A public bathhouse in Brooklyn built by the architect who designed the Lincoln Memorial
It’s hard to imagine today, when newer public buildings tend to be blocky and uninspiring—if not truly ugly.
But at the turn of the 20th century, schools, courthouses, parks, and other public structures were designed with a sense of architectural grandeur and vision. Examples of this “City Beautiful” movement, born in the early 1890s and adopted by cities across the country, are all over New York, from the Manhattan Municipal Building to Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.
Even public bathhouses were constructed with beauty in mind. You’ve probably spotted surviving bathhouses around the city, converted into new use and hiding among the cityscape.
Many of them went up in the early 1900s to give tenement dwellers who lacked bathrooms or access to pools a place to cool off and bathe—for basic hygiene purposes and to control the spread of disease.
Though it didn’t open until 1923 (on a corner space once occupied by an armory), one of the loveliest bathhouses intended for the “great unwashed” that had 66 showers and an enormous pool as its centerpiece still exists at the corner of Bedford and Metropolitan Avenues in Williamsburg.
True to the era of uplifting public buildings, this bathhouse wasn’t designed by just any old architect. The creative visionary behind its Neoclassical style was Henry Bacon, who also designed the Lincoln Memorial (below) in Washington, DC—which also takes its cues from City Beautiful philosophy.
The opening of the Municipal Public Baths, as the Brooklyn Eagle called the building, certainly wasn’t a national event like the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial a year earlier in 1922. It was just a community bathhouse for poorer people.
But for residents of Williamsburg—where the population had doubled since the Williamsburg Bridge went up—it was a day to celebrate. Three thousand people showed up on the front steps on the day it opened. Accompanied by a marching band, Brooklyn dignitaries like Borough President Edward Riegelmann roused the crowd with speeches.
“This bath will be opened 365 days of the year, and there will be mixed swimming here,” he told the crowd, per the Brooklyn Eagle on June 5, 1923, opening day. “By this I mean there will be swimming by the men and women. My one ambition now is to get enough money with which to put up six more similar bathhouses.”
Like Manhattan, Brooklyn already had several public bathhouses in its tenement neighborhoods. I’m not sure any more were built as Riegelmann pledged, and the era of public bathhouses was ending anyway. “By 1935, the structure was turned over to the Department of Parks to operate as a recreational facility,” according to NYC Parks.
Use of the pool declined through the decades, but a 1997 reconstruction brought it back to its prewar beauty—just in time for a population boom in the neighborhood. It’s now known as the Metropolitan Recreation Center. A handsome plaque on the wall memorializes its beginnings.
Considering that the same architect is responsible for both the bathhouse and the Lincoln memorial, you’d think the two would be more similar. I think the similarity shows in each structure’s gracefulness and accessibility. A century later, with the City Beautiful movement long passed, each remains inviting and inspiring.
[Second image: NYPL Digital Collections; third image: National Park Service; fourth image: Brooklyn Daily Eagle 1921]
