, Build Character

  The “great unwashed” were not so from choice. 

                                                                                     -– Jacob A. Riis

Bathing a baby was easy, but many Americans lacked access to a bathtub until relatively recently.

     Francie and Neeley Nolan were about to start school in Brooklyn in 1907. As such, they were scheduled for mandatory vaccinations. On a warm August day, just before leaving for work, their mother Katie told her six-and seven-year olds to go to the public health clinic around the corner at 11:00 for their shots. Francie tried to distract her terrified little brother by taking him outside of their tenement apartment where they made mud pies. Soon, they forgot about the time. A neighbor called down to remind them just before their appointment. Although they wiped off the mud, they also forgot to wash up properly as Mama had told them to. 

     In the next scene in Betty Smith’s autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, an insensitive Harvard-trained doctor prepares to give Francie her shot. As part of his internship he was obligated to put in a few hours a week at the free clinic in the slums of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He had a “smart practice” awaiting him in Boston when his internship was over, and described his time at the clinic as “Purgatory” when he wrote to his socially prominent fiance. 

     He stopped when he saw Francie’s dirty arm. “Filth, filth, filth, from morning till night,” he told the nurse assisting him. “I know they’re poor but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Look at that arm, nurse.” 

     In Francie Nolan’s day – that is, in Betty Smith’s childhood – personal cleanliness and morality were tied together in the middle- and upper-class public’s mind. “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was already an old saying, but acceptance of the germ theory gave it greater emphasis. The tenement poor like the Nolans, and especially immigrants – needed reforming. They needed to be taught to be clean. Or that was the prevalent view of a great deal of Americans. “Isn’t it a fact that, besides being a detriment to health, lack of cleanliness leads gradually to a loss of self-respect, to bad habits, vulgarity and vice?” a reformer wrote in an 1899 newspaper.

     What was usually overlooked was how rare bathing facilities were in the poorest urban neighborhoods. Since 1887 various organizations, including the American Medical Association, showed how few bathtubs were available to the poor. Their 1887 study found that only 23 percent of homes in 18 major cities had a bathtub. Translating that into concrete numbers, the study revealed that Charleston, S.C., for example, had 10,000 houses and 500 bathtubs.

     The scene in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn took place in 1907. There was little change since the 1887 American Medical Association survey. A new 1907 study showed that ninety percent of the homes in tenement districts in the four major cities surveyed did not have a bathtub. In St. Louis in 1908, there was one bathtub for every 200 residents. In the tenements neighborhoods, that figure was one bathtub to every 2,479 residents. But by 1890, the majority of upper and middle-class homes had bathtubs. 

     By 1890, most Americans believed that going a lengthy time without bathing was repugnant. This belief developed gradually during the nineteenth century. The acceptance of the germ theory changed what people were willing to tolerate. Suddenly upper- and middle-class Americans were concerned about the cleanliness of their fellow man. That unbathed person who brushed past you in a depot or sidewalk could make you sick. Maybe the servants in your own home…who actually did not have access to a bathtub themselves. 

     It was a time of the growth of public institutions like museums, zoos, libraries, parks, playgrounds, hospitals, insane asylums, summer concert series, and even some direct poor relief. What about public bathing facilities? 

     Public bathhouses were surely the answer. 

The Public Bath Movement

     America was challenged after the Civil War by industrialization, immigration and urbanization. The poor were generally regarded as being to blame for their condition, and were referred to as the “Dangerous Classes.” That many of these poor were immigrants didn’t go unnoticed. There were concerns that they were not assimilating, and beliefs that they were also dangerous carriers of disease and filth, with low morals. 

     As the germ theory took hold, the more fortunate became concerned about the hygiene of the people they sometimes couldn’t avoid. 

        There were common tubs in tenements like the ones the fictional Nolan family lived in, but residents told investigators for the New York State Tenement House Commission that they rarely used them for fear of diseases from neighbors. It’s not that people didn’t try to keep clean. They did. The Nolans had a small tin tub, big enough to fit the children. Water had to be heated on the stove – and in some tenement buildings, it had to be hauled upstairs from a pump. People usually washed their hands and face daily with a pitcher and bowl set that was kept on their dresser. A full immersion bath was a rare thing, especially if water had to be pumped outside and hauled up the stairs a bucket at a time, then heated on a stove, with the expense of fuel. 

     Barber shops were common places for men to get a hot bath, but of course, only for a price. 

