The hottest party in the East Village stays a temperate 194 degrees Fahrenheit. New York Magazine‘s inaugural Men’s Style issue built its centerpiece around that, sending Ryan McGinley to the Russian & Turkish Baths at 268 East 10th Street to photograph regulars and first-timers wearing almost nothing.
Writer Matthew Schneier frames the place as a survivor: going, at least according to lore, since 1892, through the émigré years, the second-generation years, the gay years, the Mafia years, the flophouse years. Today it’s the only bathhouse in the East Village that has survived.
“To be honest, we were probably the worst bathhouse in 1985,” says Dmitry Shapiro, who runs it on alternating weeks.
The Co-Ed Gambit
What made the place modern wasn’t the steam. It was the decision to let men and women sweat together. The gay poet Thom Gunn once wrote to a friend, “Considering that a Turkish baths in New York now has a women’s night … almost anything is possible.”
Dedicated men’s-only hours on Sundays and Thursdays have since become gay meetups, which is its own kind of programming.
Naked Church
Brandon Flynn, who lives nearby, supplies a line no copywriter could improve on: “I live really close and come on Sundays. There’s usually a cohort of people I know. You’re like, ‘Oh, hey, how’re you doing?’ or ‘How’s your week been?’ It kind of feels parallel to a church experience. It’s like naked church.”
Rashid Johnson goes further. “I’m really in love with this place. I grew up without a religious routine, so this kind of became that for me,” he says, naming Daniel Humm and Aziz Ansari as fellow congregants. “There’s a sense of being on the same plane; everybody’s kind of exposed.”
Isaac Cole Powell states the thesis plainly: “The bathhouse is the great equalizer. That’s one of the things I like about it. You have to be radically comfortable with everything about your body here.”
The Star Power
Troye Sivan, newly moved to the city, turns the shoot into a competitive sport. “I’ve come here a few times with my friend Maya Hawke, and she is such a fucking beast about this place,” he says. “I remember once we sat in the Russian room, and it was, like, a totally unspoken competition … where we were in there for two hours just putting the buckets on ourselves. It was like, Who’s gonna break first? … I was like, If I say something about the heat, then I’m gonna feel like such a fucking loser.“
He also uses the slot to preview new music: “I would say, in general, my new album is not coming from a place of peace. I think it’s coming from a place of longing.”
Elliot Page offers something quieter. “I went to a bathhouse recently. I’ve only in the past couple of years been like, Yeah, that sounds nice, to like go somewhere and sit around in your body like that.”
Marlon James, days after landing the review of a lifetime, describes the comedown: “I think I was in sleep paralysis for, like, two hours because I figured if I get out of this bed, I’m gonna wake up, so let’s just stay here for a while.”
The Etiquette Police
Leave it to Jeremy O. Harris to deliver the piece’s real argument about contemporary masculinity. “Can I say what I’ve seen in a steam room that needs to stop? Young men who are obviously sort of like on a no-homo tip, very much in finance, wearing full socks and shoes in the steam room with their gym shorts. Also people wearing headphones in there. Like, actually take in the sounds.”
Eddie Huang treats the heat as therapy. “When I feel overwhelmed emotionally — upset, frustrated, dare we say angry — it’s better to just come to the Baths and get hammered by the heat. I’ll come here five times a week in the winter, but in the summer, it’s three times. Generally, after a sit, I see every angle to it. You sweat out the ambiguity.”
The Mechanics of It
The magazine is selling two products at once: nostalgia and abs. Francesco Clemente, who used to come with Basquiat and Julian Schnabel in the early ’80s, supplies the former. “We were just 20-year-olds with a very obsessive lifestyle. Everything back then was somehow secret, so this was another secret of downtown life,” he says. “These days, it looks a little more manicured here.”
Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist supply the coincidence. “I’d met Mike Faist before, but East of Eden is the first time we got to work together,” Abbott says. “He’s a theater dude also, and I don’t know what that does but it does something. It’s like being at war but no one’s really getting hurt.” Faist tells it from the other side: “I saw a video of this actor doing my monologue, and I was like, I’m gonna go ahead and just steal what this guy’s doing.“
Meanwhile, the Baths is selling itself right back. It’s launched into the modern era, playing up big-name guests on social media, with two separate, parallel Instagram accounts. “There’s a ton, ton, ton of competition now, but I believe New York can meet the demand,” Dmitry says.
Schneier’s kicker is the only honest one in the package. A regular calls it “a perfect and disgusting place.”
Which is, roughly, the entire pitch. Not wellness. Not purity. Just $60, 194 degrees, and a room where a playwright can scold finance guys for wearing socks.
