Most of the American middle–class either simply chose to ignore the problems posed by the deterioration of urban centers and the plight of the poor, or they joined voices with men such as the Reverend Josiah Strong, who, in his 1885 book Our Country, fueled bigotry and class conflict by attacking immigrants for having turned American cities into “tainted spots in the body politic.” Nonetheless, attempts were made to ameliorate the workers’ condition. Workers’ housing, such as that constructed by the Alexander Smith Carpet Mills on Moquette Row, was built by a few of the industries in Yonkers, and philanthropic organizations, such as The Woman’s Institute and the Hollywood Inn, were established to aid the working class. However, changing conceptions concerning the causes of poverty, which was no longer simplistically blamed on the deficient character of slum dwellers, as well as the new emphasis placed on qualitative environmental conditions, led contemporary social reformers to advocate greater municipal involvement in the reshaping of the industrial city. However, the negligible effect the reformers’ model tenements had on the design of speculative housing, the lack of adequate laws governing their construction, and the extreme concentration of working–class populations in urban areas, forced those concerned with the public welfare to seek new means of providing the working poor with sanitary facilities.

Although in Europe public baths had been made available since the early nineteenth century and in this country public plunge (swimming) pools were relatively commonplace in some of the larger cities,³ it was not until the 1890s that attempts to establish municipally–sponsored bath houses were to meet with governmental approval. One of the first pleas for their establishment was made by Dr. Simon Baruch of New York and appeared in an 1889 editorial in the Philadelphia Medical Times and Record. According to Baruch “the erection, in the midst of populous tenement districts, of public baths which, by their accessibility and freedom from expense, would tempt the populace into the practise of bathing as a habit…[would have for its effect] the power for preventing the origin and spread of disease.”⁴ Advocates of public baths believed that not only would the baths help prevent the spread of contagious diseases among the working–class population but that they would also have a beneficent effect on the moral character of the poor. Indeed, cleanliness and morality were often seen as one, and it was noted that:

There has ever been an important and interesting connection between cleanliness and civilization…With very large classes of society cleanliness o fperson, apparel and home are inseparable from thrift, industry and prosperity, and it is the absence of this which distinguishes upright, honest poverty from the condition of the improvident, the depraved and the worthless.⁵

In 1902 the well–known photographer of the slums, Jacob Riis, wrote in his Battle with the Slum:

Soap and water have worked a visible cure already that goes more than skin deep. They are moral agents of the first value in the slum.

Bath houses were also seen as a means of integrating the large immigrant working–class population into the mainstream of American life, as the title of an article—“Americanization By Bath”—in the 1913 Literary Digest, underscores.

Initially, the erection and operation of public bath houses was undertaken by charitable organizations. In 1891, the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor constructed the Centre Market Place Bath House in New York City. This building, designed by J.C. Cady & Co., served as the model for similar establishments built in New York City, such as the DeMilt Dispensary and Baron DeHirsch Fund baths.⁶