THE NEW ST. MARKS BATHS

(The New St Marks, An ad from 1979)

“(At the baths) a nuclear physicist could meet a plumber. Bathhouses were the great leveler, a common denominator, a place where people did not have to be of similar backgrounds." -- Bruce Mailman, owner of The Saint and the New St Marks Baths, NYC.

The legendary St. Marks Baths, in Manhattan, was a good example of a bathhouse which made the transition from being a straight bath to an exclusively gay venue. Opened as a Jewish bathhouse by 1915, the St. Marks Russian and Turkish Baths catered mostly to businessmen in the area. Over the years, St. Marks became increasingly popular with residents of the surrounding neighborhood, and by the 1950's it served older Jewish men during the day and gay men at night. Sometime during the 1960's, it evolved into an exclusively gay bathhouse, although it was generally considered "unclean and uninviting" to some of the patrons, who eventually went elsewhere. But to those patrons with a proclivity to genuine sleaze, the St. Marks Baths was an aphrodisiac and a godsend. By the time the 1970's had rolled around, the aging bathhouse was already well-known for its hard-core S&M crowd, where "whippings and pot smoking" was the order of the day. Famed gay writer Edmund White put it this way: "After a horrifying fire destroyed the original Everard baths and killed several of its patrons, the heavy-sex crowd was without a home. The St. Marks filled that need. In place of the Everard's rotting marble, gummy tiles and terminal pool, the St. Marks substituted an unobtrusive, quietly masculine decor." White went on to say that the St. Marks had "no television, and disco music is confined to the front office and a back lounge, on the theory that nothing should compete with or mask the sounds of sex."

 

 

 

 

 

The locker room of the New St Marks Baths, the first bathhouse in New York City that provided the douching facilities.  For $1 you could buy a rubber hose that fit on a faucet in the wall (next to the toilets in the basement) and clean yourself before cruising.

Photo courtesy of gay historian Ira Tattelman c. 1979.

 

By 1978, after more than sixty years in service, the St. Marks Baths had become more of a liability than a profitable establishment. Business had been dwindling for a number of years, and the old bathhouse was in desperate need of a major renovation. So, in 1979 the enterprising Bruce Mailman came into the picture by purchasing the facility and refurbishing it as an efficient and stylish bathhouse that featured industrial deco black tile in the wet areas, giving it a "high-tech feel" that many remember fondly. "Our approach," said Mailman, "was to make people comfortable enough that they would not need to sign in under a false name or feel embarrassed if they ran into someone there they knew." When the costly refurbishing job was finally completed, the "New St. Marks Baths" was opened to the public. Billed as "the largest bathhouse in the country," it boasted three floors, a pool, roof deck, a steam room with "shipboard portholes," 162 private rooms, and 250 lockers. The clientele of the New St. Marks Baths was a potpourri of "hot, toned men," a handful of geriatrics on the prowl (ghosts of the old St. Marks), and the many faithful disciples of S&M, who always seemed to have a generous supply of dildos and tit clamps on hand. Jason from Long Island remembered lots of handsome French and Canadian stewards, who used the place as an inexpensive "hotel," while a former employee, Jay Blotcher, recalled the attention-getting regulars who went there, such as the man "who would lie nude in his room with an array of phallic-shaped vegetables on his cot. His butt was turned up, and there was a small place card at his crotch that said, 'Do what you want.' He was known as the Vegetable Man."

 

 

