Up Front
By Lu Donnelly
Pittsburgh Bathhouses
Imagine working in a steel mill all day and
coming home to wash up in a basin, or carrying
water to a portable wooden or tin tub for a
once-a-week cleansing. As late as 1900, most
houses in Pittsburgh did not have indoor
plumbing and personal hygiene suffered.
People bathed in the rivers, but the currents
could be dangerous and in 1895 city officials
outlawed bathing nude in the rivers between
sunrise and 8:30 p.m. That year they also
passed a law providing free bathhouses as
demanded by “a humane and charitable public
policy.”1 But by the end of the 19th century
frequent bathing became a means of self-
improvement; a bathhouse could teach
“individual or community hygiene” and make
“better men and women.”2 Only in the late
1950s did it become mandatory that each living
space have its own bathroom.
In 1894 Andrew Carnegie began to
provide bathing facilities in the libraries,
initially for his workers, and ultimately for the
communities surrounding his mills. A year
later members of the Twentieth Century Club
and the Council of Jewish Women created the
Civic Club of Allegheny County to find ways
to increase the number of free or affordable
bathhouses in Pittsburgh. Their committee
sent letters “to all the public baths of Europe
and to those in this country (though at
that time there were not many in the U.S.)
regarding cost and maintenance”3 and lobbied
Detail of Soho Bath House
sign and ornament.
All photos by Lu Donnelly.
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Former Public Wash House and Baths
Association, 35th and Butler streets,
Lawrenceville.
Detail of plaque on
re-purposed bathhouse above.
wealthy patrons for funds. Mrs. William Thaw,
Jr., was among the first to oblige, paying for
a building at 16th Street and Penn Avenue
in the Strip District with 32 marble showers
and two tubs, and second floor living space
for the superintendent. For a nickel one
could shower with soap and a towel included.
Named the People’s Baths, the facility opened
on Thanksgiving Day, 1897. Thirteen years
later, after moving the bathhouse to 1908
Penn Avenue, it was dubbed a “boon to the
neighborhood” and had served 846,539 men,
women, and children, with 61,267 free baths
provided.4
Henry Phipps, vice president of Carnegie
Steel and Carnegie’s lifelong friend, took on
the cause of public baths with several local
projects. He funded half the cost of the Public
Wash House and Baths Association at 35th and
Butler streets in Lawrenceville. This facility
included a sewing room and laundry facilities.
Showers (white marble) cost a nickel, but tub
baths (limited to half an hour) were 10 cents
for women and 15 cents for men. The building
has been repurposed, but it survived as a local
community club until 1961.5
New York architect Grosvenor Atterbury
had designed apartments for Phipps (built
1905 to 1908); Phipps again hired Atterbury
in 1907 (completed 1908) to build a four-
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Up Front
Detail of stylized fish on
Oliver Bath House.
story natatorium, a bathhouse that included a
large indoor swimming pool, at 540 Duquesne
Way near the Sixth Street Bridge. This had a
magnificent Guastavino-tiled pool and was a
commercial venture, not designed to alleviate
the bathing needs of mill workers as tub baths
cost 25 cents.6
In 1907 the Soho Bath House at 24082410 Fifth Avenue was completed by the city.
Although no longer used as a bath house, the
structure remains. A 1910 description read:
“A beautiful cream-colored brick and terra
cotta building, fronting three stories on Fifth
Avenue, five stories in the rear, and with an
added entrance from Forbes Street.”7 It had 52
showers and six tubs, an assembly hall, three
staff apartments, and men’s and women’s
waiting rooms.
In 1914, Henry W. Oliver’s widow and
daughter endowed the South Side Baths, now
the Oliver Bath House, the only bathhouse still
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Former People’s Bath House,
1908 Penn Avenue.
functioning in the city. Designed by McClure
& Spahr architects, the indoor pool remains
popular in the fall and winter. The Renaissance
Revival building at 38 South Tenth Street is
ornamented with stylized fish.
By the 1920s the city directory listed nine
bathhouses, but the numbers dwindled as
more apartments provided indoor plumbing.
Often endowed by the wealthy, those
bathhouses that remain leave us with rich
architecture and a reminder of how far we
have come since the days of bathing in rivers.
Americans have had well over a century
of sophisticated sanitation while as late as
2008, 2.6 billion people in the world have no
sanitation or plumbing whatsoever.
Lu Donnelly is one of the authors of Buildings
of Pennsylvania: Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania (University of Virginia Press, 2010)
a book in the 60-volume series on American
architecture sponsored by the Society of
Architectural Historians titled Buildings of the
United States. She has authored several books
and National Register nominations on Allegheny
County topics and organized an exhibition on
the barns of Western Pennsylvania for the Heinz
Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum
of Art.
1
W. W. Thomson. A Digest of the Acts of Assembly
Relating to and the General Ordinances of the
Former Soho Bath House,
2408-2410 Fifth Avenue,
façade.
City of Pittsburgh from 1804 to January 1st 1897
(Pittsburgh, 1897), p. 363.
2
Arundel Cotter. The Authentic History of the United
States Steel Corporation (New York: Moody Magazine
& Book Company, 1916), p. 169.
3
Fifteen Years of Civic History: Civic Club of Allegheny
County (Pittsburgh: Nicholson Printing Co., 1910),
p. 42.
4
Ibid. p. 20.
5
James D. VanTrump. Manuscript copy: “Mammon
and the Great Unwashed: the Career of the Public
Bath House in Pittsburgh.” Archives of Pittsburgh
History and Landmarks Foundation. p. 6. He credits
St. James Episcopal Church for the impetus to open
this facility.
6
John L. Fox. Housing for the Working Classes: Henry
Phipps, from the Carnegie Steel Company to Phipps
Houses (New York: Memorystone Publishing, Inc.,
2007), p. 22. Atterbury designed Phipps’ first New
York townhouse at 6 East 87th Street between 1901
and 1904. The Phipps family went on to commission
Atterbury to design a total of five buildings in
Pittsburgh; in addition to the Natatorium and Phipps
Apartments mentioned above they include: the
Bessemer Building (demolished) in 1904-05; the
Fulton Building (1905-1906, now the Renaissance
Hotel); and the Manufacturer’s Building (19061907 demolished). pp. 71-72. See also Albert
Tannler “Renaissance Man,” Focus Magazine of the
Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Sunday, April 11, 2004.
7
Fifteen Years of Civic History: Civic Club of Allegheny
County (Pittsburgh: Nicholson Printing Co., 1910),
p. 45.
Oliver Bath House,
South Side.
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