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ABSTRACT
This paper examines fees for access to New York City’s public swimming and bathing spaces from 1870 to the present. We argue that, beyond generating revenue and rationing space, charges for admission to public bathing spaces have served to condition how permeable those spaces were to various groups of potential users. Municipal actors involved in administering baths and pools have used fees to maintain and order these spaces; to distinguish between deserving and undeserving users; and to include and exclude participants in an ostensibly universal public. Over time, fees have been naturalized, erasing these motivations and giving cause to their outcomes. We problematize the fee in order to address both theoretical questions about the nature of public space and practical ones about how municipal administrators govern amidst competing pressures to serve, develop and regulate urban residents and their communities.
Acknowledgments
Naomi would like to thank her co-author, Laura Wolf-Powers, for her generosity of time and spirit in seeing this article through. She would also like to thank the staff at the New York Municipal Archive, and the Wertheim Study at the New York Public Library.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. “In 1908 the Superintendent of the New York Public Schools stood up in front of the American Playground Association and declared that ‘the usefulness to the city in point of morality of the Carnegie public libraries was small compared with that which would accrue from a comprehensive system of public baths’” (Baths Before Books, Citation1908).
2. In a parallel trend, the outer boroughs compete for ever smaller pots of money for basic park and playground maintenance, such as in the 2014 Community Parks Initiative, in which 35 of 215 neglected outer borough parks were funded for capital improvements (See: Foderaro, Citation2014).
3. Other elements describe the public character of a space as well. One is the notion that public space is a boon to democracy – both to free-speech practices (Benhabib, Citation1992) and to the everyday interactions that do not seem overtly political on the surface, but serve to deepen democracy (Mouffe, Citation2000).
4. A recent UN-Habitat working paper offers that “The proposed goal/target for public space being suggested is 45% of land should be allocated to streets and public space. This can be broken down into 30% for streets and sidewalks and 15% for open spaces, green spaces and public facilities” (UN-Habitat, Citation2015, pp. 6–7).
5. The counterpoint to this is the “procedural” approach, which refers to “any space which is put to use at a given time for collective action and debate” (Iveson, Citation2007, p. 3).
6. One common contemporary standard is the “15-minute plan” for walking time to green space as the goal for urban residents; New York City’s PlaNYC intends that “by 2030, every New Yorker will live within a 10-minute walk from a park” (Mahalchick, Citation2012, p. 35).
7. At least one problem with the state ownership model is that it can lead to the conflation of the public with the state (Newman & Clarke, Citation2009; Smith & Low, Citation2006), leaving little room for dissent, and the easy imposition of surveillance and policing. Scholars such as Shepard and Smithsimon (Citation2011) understand publics and spaces on a grid of that includes a variety of types of spaces and purposes (29) with the state as one among many sources of control. Staeheli and Mitchell (Citation2008) urge us to understand publicity as a type of “regime” – not necessarily state-bound – in order to grapple with this ostensibly universalizing type.
8. See, for example, Portland Oregon’s “Parks for New Portlanders” initiative that “works with community partners and city leaders to design culturally relevant programs and make sure services and spaces are welcoming and accessible to communities of color, new immigrants and refugees.” (https://www.portlandoregon.gov/parks/69257).
9. A hallmark of the economics literature on user fees is the casting of taxpayers as consumers. This stance elevates efficiency and economy as aims of governance and minimizes residents’ identity as participants in a polity (see for example, Compton and McCarville 1987).
10. While the city planning literature discusses fees as a municipal finance principle, recreation and parks management research features a more complex dialogue on the setting and administration of fees as well as on their impact and ethics (More 1999). Although the idea that user fees for public space are efficient and fair is widespread in mainstream planning discourse, it is contested in practice, and this has long been the case.
11. This logic assumes that willingness to expend money is the most reasonable and workable way for residents to express the value they place on goods and services. Queuing, or “paying with time” is offered as an alternative to rationing by price (Stiglitz, Citation1988, p. 130).
12. There were also disputes about the kind and quality of materials that should go into building public facilities, based both on what other cities were building at various times, and on notions of what the poorest patrons deserved from municipal spaces. (Adiv, Citation2014).
13. Renner (Citation2008), citing Kisseloff (Citation1989), asserts that “filled with polluted river water, these baths were recreational rather than hygienic facilities.” This is both supported and contested in the primary literature of the day.
14. This paper will not address the processes of exclusion and inclusion into aquatic public spaces by gender (nor as queer spaces, or spaces of sexual interaction) at length. However, the river baths were long divided into men’s days and women’s days, and the indoor bathhouses had separate bathing areas for men and for women, down to separate entrances. While the outdoor swimming pools, from 1936 on, always had mixed gender bathing, some indoor pools have long maintained special women’s swim hours – this became a source of controversy as recently as June, 2016. (See Matthews & Blidner, Citation2016). See also Murnaghan (Citation2008).
15. While 1901 is the given date for the Rivington Street municipal bath in Renner (Citation2008, p. 11) and Wiltse (Citation2007, p. 35) quoting Williams (Citation1991, p. 52), a New York Times article from 2 July 1904 announces, “The first of a series of public baths, to be erected and maintained at the city’s expense, was opened last evening with appropriate exercise in William H. Seward Park…”.
16. The Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) had maintained the People’s Bathing and Washing Establishment 1852–1861, at which time it closed for “insufficient patronage.” Williams (Citation1991) is more blunt, asserting that – at 3 cents for laundry and 5 – 10 cents for bathing – “the bath was probably too expensive for the poor people it was supposed to serve” (16).
