You know you’ve hit the sweet spot in your bathhouse session when the dim lights illuminating the dank, sweaty environs start to blur and a foggy halo appears around them. This optical illusion typically appears for me after around an hour of intense sweating, when I’m on the brink of heat exhaustion, and it’s usually when I feel most at peace with myself and the world. There’s a certain clarity of mind that comes when you’re shoulder to shoulder with a dozen or so other moist, warm bodies, your cell phones and all other connections to the outside world tucked away in storage lockers. It’s an increasingly rare feeling, and might help explain why the communal bathhouse, a tradition that dates back to at least 2500 BC, was so quick to bounce back after pandemic closures, and in spite of ongoing COVID concerns.
Before COVID hit, bathhouses around the country were thriving. Amid the boom in digital wellness apps and e-commerce-as-self-care à la Goop, the decidedly analog business of saunas, steam rooms and plunge pools was quietly growing too. According to Forbes in 2018, sauna sales increased at a rate of about 10 percent per year. The “bathhouse renaissance [is] in full swing,” wrote The New York Times in a 2016 profile about the 128-year-old Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village. Mobile saunas began popping up in Seattle, Minnesota, and Brooklyn, and high-end spaces like the international AIRE chain and Bathhouse, which opened in Williamsburg in November 2019, targeted affluent young customers. In January 2020, mere weeks before New York City would become the epicenter of the covid pandemic in North America, New York magazine published a guide to shvitzing in the city, outlining the myriad communal bathing options available in the area.
