Cold-weather blahs? It's not exactly the Caribbean, but the sun-drenched pool at the sparkling, newly renovated Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center at 232 West 60th Street is a sight for winter-weary eyes. Built in 1906 in the Georgian style, the center originally washed the great unwashed.
The evolution of personal sanitation in New York was slow. Mary Mason Jones, a distant relative of Edith Wharton, is said to have had the first bathtub in the city in 1818, in her house on Chambers Street. Seventy-seven years later, the New York Tenement House Committee reported that out of 255,033 tenement dwellers, only 306 had access to bathing facilities in their apartments.
The Tenement House Committee was one of a number of reform organizations that pushed for public baths. In 1852 the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor opened New York's first public bath, at 141 Mott Street. Besides bathtubs, it had a laundry and a swimming pool.
Apparently the second public bath in New York was completed in 1891, on Centre Market Place, between Grand and Broome Streets. Five-hundred bathers daily partook of hot and cold water, 23 showers and three bathtubs
In 1895 major cities in New York State were required to build public bathhouses. Among the responses was the 1897 report of the Mayor's Committee on Public Baths, Water-Closets and Urinals, which included specifications for a model bathhouse. This would have 42 baths for men, 23 for women and 15 for boys. The allocation for men and boys could be reversed if large numbers of boys showed up, but clearly, separating the boys from the men was of concern.
The model provided for facilities 'for men too filthy to be admitted to the public baths.' By baths, the report meant showers (or 'rain baths'). Also recommended were special showers that did not wet the hair, a feature 'preferred usually by women.'
New York opened its first municipal bath in 1901 at 326 Rivington Street; it had 91 showers and 10 bathtubs. The structure, four stories of light-colored brick, resembled a school or gymnasium.
Government acceptance of its duty to provide for the cleanliness of citizens was what the reformers had been hoping for; they believed, as Jacob Riis wrote in his 1902 book 'Battle With the Slum,' that soap and water were 'moral agents of the first value in the slum.' A bathhouse building boom began, resulting by 1914 in a total of 20 public baths, in all boroughs except Staten Island.
The bathhouse on West 60th was among them, designed by a Tammany-connected architectural firm, Werner & Windolph. Standing between West End and Amsterdam Avenues, the muscular brick-and-limestone facade enclosed 80 showers. But there were no tubs, American Architect and Building News reported, 'as they have proved unsanitary and difficult to keep clean, and are also a source of jealousy and confusion.' Other accounts of public bath houses indicate that patrons did indeed linger in tubs.
The 1897 model of the Mayor's Committee had omitted swimming pools, 'for easily understood hygienic reasons.' But even though the recreational aspect of public bathing was not central to the reformers' goals, the 60th Street bathhouse had a 35-by-60-foot pool. Patrons were required to shower before using the pool, and providing a 'plunge' in bathhouses soon became a refreshing carrot at the end of a soap-and-water stick. Water in the pool was changed three or four times a day.
Robert E. Todd of the Bureau of Municipal Research found in 1907 that bathhouse patronage in the winter months fell to as little as 4 percent of capacity. The increased use of the baths in warm weather indicated to him that most people visited not for regular bathing, but to cool off. In Todd's opinion, the need for personal cleanliness was felt more by reformers than by the poor and working class; adoption would be trickle-down.
In 1905, the city's Tenement House Department reported that 72 percent of new tenements in Brooklyn and Manhattan had private baths, and the noble purpose of the public bath evolved into simple recreation. Indeed, early accounts of the West 60th Street baths are full of swim meets and swimming instruction. In 1943, by which time German submarines had sunk thousands of ships supplying the European war effort, merchant sailors received free swimming lessons there.
The 60th Street bathhouse is now the Gertrude Ederle Recreation Center, named after an Amsterdam Avenue girl who became, in 1926, the first woman to swim the English Channel. The center reopened last year after extensive renovations, with a startling new glass-and-brick entrance designed by Belmont Freeman: an off-center amalgam of masonry and glass panels.
The new structure is completely agreeable. Flooded with southern light, it has a computer room, a basketball court, a dance space and a workout room in addition to the pool - all free if you are under 18; $25 a year (18 through 24 or over 62); or $150 a year (25 and up). It is fair to say that few come just for the showers.
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