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Milbank Memorial Bath

Cost: $140,000

Although the city government began financing and constructing municipally-run baths at the turn of the century, there was still private philanthropic interest in the bath movement. In June 1902, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, heiress to the Borden Condensed Milk Company fortune, announced that she would donate funds to the AICP sufficient to build a public bath. Milbank-Anderson was a leading NYC philanthropist, ultimately donating around $5 million to a number of institutions, primarily Barnard College.

The large facility could accommodate 3,000 bathers a day and, in 1914, added a wet-wash laundry. When I visited in 2006, the building was the Republic of Indonesia's mission to the United Nations (just to the north at 42nd Street). Note the doors that may have been the separate men's/women's entrances.

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