(The image above was scanned from the July/Aug edition of OUT Magazine for 1994) Notices proclaiming "CLOSED" were posted on the doors of the New St. Mark's Baths due to the AIDS crisis. Interestingly, since Bruce Mailman's transformation of the venue in the late seventies, the bathhouse had never locked its doors or even had locks on the front doors. When the New York City health inspectors were sent to shut down the place in 1985 they were surprised that Bruce Mailman did not have a key. For decades the St. Mark's Baths had been a 24 hour per day, 7 days per week business that saw millions of visitors pass through its doors since opening in the early part of the Twentieth Century.       New St. Mark’s Baths Preservation Project: During the fall of 1992 a lesbian photographer named Gail S. Goodman left her home in upstate New York to attend the Manhattan funeral of a longtime friend who had died from AIDS. As she dropped off one of his friends on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village after the service, he turned to her and mentioned that he had recently entered the New St. Mark’s Baths (by this time shut down and boarded up for 7 years) through an upper window in order to investigate the premises. His felonious visit uncovered a host of treasures inside the ghostly facility: signs still hung on the walls, keys to rooms and lockers still filled the bank of lockboxes, AIDS literature was still stacked at the front counter along with St. Mark’s Baths personalized matches, postcards and office stationery. Knowing a rare opportunity when she saw one, Gail wrote down the telephone number of the bank which was offering 6 St. Mark’s Place for sale, then she headed home with plans to somehow enter the baths and take pictures of the facility in order to preserve the gay history of Manhattan’s most popular gay bath house for those who had visited and to those who had never been witness to the gay sexual revolution that followed Stonewall in NYC. The following day Gail was fortunate enough to find out where the baths current owner Bruce Mailman was located. With her camera in hand and a prayer on her tongue, she knocked on a Manhattan door and met with a young blond named Jonathan who worked for Mr. Mailman. He directed her to the office of Mr. Mailman himself. After a few introductory remarks by Gail, she asked Bruce if the New St. Mark’s Baths had been photographed. “No,” he dropped his head and said, “and it was so beautiful.” With that, Gail asked for his permission to photograph the baths. Fortunately, he granted Gail permission to photograph the baths with the understanding that she not photograph anything that had been destroyed or damaged by the renovation work that was going on inside. She agreed to Mailman’s demands and, with Jonathan in tow, she entered the baths with a flashlight and managed to take several snapshots of the darkened facility as it remained 7 years after being shut down by the Health Department of the City of New York due to the AIDS crisis.     Gail S. Goodman has so kindly allowed the webmaster of GayTubs to display some never-before-seen images of the interior of the New St. Mark's Baths as it looked the day she entered the darkened baths with a camera...and a dream of helping to preserve gay history. The image of the keys below is an actual image she took in late 2008 of a set of keys she was allowed to remove from the New St, Mark's Baths front desk.      CLICK ON THE IMAGE OF THE KEYS TO BEGIN YOUR JOURNEY INTO THE NEW ST. MARK'S BATHS.     Photographer's Comments Regarding The Bathhouse Keys Image:  "A set of keys with the lock box number tag, One key opened the lockbox and the other was for the room or locker. The band let you put it over your wrist or ankle.  Notice its room 320, which gives you an idea how large the facility was.  This still photo was taken at home in 2009. It was taken under the ott-lite with a reflector using my canon camera in color. The lens for the still shoots was 50mm f1.8  You are seeing the keys as if they were right in front of you...no color variation. I have one set of keys. The others were all there but only one was given to me by Jonathan, who worked for the owned of the baths. There was a feeling of leaving some things the way they were.  If I could have gotten them all without jeopardizing the project I would have since some memorabilia will end up in museums and the gay center. The purpose was to protect the history for gay history and for the guys who had been there but more importantly for the guys that never got to experience it or the sexual revolution. At the exhibition you will be able to touch most signs .  There are over 12 photos taken in the bath that I enlarged to 16x20 and framed as art." "Frame Your Art"  Gail S. Goodman

 

 

In December 1985, the New St. Marks Baths was shut down by the City of New York, which declared it a "public health hazard" because of the AIDS epidemic. The New York Times even got into the picture by running an editorial against the closing, saying that the baths should be kept open in order to disseminate AIDS prevention information. Nevertheless, the bathhouse reluctantly closed its doors, and shortly thereafter graffiti covered the walls, screaming "Finally!" and "Fuck Fags!" Refusing to give up, Bruce Mailman had tried for a number of years to reopen his bathhouse by arguing that the closure constituted an invasion of the patrons' right to privacy and freedom of association. The court, on the other hand, questioned whether the patrons' constitutional rights were truly infringed by the closure, observing that sexual activity in commercial establishments was not "protected." In addition, the City of New York presented evidence of high risk sexual activity at the New St. Marks, and the court upheld the City's decision.

 

 

 

The fifty-five year old Bruce Mailman died in June of 1994. In his obituary, The New York Times described his St. Marks as a "gay bathhouse and meeting place that was closed in 1985 by the New York City Health Department as a public health hazard." Not long after Mailman's death, the building was sold to a video chain.

 

 

 

BELOW: The famous St Marks Cafe, where "Celluloid Closet" writer, Vito Russo, once worked. It was well-known for its sandwiches, but most people dropped by between encounters to camp it up with Vito.) Image courtesy of Ira Tattelman.

 

A regular of the old St. Marks Baths remembered it this way: "The steamroom was an institution in itself. Guys would pack in so tightly that you could hardly raise your arms. And there was a pool in the basement where I saw quite a few guys getting blow jobs under the water. Never could figure out how they didn't get a lung full of water." (Robert, NYC)

 

Another regular of the old St. Marks Baths remembered this incident: "I'll never forget this one...happened at the old St. Marks Baths one Saturday night in the late 1970's. There was a line out the door (probably about 1 in the morning). I was waiting patiently when, all of a sudden, the music stops playing from inside, and an ambulance pulls up. About 15 minutes later two men come out with a stretcher. On it was a guy in a rubber body bag! The reaction of the line was just 'business as usual.' A queen in front of me said, 'I hope I don't get HER room.' That was it for me---I was out of there!" (D.H., NYC) Although "D.H." did not remember why the man on the stretcher had died, there was said to have been an incident in which a man suffered an epileptic attack and drowned in the hot tub about the same time of this incident.

