There are all sorts of obsolete building types and uses. There are, to my knowledge, no more ice houses in New York, having been driven out by refrigeration. The building above is a public bath, built in 1903 at Hicks and DeGraw Streets in Brooklyn. There were a number of these buildings spread across the city around 1900 and they are simultaneously a triumph of public policy and the result of a complete failure of public policy. They also, typically, have Neo-classical architecture, either vaguely (as here) or more explicitly (as at Public Bath Number 7); this style was probably meant both as an expression of municipal importance and as some kind of reference to the baths of ancient Rome.
These baths allowed people to get thoroughly clean in a way that we take for granted. That’s great. The reason they were needed is that Old Law tenements (and pre-Old Law tenements) had no requirements for baths. They barely had requirements for toilets. So the millions of people who lived in tenements had, at best, limited access to bathtubs and hot water. That changed in 1905, when the minimum plumbing requirements of the New Law tenements were retroactively applied to the older buildings, but it took a long time for the upgrades to be completed. So, having failed poor people with the tenement laws of the nineteenth century, the city government tried to balance things later by building the public baths. Eventually the retroactive plumbing requirements and the construction of the much better New Law tenements eliminated the need for the baths.
Looking at the past requires, to some degree, getting into the mindset of the people who were there. That doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but you need to at least understand their logic. People don’t do things for no reason. We may think that the reasons someone used were wrong by our standards, but that doesn’t mean they’re illogical by their standards. I’m perfectly happy to sit in judgement on people in the past – if they were racist, or if they felt it was okay for poor people to be crowded into unventilated boxes without baths – but if I’m going to write about their actions I still have to try to understand them. But no matter hard I try on this topic, I come to the same conclusion: if I were building public baths to make up for literally millions of people stuck in terrible housing without baths, I’d try to make the architecture as nondescript as possible to try to not draw attention to the situation.