Early Public Bathing

      Cholera outbreaks in the 1830s and ‘40s brought a new concern about cleanliness to American urban dwellers. In 1849 the New York State Legislature established the People’s Bathing and Washing Association, with a capital fixed at $20,000. By 1850, half the amount had been raised in stock. The organizers looked to England as a model for public baths and wash houses. In 1852 they opened a facility on Mott Street in the notorious Five Points slum. It was meant to be a money-making enterprise, not a charity. A Buffalo newspaper said their rates were too high. A regular tub bath was five cents. A swimming pool-like bath was ten cents. Yet attendance seemed strong. In its first-year report the association said there were just over 10,000 sessions of laundering clothing - about 200 women per week. Over 80,000 baths were taken, but the board believed there should have been twice that number.      

     “Yet who can calculate the benefit it has been?” a commentator said about the report. “Of that eighty thousand, many before never had an opportunity to bathe. What a luxury, as well as a benefit, to have open to all!” 

     Its second report in 1854 showed that the association lost money. The board appealed to philanthropists to donate so the board could pay off the mortgage on the building and retire debt. They were disappointed by the response and the facility was closed.  

     This reinforced a belief that the poor did not want baths and would not take advantage of them. A rumor circulated in New York that the poor who had bathtubs used them to store coal. A Detroit official said, “You can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.” 

     Some cities provided free floating baths in summer - wooden frames extended over a river where people bathed. Boston was first in 1860; by 1889 New York had 15. But of course, they were used only during the summer months and were more a means of providing relief from the heat. The rivers were polluted and the flimsy structures needed constant repair. Taxpayers thought it was something for charities to fund. 

The Gospel of Cleanliness

     In the last decade of the century, wealthy reformers felt a great sense of urgency to create public baths. They had two key motives:

1. The desire to avoid contagious diseases from these lower classes. The Philadelphia Ledger said “Every dirty man or woman is a menace to the health of the community.”

2. They regarded cleanliness as an issue of morality. Staying clean would civilize the masses and lower crime.

     

     Neither motive was altruistic. 

     Nevertheless, in 1891 the Association For Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) managed to open the first successful public bathhouse in New York City, the People’s Bath in lower Manhattan. Although the AICP reformers tended to blame slum conditions on the degraded moral character of the poor,  they championed the cause. A coalition of charities pooled their resources to build it. There were a number of innovations that helped it succeed. Chief among them were “rain baths,” construction methods, and the price charged.  

There were nine free bathhouses in Chicago with two more on the way when the Kansas City Star pressed for a similar effort in 1907.

   

     The rain bath was simply a shower. A bathtub took time to fill and used more gallons of water. It took longer to take a bath. It took time to drain. Then, an attendant had to spend time scrubbing it for the next patron. Bathtubs themselves were also expensive. The rain bath had every advantage over a bathtub. It took up less space, was cheap to build, used less water and took less time to get clean. Essentially it cleaned itself - rinse and the germs went down the drain, advocates said. No lengthy time filling, emptying and scrubbing. They cost only three to four cents to give patrons a three- to five-minute shower, which was all the time proponents believed anyone needed. 

     The second innovation was construction. Cement floors and corrugated iron walls lasted far longer than the wood used in river bathing facilities, and they were easy to clean. 

     Thirdly, the idea of making money off of baths was dropped. The cost of the 1849 baths was a nickel. Forty-three years later, The People’s Bath charged….a nickel. A cake of soap you could take with you, and the use of a towel was included. A mother with small children was charged for only one person. “If any applicant is unable to pay he receives his bath gratuitously,” the Buffalo Commercial reported. Tickets for free baths were also distributed to a variety of charities to be given away. The Association ran ads requesting donations to help defray expenses. 

     The People’s Bath allotted 20 minutes in each cubicle per person, which included time undressing, drying off and dressing. Even in the cold winter’s month of February there were 2,357 bathers. Soon 70,000 to 80,000 rain baths were being taken per year, and charities clamored for the city to fund public baths. 

      A local poet and physician, Gouverneur M. Smith, celebrated the opening of the bath and expressed the mixed motives and hopes of the bath reformers with a poem. Here are the concluding verses: 

The man who is clean from his scalp to his toes, 

Should always be jolly, wherever he goes. 

To be clean without leads to pureness within. 

Where lurks germs, the vilest of terrible sin. 

So hurra! Yes, hurra! that this bathhouse is built. 

At sin and at filth to make a brave tilt. 

May the AICP by this right royal gift, 

Save many a soul now wrecked and adrift. 

Philadelphia 

    In Philadelphia the city took the lead and built three indoor bath houses between 1898 and 1903. They were mobbed by the public, but were not year-round establishments. Many hoped wealthy philanthropists would step forward and a few did, as they did with college buildings, concert halls or museums, but most would not support something only benefiting the poor. Scholar Glassenberg said, “They echoed Pittsburgh industrialist Henry Phipp’s complaint in 1902 that he was “tired of trying to wash the great unwashed.” (Although a year later he did help endow a public bathhouse.)

