Municipal Bath House No. 6

The bath house in Old North St. Louis on St. Louis Ave is an Art Deco building constructed in 1937, as Bath House No. 6, and was built as the last public bath house for residents of the city without indoor plumbing. It was also the last bath house in operation, staying open until 1965, at which point indoor plumbing had become standard in most residences, whether added or built in.

To get an idea of why bath houses were created, one has to look at the housing stock and living conditions of poor and working class people in 19th century St. Louis. In the 1850s, indoor plumbing was not available for even the most wealthy St. Louisans, as can be seen with some of the mansions in the area from that time period like the Campbell House or Chatillon DeMenil mansion. By the 1890s, many of the wealthy residences had been fitted with toilets and bathtubs, or were built with them, such as the Cupples House. However, many of the poor and middle class households were still reliant on outhouses, and had to fill a small washtub with water, which had to be filled at a pump. As a result, bathing was not a common practice in the 19th century, and many people were dirty.

To solve this problem, the city began to build public bath houses in the poorer neighborhoods, as well as those with older housing stock. The first one was built in 1907 in the Columbus Square neighborhood near St. Joseph Catholic Church, in what was then a largely Irish, Italian, and Jewish community. In its first year, this bath house had 69,000 visitors, so two years later, another was built in Soulard, and it served 238,000 people in its first year. Two more were built in 1910, with one in Carr Square and one in Midtown. The one in Midtown became segregated later on after a 1916 segregation law was passed. In 1932, a second segregated bath house was built in the Mill Creek Valley, which was a historic African American and immigrant neighborhood, where almost none of the houses had indoor plumbing, a fact that contributed to the wholesale demolition of the neighborhood in 1960 for an urban renewal project.

The house in Old North was built in 1937, as the housing in the neighborhood was not fitted with indoor plumbing until the 1950s and later. Today, this bath house on St. Louis Ave is the only one surviving, as the others were demolished for urban renewal projects or lack of use for them.

Map credit: Distilled History