LEGENDARY GAY BATHHOUSES OF NEW YORK CITY
"The safest, most enduring, and one of the most affirmative of the settings in which gay men gathered in the first half of the twentieth century was the baths..." George Chauncey
"The pansy men of the Nation---New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco are just nuts about Turkish Bathing. Steam joints of the aforementioned cities are the gathering places of perverts...the clubhouses of joyboys on the make...and the ports of call for those despised parasites who pander to the desires of homosexual men...punks who will submit passively to the tainted caresses for the price of a drink or a pack of cigarettes." Despite the negative publicity surrounding the evolving gay culture in cities like New York and San Francisco, those bathhouses which "tolerated" gay men continued to thrive long after the municipal baths had shut down, since the recent inclusion of bathtubs in all new tenements meant that the general population would no longer need to pay for a bath. Of course, gay men did not necessarily visit the bathhouses for hygienic purposes. Instead, they went for the camaraderie of other "like-minded" people, and their very presence year after year transformed the bathhouses into the first gay social institutions in the United States. Almost a hundred years after the first documented raid on a gay bathhouse in New York City, the handful of bathhouses which have survived to this day serve as ancestors of the legendary sex palaces of the past. These were places where sex ruled the days and nights, and the familiar warm hue of the air, mixed with the faint echoes of slamming lockers and plywood doors, suggested to you, as you stepped into the steam room, that it was all too good to last. So, pay your five bucks and sign the ledger. It's time to go back to the baths...
The Everard Turkish Baths
(Opened to the public on May 3, 1888 and closed in 1985)
The Everard Turkish Baths (sometimes referred to as the "Ever Hard Baths") served as a homosexual rendezvous for more than a half century, and was the longest-running gay oriented business in New York City. Originally a church, the Everard was converted into a bathhouse by the "prominent financier, brewer, and politician" James Everard, at a period in time when most of the dwellings in the city lacked adequate bathing facilities. For a one dollar admission fee, patrons could bathe, swim in the pool, or luxuriate in the steam room before retiring to the small cubicle (with a cot) that came with the admission price.
Gay men started frequenting the Everard by World War I, and by the 1920's it had established itself as a homosexual but clandestine bathhouse. As the years progressed, the Everard's salacious reputation extended beyond New York City, as was evidenced by the fact that some patrons came from relatively far away places, such as New Jersey, Philadelphia, Ohio, and even Europe. London offered "nothing compared to it," a Parisian friend told British actor Emlyn Williams, who paid a visit in 1927. Williams' description of the Everard bathhouse is as follows: "Up some stairs," Williams wrote, "at a desk, an ashen bored man in shirtsleeves produced a ledger crammed with illegible scrawls. I added mine, paid my dollar, was handed key, towel and robe, hung the key on my wrist and mounted to a large floor as big as a warehouse and as high: intersecting rows of 'private rooms,' each windowless cell dark except from a glimmer from above through wire-netting shredded with dust and containing a narrow workhouse bed." Williams went on to describe how he took off his clothes, donned the robe and stepped into the passageway to witness men walking to and fro, apparently cruising. He saw a man "stop at a door which was ajar, give it a gentle push and peer inside" as though he might have been seeking a sexual encounter. Williams also wrote about a rather hilarious scene at the Everard in which someone's false teeth came loose during an act of fellatio. Interestingly enough, the Everard was rumored to have been owned by the Police Athletic League, which enhanced its reputation as being safe from police harassment. Nevertheless, there were raids on the Everard, such as the one carried out on January 5, 1919, in which the manager and nine customers were arrested. The scene replayed itself only a year later when fifteen men were arrested in a similar operation.
Unfortunately, in 1977 a devastating four-alarm fire swept through the Everard complex, leaving nine men dead and many others severely injured. But that tragedy was relatively small compared to the larger tragedy which would force the closure of the Everard Baths in 1985: the AIDS epidemic. Here is a personal write-up about the fire: "The fire occurred on May 25, 1977 there were 9 (nine) men killed and 12 injured. Accounts were published in the New York Times and the Daily News (a front page photo of a fireman saving a towel-clad patron was very moving). A sprinkler system had just been installed but was not yet operational. It was scheduled to be fully working on June 2. The windows were not all painted over. In fact, there was a small window on the second and third floors in the front overlooking the street. I remember crowding around the window one night watching torrential rains flood the streets. You could see the Empire State Building from that window. I have many fond memories of the Everard. I met my lover there in 1981 after it had been renovated. It finally closed for good in approximately 1985." "This tragedy led NYC to enact a law that would not allow anyone to spend more than 12 hours at a time in a bathhouse (my how far we've come). Whether it's enforced these days I'm not sure, but you would get around that by checking out (usually physically) and checking back in again minutes later. This I'm sure was a bonanza for those places because depending on the day (or time of day) you would probably pay a rate increase. The building now houses a group of wholesale merchants."
