Two days ago, the Department of Buildings issued a violation for the 110-year old LaGuardia Bathhouse, declaring its walls in danger of collapsing at any moment - following demolition it will be replaced by a turf field. I had passed by this building, situated next to the Little Flower Playground at Madison and Jefferson (about two blocks from where I was born) around the end of November, originally to take photos of the mural which stretches across its entire height at one end.
An epic depiction of Puerto Rican history and life, the mural moves from scenes of enslaved Africans led in chains by conquistadors, to more contemporary sites of music, community, or figures like Pedro Albizu Campos (a leader in the Puerto Rican independence movement and namesake of the Campos Houses) and Roberto Clemente. Like the large mural depicting scenes of Jewish life, religious themes, images of the Holocaust, and more which once adorned the recently demolished building at 232 East Broadway (known by Flight of the Conchords fans as the New Zealand consulate building, and in-part the topic of my next post), the LaGuardia Bathhouse mural was the undeniable expression of the largely immigrant Puerto Rican community of the Lower East Side, which had steadily grown in the years following WWII.
Completed in the winter of 1909, the LaGuardia bathhouse, originally the Rutgers Place Public Bath, was a symbol of the city's fight against the grip disease held on the surrounding slums. At the time, and for decades afterwards, many of the scores of tenement buildings across the LES had extremely limited access to bathrooms, often times a communal toilet served an entire building and lacked any form of bath or shower altogether. Today, the idea of a communal bath is unattractive to most, but for a long time they served a vital role in the daily lives of thousands upon thousands of people across the neighborhood and the city, and demonstrated a commitment by the city government towards providing free, public health services to those in need. In the 1940's a gymnasium and an indoor pool were added to the building and it became an increasingly popular community center; in 1957 the buildings around the bathhouse, south of Madison, were demolished to give rise to brand new public housing "superblocks".
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| (photo from 1957, before construction of the LaGuardia Houses) |
As the standard narrative goes, by the 1970's, with the city on the brink of financial collapse, public institutions like these bathhouses had no choice but to close as a part of the broader dismantling of New York City's social infrastructure. Yet, even as the city climbed out of its hole to become the financial capital of the world, there was no more of a commitment to health, housing, or other public goods, as neighborhoods like the LES took on crack, AIDS, sharp increases in homicide, as well as numbers of other diseases many thought were under control for years. All across the city people fought to reclaim urban space, and while these movements varied in scope and intention, the call was heard everywhere for local government to participate in acts of community-building and restoration underway (even if that meant to get out the way). For decades, people living around the LaGuardia Bathhouse called for it to be restored and reopened to the public, told every time that the city could not afford it.
So when the DOB slapped a violation on the building this past weekend, surely no one was surprised that a building left abandoned for almost fifty years was falling apart - instead, we are witnessing the fulfillment of the city's decades-long power grab of public space on the Lower East Side. But Aidan, they're knocking down this abandoned old building and putting a nice public turf field in its place, is that really such a bad thing? As other sites have noted, the city's choice to build a field comes as the city scrambles to move forward with its ludicrous plan of demolishing the East River Park and closing it off for almost four years, yet somehow compensate for this lack of outdoor public space. The city's plan to build a small turf field at the former site of the bathhouse seems to me like no more than a desperate public relations move from a government embroiled in numbers of legal and political battles in Lower Manhattan.
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