The public bath was the bathroom for people who did not have one. The tenements on the Lower East Side had one toilet per floor and no bathtub. Twenty families on a floor and one toilet and no place to wash. The city said this is a health problem. The city built bathhouses. The bathhouse on Allen Street opened in 1905 and for the first time in their lives people who lived five to a room could take a hot shower. The public bath was the most democratic room in the city. Everybody was naked. Nobody was rich.

The bathhouse had rules. Fifteen minutes. One bar of soap. One towel. You went in dirty and you came out clean and someone else went in after you and the clock started again. Fifteen minutes to wash the tenement off your body. The soot from the coal stove. The grease from the factory. The smell of six people sleeping in one room. Fifteen minutes was not enough but fifteen minutes was what you got and you learned to be fast and you learned that clean was a thing you had to earn every week.

My mother talked about the bathhouse on Rivington Street. She said the women lined up on Thursday afternoon because Thursday was women's day and the line went around the block. She said you brought your own soap because the city soap was like sandpaper and you brought your own comb because the city comb had been through a thousand heads of hair. She said the hot water was the best thing the city ever gave her. Better than the schools. Better than the parks. The hot water.

The public bath was the great equalizer. The lawyer and the garment worker stood in the same line and used the same shower and the same towel and for fifteen minutes they were the same person. A person who needed to be clean. The bathhouse did not ask what you did for a living. The bathhouse asked how dirty you were. That is the only honest question any institution has ever asked.

The last public bathhouse in New York closed in the nineteen-seventies. The tenements got indoor plumbing and the bathhouse became unnecessary and unnecessary things in New York become parking lots or condos. The building on Allen Street is still there. It is a gallery now. People stand where the showers were and look at art and they do not know that the most important thing that ever happened in that room was hot water on a cold body on a Thursday afternoon in 1910. The art is on the wall. The art used to be in the pipes.

See also: Tenement Roof, Clothesline