FORMER PATRONS TALK ABOUT THE EVERARD: A visitor to the Everard Baths in the mid 1970's wrote: "Everard in the West 20's was dark and run down, real seedy, like a skid row hotel. It had a huge, shadowy steam room with benches, and peeling paint on the walls and ceiling. The swimming pool was large and formally decorated like at one time it had been a gracious men's club or something grand from the turn of the century." (Robert, NYC) Another patron wrote: "They called it the Old Dirty Foot. In my little coterie that's what we called the Everard because people smoked in that place and ashes were on the floor, and the management never swept the place. You could always tell someone had been to the Everard. They would have black scuz on the bottom of their feet...it took three days or so to get rid of it." (C.H., NYC) The late author Arthur Bell had this to say about the Everard Baths: "Everard was a haven where I could stare at crotches in dimly lit hallways, wander the steam room, which smelled of sweat and Lysol, and screw with a cast of thousands, who, like the extras in Quo Vadis were faceless and nameless." A visitor to the Everard Baths in the 1950's wrote this about the place: "...friends whispered about this black hole of Calcutta on West 28th Street, where steam hissed through leaky pipes and the fat, aged, and perverted indiscriminately banged each other. Everard's, they said, was Hades. But to me it was expediency." Another visitor to the Everard Baths in the mid 1970's said: "The place reeks of history, smells of hundreds of thousands of hard-ons. If all the moans ever moaned there were moaned again at once, they'd be heard in Albania!" Some Tidbits about the Everard
Baths locker room: "One other thing came to mind -
the lockers were walk-in lockers. It was a tight fit but sometimes you
could even have sex in those lockers. I remember that the inside walls of
these walk-in lockers were almost always covered in the most elaborate gay
erotic art and graffiti - daisy chains of fucking and sucking, exploding cocks,
exaggerated genitalia. The quality of the art in many cases was extremely
high - Tom of Finland style art - while there were cruder but no less heartfelt
depictions, as well, of gay sex and cock worship. It had occurred to me to
photograph these priceless artifacts but the shallowness of the space, lack of
light, and my own shyness prevented me from following through. When the
Everard closed and I realized all that had been trashed I was hurt and bitter. I
still mourn the loss of those treasures." Brian L. of NYC
More Facts about the Everard Baths: ***The Everard was said to have been a favorite haunt of Rock Hudson and Nureyev. ***In 1977 you could rent one of the 135 cubicles at the Everard for only $7; $5 for a locker (on the weekends lockers went for $6, rooms for $9.25). ---New York Times, 5/26/1977 ***In the 1970's, the Everard was known for Tuesdays and Thursdays when the sexual temperature was high.
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Gay bathhouses have
operated in New York City since the beginning of the twentieth century. While
there is scant evidence to suggest that gay men "cruised" the city's
municipal baths (which were established to "encourage cleanliness in the
tenement districts,") it is certain that homosexual encounters took place
in the private, more upscale Turkish and Roman bathhouses found in Manhattan. By
the height of the Roaring Twenties, there were nearly sixty of these bathhouses
in the city. Some of these facilities were located in the basements of hotels,
and others had their own, lavishly decorated buildings, such as the famous
Everard Turkish Baths, then considered one of the classiest bathhouses in New
York City. Although the sexual activity
in these early bathhouses was relatively discreet, there were various legal,
military and newspaper accounts written at the time, documenting that a number
of locations throughout the United States had become popular rendezvous for
"fairies," "queers," and "perverts." To add fuel
to the fire, publications
of the day, such as the New York scandal sheet "Brevities," printed venomous
articles about the gay bathhouse scene in New York and abroad, such as the
article that appeared in the November 23, 1933 edition:
