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“There was now more of a sense that the city should provide for everyone to have that, and if they weren’t going to have indoor plumbing they had to provide these bathhouses for people.”Īccording to Williams, bathhouse attendance peaked in 1910, when more than one million baths were taken. As Flanigan explains, the germ theory of disease was gaining acceptance, and the middle-class and wealthy areas were getting indoor plumbing. Gertrude Gail Wellington argued in a letter to Chicago’s then-mayor, the public bath “will inspire sweeter manners and a better observance of the law.”īut bathhouse advocates did recognize that washing was important for good health and that the poor had little access to clean water for bathing.
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But their bathhouse advocacy was not just for health reasons they believed that cleanliness was a sign of good moral character. Bathhouse facilities were co-ed, but they would be reserved for women and girls on certain days of the week, Flanigan says.Ĭhicago’s public bathhouses were funded and operated by the city, but they were opened because of a campaign by a group of female urban reformers who were known as the “Free Bath and Sanitary League.” Many women involved in this group were doctors, Williams writes. According to Williams, they were in slum neighborhoods or industrial areas. In 1894, the city built the first public bathhouse on the West Side.īy 1920, another 20 bathhouses were opened across Chicago, in neighborhoods ranging from Little Sicily to Bridgeport. In 1893 just three percent of families living in Chicago’s ‘slum districts’ were in housing with bathrooms, according to Marilyn Thornton William’s Washing “the Great Unwashed:” Public Baths in Urban America 1840-1920. … You got in, you got your soap, you got your towel and then you were out.”Īs the Chicago Department of Health noted in its 1904-1905 biennial report, “These baths have not been established as places of diversion and pleasure, but to promote habits of personal cleanliness.” So they didn’t have any bathing facilities,” says Maureen Flanigan, a historian emeritus at the Illinois Institute of Technology, adding that the experience was no luxury. “In a lot of the poor neighborhoods, they didn’t have indoor plumbing.
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The city built the bathhouse in 1910 so that neighborhood residents could get clean. The particular building that prompted Anna’s question is the “Simon Baruch” public bathhouse, named after the noted public health advocate and leader of the public bath movement in the United States. We’re gonna cover all of these - don’t forget your towel. The word’s applied to different kinds of places, ranging from a place for the poor to scrub down a place to have sex but then catch a show and a place to pamper yourself with extreme heat and cold you would never tolerate anywhere else, let alone pay for the privilege. But defining Chicago’s experience with “bathhouses” is complicated. You may have had a similiar question if you’ve ever passed one of these old facades or even the occasional operating bathhouse in the city. (In fact, it’s zoned to become residential someday.)Īnna’s passed that building so many times that she eventually asked Curious City to figure out something that regularly gnaws at her: “There’s a public bathhouse in my neighborhood. Above the door, an inscription reads “Chicago Public Bath,” yet there’s no bathhouse running in there these days. A social studies teacher and history enthusiast, she says she can’t help but notice this odd brick building she often passes it sits right in the middle of a residential block, and it has large Roman-style stone columns. To stay up to date on the stories that matter.Īnna Erickson likes to walk around her Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. WBEZ brings you fact-based news and information.