It is easy to forget how recently a bath became a private thing. In the New Haven of the 1880s a tenement flat had no tub, no hot water and often no water at all above the ground floor. Washing meant a basin, a kettle and a good deal of carrying — or it meant the river.
The bathing city
Through the summer the Mill River filled with people. Boys swam off the banks and the bridge abutments; families came down in the evening when the factories had stopped. This was ordinary in every American industrial city, and so was the fact that the water they were swimming in carried the discharge of every works upstream.
It was also, by the standards of the time, a public order problem. Boys swimming in a city river were visible from the street, and the argument about what to do with them ran alongside the argument about hygiene.
Why cities started building baths
From the 1880s a new argument spread through American cities: that cleanliness was not a moral failing of the poor but a service a city owed its residents, and that a city which gave people nowhere to wash had no standing to blame them for the diseases that followed.
It was a public health argument, and it was also a housing argument. The tenement was the problem; the bath house was the patch. New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia all built free public baths on this reasoning, and the movement produced a recognisable building type: plain, functional, separated by sex, run to a timetable, and free.
There were two kinds. The river bath was a floating or bankside structure — changing rooms, a walkway, an enclosure in the water, an attendant — cheap to build and dependent on the river being clean enough to swim in. The indoor bath came later, with piped water and showers, and was what eventually replaced it.
New Haven's
New Haven had the same debate and its newspapers ran it. The Morning Journal and Courier carried the argument in May 1880 and again in October 1881, in the years when the city was deciding what to provide and where.
A bath house stood at the water's edge here, at the corner of Mill River Street and Beach Street — the 1888 city map shows the building on its plot, which is the picture on this sign.
What we do not yet know
This is the thinnest-documented sign on the trail, and it is worth being straight about it. The date it opened, who ran it, how long it lasted, what it cost the city and whether it was free are all still open questions.
The documents that would answer them exist and are listed below: two New Haven newspaper pages from 1880 and 1881, the 1888 map, and the city records that mention a Beach Street bath house. They are scans, not searchable text, so somebody has to sit and read them.
If you know something about this building, the project would like to hear it. Sign 5 will not go to print until its specifics are nailed down.
The contradiction
What the city could not do was make the water clean. The same decades that produced the bath house produced the factories whose outfalls ran into the river, and the argument about which mattered more went on for close to a century. Public baths eventually moved indoors and away from the river, plumbing reached the tenements, and by 1970 the Mill River tested at four times the legal limit for swimming.
Water quality here has improved a great deal since the industry left. It still drops sharply after rain, when runoff from streets and lawns and overflow from ageing sewers reaches the river, and bacteria counts stay high for days afterwards. The bathing city is not quite as far in the past as it looks.
The sign at this spot
The full sign, in English and Spanish. Zoom in to read it.
This sign is still a draft. The hatched boxes are photographs that have not been sourced yet.
Sources and further reading
Where a link goes to a scanned original — a newspaper page, a map, an engineering journal — it is the actual document, not a summary of it.
- The Beach Street bath house in the New Haven papers, May 1880 — Chronicling America
- The Beach Street bath house in the New Haven papers, October 1881 — Chronicling America
- 1888 map of the bath house area — Library of Congress
- Scenes from New York's public baths — Bowery Boys History
- Beach Street bath house in the New Haven city records, p. 304 — Google Books
- The birth and death of Manhattan's municipal baths
- Hygiene and swimming pools in New York City — Cities and Modernity
- Mill River bacteria TMDL — Connecticut DEEP
Research and credits
Historical research for the Mill River Trail signage was carried out by Colin M. Caplan of Magrisso Forte and John R. Logan, with contributions from Jason Bischoff-Wurstle of the New Haven Museum and walk notes by Steve Hamm. Images are credited individually. Locator maps are drawn from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.