Manhattan’s Last Remaining Bath Houses
The public bath house was a fixture of late 19th and early 20th century New York City life. These grand municipal buildings served several important purposes for New Yorkers, especially those residing in tight quarters in overcrowded tenement buildings, where running water was often not an option and certainly not a guarantee.
The City set out to find ways to mitigate the spread of disease and other issues wrought by unsanitary conditions, and one means of achieving this was by constructing bath houses that would be accessible to all. Initially, temporary floating bath houses cropped up along the Hudson and East Rivers in the late 1800s, but these were seasonal, and while a much-needed cooling and cleansing respite in the summer months, left many New Yorkers still lacking during the remainder of the year.
In 1895, a New York State law was enacted, “making the establishment of public baths mandatory for all first- and second-class cities in the state.” As a result, NYC began to construct permanent bath houses, primarily in dense lower-class residential neighborhoods, and by the early 1900s, there were at least 14 (likely more) such structures open throughout Manhattan.
While these public amenities were mostly used by people who did not have consistent access to the volume of piped water in their homes necessary to run a bath, some locations also became increasingly popular for recreational swimming. One example, the building of which is still extant, is at 35 West 134th Street. This was among the last bath houses to open, in the 1920s, and it’s interesting to see the term “natatorium” carved into the stone band above the entrance, an indication that the use here was already tending toward recreational, rather than strictly hygienic.
Only a couple of decades after many of the facilities first opened, the majority of them fell into disuse, as running water and other advancements in at-home plumbing equipment and citywide sanitation measures made public bath houses redundant. Most were decommissioned following World War II, and the question then became what to do with these still relatively young, sizable, City-owned structures.
There were various favored solutions. Several were adapted as public pools for recreation purposes, an easy conversion since many of the bath basins could be reused, and the buildings were already equipped with significant plumbing infrastructure. A couple others found unique uses by private owners (more on this below). Others were demolished. Today, there are about ten of these buildings still standing borough-wide (confirmed by a survey conducted by Michael Minn in 2006, and further vetted by our own research to determine which have remained since then).
Of the ten known remaining bath house buildings, two are currently vacant/abandoned and located within the campuses of NYCHA housing (at 326 Rivington Street and 5 Rutgers Place); one, at 133 Allen Street, is now a church; the Milbank Memorial Bath at 325-327 East 38th Street is the current home of the Mission of Indonesia; the bath house at 538 East 11th Street was converted to a private residence (and designated an individual landmark in 2008, thereby protecting its limestone facade, which still features the engraving “Free Public Baths of the City of New York,” from significant changes); and the other five continue to remain under City ownership and were converted to recreational facilities under the jurisdiction of the Parks Department.
All but one of these five recreation centers are currently open and serving the public. The exception is the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center. This Colonial Revival building is the only physical reminder of Greenwich Village’s participation in the public bath house movement of the early 1900s, and the only extant bath house structure on the West Side of Manhattan.
Today, its future is uncertain. The recreation center has been closed since 2020 and is in desperate need of repairs. As we reported last month, the City is claiming that this beloved public space — a city, state, and national landmark built in stages from the 1900s through the 1930s that has served generations of New Yorkers — is beyond repair and shouldn’t be fixed. They’ve kept it closed for four years and done little to restore it, and they are instead now proposing to demolish the landmarked building.
While we don’t yet know what the City may try to pursue as a future use of the site if they are able to demolish it (we intend to ensure that doesn’t happen), the City has made it clear that demolition of the landmarked and National Register-listed building is their intention. If that happens, we will lose this integral part of our neighborhood’s, and city’s, past. As was clearly an option for many of the other original turn-of-the-century bath houses throughout New York City, there are plenty of ways that the Tony Dapolito Recreation Center building can be adaptively reused, whether for continued use as a recreation center, or some other public purpose, without the loss of the historic building. While other such structures have been adapted to uses as diverse as embassies and churches, and many remain in use as public pools and recreation centers, the city claims, without evidence, that this one is beyond repair and continued use — a claim we adamantly refute.