people most
sedulously, and in heathen Japan to-day, I am told, there are baths, as
we have saloons, on every corner. Christian New York never had an
all-year bath-house until now. In a tenement population of 255,033 the
Gilder Commission found only 306 who had access to bathrooms in the
houses where they lived, and they would have found the same thing
wherever they went. The Church Federation canvass of the Fifteenth
Assembly District over on the West Side, where they did not go, counted
three bath-tubs to 1321 families. Nor was that because they so elected.
The People's Baths took in 121,386 half dimes last year (1901) for as
many baths, and more than forty per cent of their customers were
Italians. In the first five months of the present year the Rivington
Street baths accommodate 224,876 bathers, of whom 66,256 were women
and girls. And this in winter. The free river baths have registered five
and six millions of bathers in one brief season. The "great unwashed"
were not so from choice, it would appear.

The river baths were only for summer, and their time is past. As the
sewers that empty into the river multiply, it is getting less and less a
place fit to bathe in, though the boys find no fault. Sixteen public
bath-houses on shore are to take the place of the swimming baths. They
are all to be in the crowded tenement districts. The sites for the first
three are being chosen now. And a wise woman[33] offers to build and
equip one all complete at her own expense, as her gift to the city.

[Footnote 33: Mrs. A. A. Anderson.]

Pull up now a minute, if you think, with some good folks, that the world
is not advancing, but just marking time, and look back half a century. I
said that New York never had a public bath till now. I meant a free
bath. As long ago as 1852, just fifty years ago, the Association for
improving the Condition of the Poor built one in Mott Street near Grand
Street, and spent $42,000 in doing it. It ran eight years, and was then
closed for want of patronage. Forty years passed, and it was again the
Association for improving the Condition of the Poor that built the
People's Baths in the same neighborhood. That time they succeeded at
once. And now here we are, planning a great system of municipal baths as
the people's right, not as a favor to any one, and the old lie that the
poor prefer to steep in their squalor is no longer believed by any
person with sense. This month contracts will be given out