Chicago

                                   A line for public baths in 1907 Chicago

   In 1892 Dr. Gertrude G. Wellington moved to Chicago to practice medicine. In a 1908 article about Dr. Wellington, writer Lucy Cleaveland described the city then as, “a meeting ground of men and women of all languages, this battleground of industry that moves around in the tense, grim, grimy fight for bread.” The Chicago World’s Fair was a year off, swarms of workers toiled at constructing the fairgrounds, and most of them went home to no bathtub.

      “Look - just look at the sweat-begrimed bodies of your workers, Chicago,” Cleveland imagined Dr. Wellington thinking. “Something must be done to give to these men and women, to give to these vermin-covered bodies.”

     Dr. Wellington wrote the mayor asking for temporary bathhouses for the workers constructing the World’s Fair site and three permanent ones on three different sides of the city. Jane Addams helped her mobilize the press. In 1894 Chicago opened its first municipal bath house. By 1910 the city operated fifty. Bath house reform spread by social work journals. The American Association for Hygiene and Public Baths was established in 1912. They worked to place shower baths in schools, factories and mines. 

Bathing At Work

    In 1906 in Coffeyville, Kansas, a smelter employing some 1,000 men built a bathhouse for its employees. It was a “model factory of the west,” the Coffeyville newspaper said (the Midwest was still called the west). “Every workman, at the close of his shift, takes a shower bath before going home and is thus refreshed and strengthened for his work next day,” the reporter wrote. “The apparatus of the bath room is modern like that used in a gymnasium. There is not [another] factory in the state that furnishes free baths for its workmen.”

     William Paul Gerhard, a sanitation engineer who published the book Modern Baths and Bathouses, recommended factory bathing facilities, like those in Coffeyville, of which there were very few in the U.S. Employer objections were cost, space, and loss of time. 

     Gerhard countered with the three-to-five minute shower bath, which was time effective. He suggested that providing bathing facilities would actually increase production, which was a point made at the Coffeyville smelter, and is “calculated to educate the men in habits of cleanliness and order, and is altogether a step in the right direction.” His book included photos of several factory facilities with long rows of sinks so men could wash up in sinks, although Gerhard strongly recommended the three-minute “rain bath.” 

     There were companies who built these facilities before and after Gerhard’s book. The Western Electric plant in Newark had a bathhouse for its employees. There was a natatorium directly under the employee dining hall, 160 feet by 35 feet with a 20 foot ceiling.

     In many facilities where men work in broiling conditions year round such as forges, smelters, and boiler rooms, sweat-soaked clothing was seen as another problem. A Brooklyn forge was featured in Gerhard’s book. It had a large soapstone trough with a wringer attached. Then there was a drying closet where hot-water pipes heated the air to dry the clothes. The forge also had 80 lockers, one for each man, and rain baths. The owner of the forge said, “As it is acknowledged that habitual bathing prevents disease, and promotes health and morality, baths for working people affect all classes of society. Employees are therefore under a moral obligation to supply such facilities….but few opportunities are afforded to any but the privileged classes!” 

Bathing At School

     In 1887 English physician Dr. Alfred Carpenter published the book The Principles and Practices of School Hygiene. He had a great interest in sanitary science and the role sewage systems could play in human health. He advocated the creation of supervised school bathing facilities in the schools of the poor, and gave lectures on the topic. As was typical of the time, he framed this is moralistic, and to modern ears, condescending terms. School Baths would “increase the appreciation of cleanliness in the poorer classes, and thus indirectly stimulate  bodily – and often moral– purity in the home circle.” 

     In a lecture he said, “Is the custom of wearing the same dirty garments day after day, getting daily more filthy, an unavoidable one? It is this custom which makes the air of rooms so unwholesome in which the lower classes of children assemble, and which frequently produces the first seeds of evil [illness] in the constitution, especially when they go into the room damp from a drizzling rain.”

     He believed the answer was facilities at school where children could bathe twice a week, though daily would be preferable, wash their clothes and have their hair combed under supervision. 

     “I contend that all this is necessary for the education of the great mass of our poor, as much as, if not more than, a knowledge of geometry and astronomy, or even history. It will be impossible for the people to be godly until they are all instructed in the way of cleanliness. Clearly children will acquire a dislike of dirt and retain it to the rest of their lives. They will make an effort to raise themselves from below the level of brutes to that of Christians than they would otherwise do if allowed to remain accustomed to filth.”