17. For secondary literature exists on the first indoor baths and their social goals, see (An, Citation2005; Crook, Citation2006; Gutman, Citation2008; Porter, Citation1999; Smith, Citation2007; Strasser, Citation1996; Tesh, Citation1988; Verbrugge, Citation1983; Wilkie, Citation1986; Wiltse, Citation2007).
18. This statement echoed the same group’s 1895 report, which used the language “that a certain part of each Bath and Convenience should be free, in order that necessitous cases may be relieved; for the remaining part, a fee should be charged, which sum will contribute towards the operating expenses, and will enable the patrons of the establishment to retain their self-respect” (Hamilton et al., Citation1895, emphasis in original.)
19. This argument is repeated in other public discourse, such as the newspaper: “The charge for a bath will be 5 cents. For this sum the bather is furnished with a towel and soap, and has the use of a bathroom for a certain length of time. It is the desire of the association to make all who use the baths feel that there is no charity about the thing. With this object in view, the charge of 5 cents has been fixed, and for the same reason the structure was made as handsome and comfortable as any of the uptown baths” (To Open the People’s Baths, August 15, Citation1891).
20. A 1901 New York Times article on the subject quotes Mr. Frank Tucker, Secretary of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP), a prominent philanthropic organization:
You see, a bath is something different from a library or a park. You can’t pauperize people with public libraries or parks. But anything of such a very personal nature as a bath, a man feels better to pay for. Still, there must always be provision for free baths for people unable to pay. This should be quietly and tactfully managed by those in charge. It should be understood that the hobo who wanders in should be sent to a certain compartment, and allowed to bathe free, without making a formal and humiliating distinction. (“Necessity for More Public Baths,” August 4, Citation1901)
The “hobo” is presented as the exception here, and as an outcast who should be treated with compassion, but this leaves little room for a person who is not so clearly “labelled” as poor.
21. Furthermore, by 1914, even the AICP had reconsidered, and was in support of the free baths the city had established (Howe, Citation1914). See footnote 19.
22. Moses, at least quietly, recognized this need. When Colonel Davis D. Graves, of the New York Air Defense Wing requested that the Chelsea Baths be turned over to his men for the war effort, Moses responded, “I decline to do this and am astonished that you should make a request of this kind which indicates that you have no understanding of the civilian requirements of New York City.” He went on, “the building includes gymnasium and bathing facilities, and also cleansing baths for thousands of people who have no other way of bathing because they live in cold water flats in the neighbourhood” (Moses, October 17, Citation1942).
23. In fact, Moses proposed an amendment to the City Charter to create a “Parks Receipt Fund” in order to keep fees moneys in a separate fund to support Parks, rather than going in to the general fund, as did other city revenues. He saw no alternative to meaningful funding of the vast new public infrastructure built with WPA money over the long term, other than issuing municipal bonds, which was an unpopular idea.
24. Gutman (2007) argues that “the modest fees do not seem to have prevented many people from using the new pools, given the numbers who flocked to them as soon as they were open… the pool fees were one means used to stabilize the municipal budget” (76).
25. The version of that appears in the Municipal Archives includes the number of operating days per season (which are fairly comparable throughout), and then is broken down into capacity and size for swimming and diving at each pool, as well as bathhouse capacity at each pool by gender. For simplicity, we show only attendance and revenues. There are also some difficulties with interpreting exactly who was at the pool and how often (i.e. visits can be counted, but visitors cannot.)
26. Memos cited come from the New York Municipal Archive, Parks Department Records.
27. At its height, this program operated 74 mini-pools around the city; today, 19 remain. (https://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/pools).
28. The New York Times reported these to be in use as late as 1987, under Parks Commissioner Henry Stern (Geist, July 1, Citation1987).
29. The mayor also had a plan, which did not materialize, for 18 floating pools to be set on barges around the city (Cariello, Citation1966; Starke, Citation1965).
30. “On its first full day in business, the 24-by-16 foot steel pool in Tompkins Park in the heart of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York’s largest Negro-Puerto Rican ghetto, proved a huge success with its eligible, nonpaying patrons – boys and girls under 12 years of age” (A Vest-Pocket Pool, the New York Times, Citation1966).
31. The last record of pools charging a fee in the New York Times is in 1974 (Taylor, July 20, Citation1974). Extensive archival in the New York Municipal Archives, the New York Times archive, the New York Public Library and correspondence with Parks Department officials did not yield a sufficient answer to this, the original guiding question.
32. There has been occasional outcry over this scheduling, with a demand for pools well into September as New York City tends to stay quite hot. The biggest conflict is over the cost of personnel to keep them open with a lower load. (Durkin, March 10, Citation2015).
33. These centres, funded by a federal Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) were officially considered “community development centres.” (Chan, Citation2006).
34. However, soon after the fee hike, and the subsequent attendance drop, Parks quickly added a $75/six-month version of the plan.
35. In the most clearly symbolic (i.e. non-revenue generating) move, Parks raised the age threshold for senior citizens, and increased the senior fee from $10 to $25/year.
36. In interviews completed in 2012, long-time Harlem residents and regular swimmers expressed that a YMCA just down the street was cost-prohibitive: “When I think of the Y, I just see money signs. It’s just so expensive… I don’t even know what the membership is these days, I guess three hundred and something, I have no idea. So, you know, I never even think of that.”
37. For example, while New York City’s first public floating baths were operated by the Department of Public Works, the city’s indoor bathhouses were originally held by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, until many were turned over to Parks and Recreation, particularly those in Manhattan, which Parks acquired in 1938.
38. The fact of free pools in the face of tremendous privatization of New York City’s public spaces (Madden, Citation2010; Shepard & Smithsimon, Citation2011; Sorkin, Citation1992) through conservancies, foundations, BIDs, and other means, represents a notable anomaly.