Naomi Adiv, "Last Bathhouse Standing: The Allen Street Public Bath, New York City, 1905-1975"
Abstract: In this paper I focus on the New York City public bathhouse that outlived them all: the Allen Street bathhouse, which remained open for seventy years. Most of the other two dozen public baths built by the city of New York in the early 1900s were either shuttered, or converted to pools and recreation centers by mid-century. This downtown bath, however, remained operational for decades after the ideas and budgets that supported public bathing were no longer central to state projects of public life. Indeed, by 1960, Allen Street was the last bathhouse, as such, standing, serving more than 131,000 people each year, 28,000 of them women, and charging nothing for admission but a quarter for the use of soap and towel. (Allen Street would finally close in the face of the city’s fiscal crisis of the 1970s.)