“It is only by educating our poorer classes in cleanliness in early life that we shall make them, as a whole, love it for its own sake, and hate dirt and those habits which tend to make man lower than the beasts of the earth, too often now arising from an acquaintance, an intimate association with dirt and dirty homes among the poor. Poverty may be clean, and with cleanliness the first step will have been taken to do away with the evils which follow in its train, and that health secured which riches without cleanliness cannot possibly purchase.”

     School baths were actually pioneered in Goettingen, Germany in 1885. When new schools were constructed in Scranton, Pennsylvania and New York and Boston, the school systems experimented with building bathing facilities. 

A matron like Mrs. Quinlan supervised the bathing of lower-grade children at one of three Chicago public schools in 1896. The weekly bath was described as a "novelty and luxury" for the students. Mrs. Quinlan worked at the Jones School and also gave haircuts.

     Chicago experimented with schoolbaths in 1894 and Boston in 1896. In an 1896 Chicago newspaper article, the children of the Jones School were described as living with four or five siblings and as many adults in one or two rooms. “As a usual thing these people have not been educated up to the needs of bathing, and it is a matter of education…so the children are considered very neat if they give a dab at their faces with a little cold water and then rub it off on a cloth that is far from clean.” The population of the Jones School was described as largely Syrian, Greek and Italian, with Blacks making a significant number. The Washburne School was also described as a predominantly immigrant population who had never seen bathtubs and had to be taught cleanliness. 

     The Boston Committee on Schoolhouses had mixed feelings about implementing bathing in school. Its report said, “We hesitate to take the position that it is the duty of the school authorities to bathe the children in public schools, because they may not be clean, for if this be granted, we see no reason why we should not clothe them if they be improperly clothed, or feed them if they are not properly nourished at home.” However, the  board voted 11-8 in favor of trying school bathing. The Paul Revere school, which served large numbers of “Hebrews” and Italians, was chosen for this. Soon 125 to 150 pupils bathed daily. The cost per month for a matron, soap, towels, laundry, and heat was $85 a month. The superintendent of schools in a 1900 letter said it would be even better if they had the facilities to have the kids wash their clothes. 

     When there was a drop in crime in Boston, it was attributed by bathing advocates to the free baths there. Baths had the power to transform “urban barbarism.” 

     One bath advocate in Chicago said, “The greatest civilizing power that can be brought to bear on these uncivilized Europeans crowding into our cities lies in the public bath.” 

     The upper-class reformers who led the public bathhouse movement had beliefs that seem so naive and quaint today. They sincerely believed they were bringing society closer to a dream of the ideal city - free of corruption, vice, immorality, dirt and disease, all the result of bathing. 

What Wasn’t Done - and Concerns

     Reforms that were not considered included requiring builders to construct apartments with bathrooms. The New York Tenement House Law of 1901 required private toilets but not baths. Such a requirement was seen as a violation of landlords’ rights, just as urging higher pay for the poor was seen as infringing on business. Therefore, pushing for higher wages so the poor could afford to live outside the slums was another  approach that wasn’t used. 

     But many believed the poor could not be trusted to bathe in their own homes even if they were provided a bath. The Philadelphia North American Society suggested legislation to make bathing compulsory. 

     The Rochester Herald worried that free baths would teach people that they had a right to what they had not earned. "Gloss the matter as you may," the editor wrote, "the person who accepts a free public bath has accepted what another person has been compelled to pay for. In ethics it is no more honest than would be the theft of 25 cents spent on a bath in a private establishment." 

     Others argued, as Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy did, that "free baths would not pauperize the people any more than free textbooks and free public schools." 

     The Boston Herald agreed with Quincy, asserting that free baths would be more democratic, that all citizens were indirectly or directly taxpayers and therefore joint owners of the bath, and that at any rate parks and libraries were free already. 

A Slow Demise

     Although there was a hope, even a goal, that the bath house would replace the saloon as a place to hang out, few were built with the stateliness of the museums and theaters funded by philanthropists. There was little that would make anyone want to linger, and much that said, “This is just for the poor.” Their locations, too, sent the same message and ensured that different classes did not patronize them. 

     They were deliberately built to be as plain as possible. This was partly financial but also based on two underlying beliefs. One was that the poor didn’t deserve anything nicer. Others believed the “poor and lowly” would be intimidated by a grand building. No Greek columns and murals of Roman baths then. 

     After 1915, the bath movement lost vigor, and those reformers who remained interested transferred their efforts to the American Association for Promoting Hygiene and Public Baths, a professional organization of bath reformers and administrators founded in 1912 with Simon Baruch as president. Most of New York's municipal baths were renovated in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration and continued to operate during World War II. After the war, however, they were either demolished to make way for other structures, converted to other uses, or maintained by the city as public swimming pools.

         As soon as something better was available, people chose that. There were tenement house reform bills, such as New York’s 1901 law requiring not bathtubs, but water on each floor. This was later amended to each apartment. Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cleveland, and Baltimore soon followed. Then laws were passed requiring a water closet for each apartment. Eighty-six percent of new tenements built between 1901 and 1910 were built with bathtubs. After 1920 the spread of an individual family tub was hastened by the invention of the mass-produced one-piece double-shell enamel tub – the type used today. It was much cheaper than the claw-foot cast-iron porcelain glazed tub. 

     In Baltimore patronage at public baths peaked in 1914 at 753,899 and leveled off at 600,000 in the 1920s. St. Louis built their last bathhouse in 1937 and it served 170,000 in its first year. Its last bathhouse closed in 1965. By 1954 Cleveland closed all of their bathhouses which had become aging structures. Boston’s municipal bath program ended in 1959.

     But even as late as 1950, only a third of homes in the poorest neighborhoods had private bathing facilities. The “norm” of nearly everyone having access to a daily bath or shower in the privacy of the family home is quite a recent phenomenon.

Note: The focus of my “family history-plus-social history” blog has been on only the Barbour side of my father’s family tree. They were not the urban poor, the tenement dweller, or even (for generations) the immigrant. Dad’s other side was a different story. He had two immigrant grandparents who came to Chicago from Bavaria and Canada (by way of Scotland). My great-grandmother Francisca was sent over at age 14 and supported herself as a waitress. (We don’t know why, or who helped her when she first arrived.) She always had a difficult life. 

     I imagine Francisca and her future husband Stewart taking advantage of the public baths. They weren’t the poorest of the poor, but they fit the intended demographic. Even though I have always had at least one bathtub in all the homes I've lived in, with hot water at the turn of a tap, I have never taken them for granted!

     

Sources:

      Cleveland, Lucy. “The Public Baths of Chicago,” Modern Sanitation, Vol. 5, No. 5 (October 1908), pp. 5-18.

     Collins, Cameron. “Municipal Bath House No. 6,” Drinking St. Louis History Blog, 19 Dec 2012, https://www.distilledhistory.com/bathhouse/

     Gerhard, William Paul. Modern Baths and Bathouses, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1908. 

     Glassenberg, David. “The Design Of Reform: The Public Bath Movement in America,” American Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall 1979), pp. 5-21. 

     O’Connor, Patrick J. “Spitting Positively Forbidden”: The Anti-Spitting Campaign 1896-1910,” (2015) Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations & Professional Papers, 4449. 

     Richmond, Phyllis Allen. “American Attitudes Towards the Germ Theory of Disease (1860-1880), Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 4 (October 1954), pp. 428-454. 

     Rotman, Michael and Chris Roy. “Lincoln Park Baths,” Cleveland Historical Blog, 2009, https://clevelandhistorical.org/items/show/154

     Williams, Marilyn Thornton. Washing “The Great Unwashed” - Public Baths in Urban America, 1840-1920,”  Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. 

Newspapers:

     “Public Baths,” The Evening Post (New York, New York), 8 May 1849, p. 2.

     “Public Baths and Wash Houses,” New York Daily Herald, 17 Mar 1850, p. 2. 

     “Washing the Million,” Buffalo Courier, 11 May 1852, p. 2. 

     “The People’s Washing and Bathing Association,” New York Times, 27 July 1853, p. 8. 

     “Washing and Bathing For the Million - Second Year,” New York Daily Herald, 9 June 1854, p. 3. 

     “Cleanliness of Person,” The Buffalo Daily Republic, 19 Aug 1856, p. 3. 

     “Tenement Hovels,” New York Daily News, 9 Sept 1869, p. 5. 

     “They Want To Be Clean,” The Buffalo Commercial, 31 March 1892, p. 4. 

     “Extracts From the Report on the Establishment of Free Public Baths in Buffalo,” The Buffalo Commercial, 26 March 1895, p. 4.

     “Pupils Made Clean. Public Baths Established in Three Chicago Public Schools,” Chicago Chronicle, 25 Oct 1896, p. 33. 

     “At the Smelter. The Big Plant Being Made a Model Factory. Bath House For the Men,” Coffeyville Weekly Journal (Coffeyville, Kansas), 13 July 1906, p. 9. 

     Rasmussen, Frederick N. “Public Bathhouse Era Ended in 1959,” Baltimore Sun, 2 Sept 2006. 

Copyright by Andrea Auclair  © 2024