 

A patron of the New St. Marks Baths remembered this about the place: "The New St. Marks had a great hot tub and olympic pool. Showers were way hot, too. The rooms were tiny, attendants were all nice & would give you sheets, pillows, and towels if you needed extras. I had some hot times as a teenager there. They never proofed!" (J.T., Long Island)

 

Another regular of the New St. Marks remembered this: "I always tried to get the "corner room." There was a corner room which was oddly shaped because of the corner. It was right at the head of the stairs, so you could see everything and everybody as they passed by. It was great for cruising. It was also larger than the rest of the rooms because of the angles of the corner. So it was perfect for a small orgy. And I hosted many there!" (C.H., NYC)

 

Even before AIDS had crept onto the scene, patrons were receiving condoms (in a package that read "WHAT'S IN THIS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE") and safe sex pamphlets from the management of the New St. Marks. During the onset of AIDS, however, anyone entering the facility was required to sign a contract agreeing to practice safe sex. A regular visitor during the 1980's had this to say about the the safe sex paraphernalia in the bathhouses: "We didn't much like AIDS literature being in the baths. It killed the party atmosphere. Nor did we like politics or any reality penetrating the baths. We dealt with that stuff all day long. The baths were our places, where we could be ourselves. We didn't want anything like politics or business or whatever laying its heavy hand on our space." (C.H., NYC)

 

"It was weird. You would go to St. Mark's Place at three in the morning as the bars were closing and there would be cabs stopping and even the occasional limo, which always blew my mind, in front of what had been a dump of an ancient Jewish bathhouse. People who were anything but old Jewish guys were getting out of cabs and limos in what had been a very cheap street for winos and derelicts and drug addicts not long before the New St. Mark's Baths opened. The winos and drunks would even still be sitting on the stoops near the St. Mark's Baths, sometimes even hassling the customers in the early days, but a stop was put to that pretty quick. Then you would go in and you were in the chic, so we thought, pristine, totally rational, totally sexual gay world. It was 'our space'. It was terrific fun while it lasted. And the men, oh the men...I get horny just thinking of those nights...Often now a face or a body from those days will rise up in my mind. I will wonder what ever happened to that guy. Many of them were just bath 'friends". I don't think we ever knew each others' names and we only met in the baths. Some examples: There was one perfectly formed, hard as rock guy who was only about five five and gorgeous. He was also a rabid communist. I was a Wall Streeter. We disagreed on everything. But he loved to get fucked and I loved fucking him. So we met at the Club Baths in Manhattan almost every week for months. Then it just suddenly ended. I never did know his name or anything about him like where he lived, what he did or anything. There was another Italian guy. Body and ass of death. He also loved getting fucked….I don’t think we ever said one word to one another, but it was obvious we were in love with one another. That little affair was conducted at the Continental Baths over a period of months as well. I saw him in the Village on Christopher Street one Sunday afternoon after our fling and the Continental was over. He looked terrible. I’m sure he’s dead now. Then there was this guy about six three, incredible body and very, very shy. We made it several times in the Continental Baths. I thought he was going to go berserk. Afterwards he told me he was a psychiatrist and had never made it with a guy before. I believed him. A few years after that I would see him around in the Village on Sunday afternoons traveling around in a limo with an older guy in a limo with New Jersey license tags and a uniformed driver. It was funny. Dunno what ever happened to him. There were lots of bathhouse people like that…the whole range of gay existence it seemed. It was awfully addicting.”  (C.H., NYC)

“One thing which is significant about openly gay bathhouses in the 70’s is that it was the period when it became considered ok for very attractive young gay men to do what had previously considered the purview of trolls and hustlers. It was ok to go to a place just to fuck your brains out with equally studly strangers without even talking, much less knowing one another. And you could do it with ten different guys a night without apology to anyone. In fact, it was expected that you would. That’s why talk of baths as being a place for the dissemination of gay culture and discussion always strikes me as rather contrived. There was dissemination, lots of it, but it had nothing to do with literary or political discussion.” (Bill M., NYC)

Fortunately, a there were a number of men who took the time and effort to record certain bathhouse experiences for future generations to read. The following journal entry was written by a patron of the St. Marks Baths in 1978. The diarist, a New Yorker who wishes to remain anonymous, obviously had a great time at the "tubs" that night so long ago:

"To St. Marks baths last night. Good time. Met a beautiful Puerto Rican, lean, hard body. A messenger. Nice guy. Got his number and gave him mine. Big dick, tight, hard ass. Came twice. Plan to see him again."

 

 

LEFT: The original scale from the St Mark's baths.  A former New Yorker found this gem on St Mark's place one winter morning in 1973. Apparently, the management threw it out in the garbage.	RIGHT: This August 2004 image of 6 St Marks Place shows the building which once housed the St Marks Baths from 1915 until it closed in 1985. The New St Marks baths was run by the same man who owned the legendary disco, The Saint.