Two years later, in 1898, Yonkers embarked on the construction of a second bath house at 27 Vineyard Avenue. Although slightly different in execution than its predecessor, Bath House #2 followed the same general prescriptions elaborated by Baruch:

1st. They must be located in the very centre of the overcrowded districts.

2nd. Their exterior must be modest, so as not to repel the poor and lowly by their architectural pretensions.

3rd. They should be so constructed that a cleansing bath may be obtained without trouble or expense, and without sacrifice of much time.¹²

These two bath houses proved to be an immediate success—in 1901,26,384 bathers patronized the facilities.¹³ They also served as prototypes for similar structures built in the country and were often referred to as examples by public health advocates.¹⁴ Both bath houses, like others erected throughout the country, featured a first floor divided into compartments, each of which had a dressing room fitted up with a rain bath (shower) supplied with hot and cold water. A nominal fee of a nickel was charged as “Many hold that such baths should not be free, as the respectable poor unconsciously shrink away from anything that looks like charity.”¹⁵

By the first years of the twentieth century, new ideas concerning the role of the bath house in the community began to alter both the appearance and program of Yonkers’ bath houses. Although the city’s earliest public bath houses had answered the reformers’ calls for an easily reproducible building type that could economically provide large numbers of people with sanitary facilities, later bath houses became increasingly luxurious, at least outwardly, as the City Beautiful movement made itself felt upon the architectural fabric of municipalities throughout the country. No longer perceived as simply testaments of the city’s concern for its poorer citizens, later bath houses also sought to symbolize and engender civic pride through imposing architectural displays.

Public Bath #3, east elevation, detail of bays.
Courtesy Yonkers Planning Bureau.

Eschewing the plain. unprepossessing facades that characterized the first bath houses, Public Bath House #3’s elevation, designed in 1909 by George S. Cowles for a prominent corner site at 48 Yonkers Avenue, combines the monumental proportions of the Second Renaissance Revival style with an exuberant display of polychromatic tile work and variegated brickwork. In building Public Bath #3, Cowles incorporated the traditional spatial divisions that marked the city’s two earlier public baths: public reception area, showers, and second-story custodian’s apartment. However, a modification in the building’s programmatic requirements led to a significant addition to its interior: the incorporation of a small plunge (swimming) pool. Initially, the bath house advocates opposed public pools as they felt that they were wasteful of space which could be better used for showers and that “the aversion of even the working people sharing so small a body of water with each other”¹⁶ would doom them to failure. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, pools in bath houses became increasingly common as the “play movement” of the 1880s and 1890s began to exert its influence on their design. This movement held the conviction that organized public recreation not only strengthened bodies, it also molded good citizens, and that municipally–sponsored structures, such as bath houses, should be active agents of social reform