Introduction

There are buildings scattered around New York City with two symmetrical entrances. One is labeled Men, the other Women. They are hallmarks of NYC’s public bathhouses, built in the early 1900s for people living in tenements. Although they no longer serve their original purpose, many of the buildings have been maintained as historical landmarks.

But what story does the landmark designation tell? Reports on preserved bathhouses from the Landmarks Preservation Commission frame the buildings as outstanding examples of neoclassical architecture and reminders of one of NYC’s earliest public health campaigns. They describe the structures in loving detail and celebrate the surrounding political history.

An excerpt from the Landmark Designation report for the Asser Levy Public Baths, built from 1904-1906 at 392 Asser Levy Place in Manhattan, NY.

Yet the landmark designations lack context. Looking into the reasons the baths were built and the goals of their architectural form reveal the power structures that determine what kinds of bodies are allowed in public spaces. The conception and construction of these bathhouses embody America’s tangled relationship with white supremacy. The public baths are archives of aesthetic choices and the flawed ideals of morality, race, and sex behind them.

Charities in New York City built at least twelve bathhouses across Manhattan and Brooklyn in response to a public health crisis among people living in tenements.¹ Building codes for tenement housing required bathrooms but not showers or baths.² Without access to bathing facilities, tenants were more susceptible to infection and disease.

Instead of citing the building codes as the root of the issue, the charities building the bathhouses framed hygiene as an issue of morality. The architects commissioned to design the baths chose to focus on the perceived moral failings of tenants instead of considering the wellness or access of the people they were serving.

An excerpt from the Landmark Designation report for Public Bath No. 7, built from 1906-10 at 227-231 Fourth Ave in Brooklyn, NY.

As the historical landmark designation for Public Bath No. 7 states, architects designing the baths used neoclassical architecture to elevate the concept of bathing. They assumed that tenants were not bathing because they were morally corrupt, and decided to use ancient Roman and Greek aesthetics to teach their users to associate bathing with being civilized.

This architectural decision highlights how neoclassical architecture, morality, and hygiene are intertwined. Historian Gail Bederman argues that the rise of neoclassical revival style in America in the early 1900s represents a form of race anxiety. The Chicago Columbian Exposition, referenced in the landmark report for Public Bath No. 7, juxtaposed neoclassical architecture against “primitive” and “exotic” architecture mimicking Arabic, Chinese, and Egyptian villages.³ American neoclassicism references a variety of European styles and eras, but the genre of neoclassicism groups them together to create a cohesive concept of Western (read: white) culture.⁴ Equating neoclassicism with civilization, and civilization with whiteness, carries over into the moral agenda of a 1900s bathhouse built in the Roman fashion. When an architect aims to moralize a bather through neoclassical architecture, they end up equating “civilized” with “white.”

Next comes the connection between “civilized,” “white,” and “clean.” Historically, hygiene spaces have been leveraged to enforce moral ideals. Think of the conflict surrounding race-segregated bathrooms, or the fear and misinformation surrounding public bathrooms and the spread of HIV.⁵ The design and regulation of public bathrooms and bathhouses marks a place where current concepts of how the human body should look and behave are literally set in stone.

The most basic trait of each twentieth century bathhouse is the separation between men and women. This design feature is so common that you can recognize a former bathhouse from the facade alone. The separate doors enforce the belief that bodies come in two shapes—male and female—and should be segregated according to these categories. Taken one step further, the labels on the entrances assert that bodies that fall outside of these categories should not participate in public life or hygiene. Imperfectly sexed people are not part of the public baths’ vision of a clean, civilized society.

In the early 1900s, scientists studying sex differentiation framed their research around the belief that more pronounced differences between the sexes represented evolutionary progress.⁶ Biological essentialism—the idea that a person’s physical configuration reflects other facts about them, such as personality, intelligence, even social status—was in vogue. When combined, biased science and biological essentialism lead to eugenics. Physical traits that are considered socially unfavorable become medical problems to be eradicated.

In trying to classify variations in the human body, eugenicists connected sex difference to race categories.⁷ They claimed that non-white races exhibited less sex differentiation, which marked them as less civilized. Race scientists were invested in finding patterns of physical traits to bolster the idea that a clear separation into social categories of man and woman represented the cultural progress of white culture. Thus, although the bathhouses were not explicitly racially segregated, the categories of men and women have a racial history as much as the columns and arches that define these buildings.

When we retain the labels “Men” and “Women” on the facades of historical buildings, what history are we remembering? A moment where public health increased, where thousands of New Yorkers were granted more access to hygiene facilities? Or another instance of control, in which a wealthy ruling class selectively withheld resources in order to force a moral agenda of white supremacy and cissexism onto a relatively powerless population?

If only these baths were truly part of the past—relics of a time when we categorized bodies based on false ideals. But when we refuse to confront the histories embedded in these buildings, they continue into the present.

Thank you to Seb Choe and Lucas Crawford for your contributions to an earlier version of this essay, and a special thank you to Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi for teaching me how to have a relationship with architectural history.