Everard Baths
| Everard Baths | |
|---|---|
Baths in 2009
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| General information | |
| Type | Bath house |
| Location | New York City |
| Address | 28 West 28th Street |
| Country | United States |
| Coordinates | 40°44′43″N 73°59′21″W / 40.7454°N 73.9892°WCoordinates: 40°44′43″N 73°59′21″W / 40.7454°N 73.9892°W |
| Opened | 1888 |
| Renovated | 1977 |
| Closed | April 1986 |
| Other information | |
| Facilities | private rooms, wet and dry steamrooms, pool |
The Everard Baths or Everard Spa Turkish Bathhouse was a gay bathhouse at 28 West 28th Street in New York City that operated from 1888 to 1986. The venue occupied an adaptively reused church building and was the site of a deadly fire.
Everard Baths was a Turkish bath founded by financier James Everard in 1888 in a former church building, designed in a typical late-nineteenth-century Victorian Romanesque Revival architectural style. James Everard who operated the Everard brewery on 135th Street converted it to a bathhouse in 1888. Everard's bathhouse was intended for general health and fitness.
On November 28, 1898, a soldier was found dead in his room at the baths and gas was suspected.
On January 5, 1919, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice encouraged a police raid in which the manager and nine customers were arrested for lewd behavior. It was raided again in 1920 with 15 arrests.
It was patronized largely by homosexuals by the 1920s and became the community's preeminent social venue from the 1930s onward. It was patronized by gay men before the 1920s and by the 1930s had a reputation as "classiest, safest, and best known of the baths," eventually picking up the nickname "Everhard".
The entrance was lit by two green lamps giving it, according to patrons, the appearance of a police precinct and giving rise to speculation that it was owned for a period by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York (a claim that would be vehemently denied after patrons died in a 1977 fire).
Emlyn Williams described a visit in 1927:
Among the documented patrons were Alfred Lunt, Lorenz Hart, Charles James, Gore Vidal and Rudolf Nureyev.Truman Capote and Ned Rorem wrote about their visits.
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Wikipedia