Coal smoke belched up from factories, homes, and locomotives irritated throats and sinuses—and people seemed to think nothing of hawking up wads of the resulting goo onto sidewalks and on streetcars. Unsurprisingly, the spread of ‘consumption’—tuberculosis—went unchecked.

As you may guess, most of Buffalo’s working poor—laundresses, housemaids, soapmakers, scoopers, coal heavers, slaughtermen, newsboys, and many others—worked, ate, and slept in hygienic conditions we would consider appalling. To them, it was merely their lot in life: most blue-collar Buffalo families could only dream of running hot water, bathtubs, or indoor plumbing.

But no one likes to be dirty all the time, and even without any scientific understanding of things like germs and viruses, common sense told people that being unclean was also being unhealthy. Yet getting clean (which we today take somewhat for granted) was a challenge.

Young boys didn’t mind dunking themselves in Lake Erie, as my opening image—a postcard from 1905—confirms. (Whether they came up any cleaner than they went in is a matter of speculation. But considering that raw sewage, blood from the slaughterhouses, and chemical waste from factories and tanneries were all dumped straight into the lake . . . I’d say probably not.)

Gilded Age adults, though, weren’t about to strip down in public—so sponge baths and the occasional summer plunge at Woodlawn Beach had to suffice.

As the city and its grime grew—and typhoid fever, dysentery, and tuberculosis claimed more and more lives—conditions became so intolerable that charitable organizations prevailed upon Mayor Edgar Jewett and his aldermen to address the scourge of uncleanliness and its consequences.

Their solution was to build a public bath house—open to all and free of charge—on the Terrace, just above the Erie Canal. The city appropriated $8,000 (about $400,000 today) to build and furnish it, and “Bath House Number One” opened on January 1, 1897—right on schedule.

Which made it, incidentally, the first free public bath house in the United States. Period.

Patrons were expected to behave themselves, and for the most part they did. There was, of course, the occasional instance of vandalism, rowdy behavior, or petty theft—but remarkably few. People knew enough not to screw up a good thing, and so tended to police one another. Men, in particular, had a place to socialize after work that did not involve alcohol—a rarity in turn-of-the-century Buffalo and a boon to the temperance movement.

After a pleasant half-hour or so at the baths, everyone went home clean—and presumably happier and healthier than when they’d arrived. As they departed, visitors deposited their used towels into one barrel, and unused bits of soap into another. The towels would be washed and sterilized, and the soap shards hauled over to the Larkin Soap Company for remanufacture.

In its first month of operation, some 4,000 Buffalonians availed themselves of the new facility—blizzard days being the most popular. By June, the number had grown to 10,000. The place was such a hit, particularly with the large Italian community in the Canal District, that in fewer than six months clamors began to erect a second bath house in East Buffalo, then a predominantly Polish, working class section.

Bath House Number Two was sited at the corner of Stanislaus Street and Woltz Avenue. It was considerably larger than Number One, and grander too: costing north of $20,000 (about $1 million today) to complete. When it opened on January 1, 1901, it was even more thronged with residents than Number One had been.