Historical Significance
The North End Public Bath and Gymnasium (now known as the Nazzaro Community Center) is a well-preserved artifact of America’s immigrant era in the early 20th century, when social reformers struggled to respond to the overwhelming flow of immigrants arriving from Ireland, Italy, and other parts of Europe. They lived in crowded urban tenements that sprung up quickly in neighborhoods like Boston’s North End, without plumbing or much public space. Concern about typhoid and other epidemics helped spur political leaders to take action. The North End Bath and Gymnasium project was sponsored by Mayor John F. “Honey Fitz” Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy’s grandfather. This ornate 28,000-square foot three-story building and adjacent community playground, have been at the heart of Boston’s North End community for over 100 years.The Italian Renaissance revival building, constructed from 1902-1910, was designed after the Villa Medici in Rome by Maginnis, Walsh & Sullivan, one of America’s most prominent architectural firms. It was considered the finest public bath in Boston. This building represents the peak of the American public bath movement at the end of the 19th century, an urban reform effort which came in response to the unsanitary conditions in the crowded apartments. Public baths, many built like the North End Bathhouse to include gymnasiums, were a solution proposed by Progressive Era politicians when faced with numerous social problems created by unprecedented urban growth and congested slums. Mayor Fitzgerald, the first of Boston’s Irish politicians to win the mayoralty, was especially keen to build this bathhouse in the then-Irish North End, which was his birthplace and the seat of his early power as ward boss.
The land for the building was bought by the city in 1902, and the ornate bathhouse was designed in 1907 and built in Italian Renaissance style, at a cost of $130,000. By the time the bathhouse opened in 1910, after delays due to fiscal constraints, the Irish area had become largely Italian, with some Jews also living there.[i]
The demand for public baths was part of the wider demand for public health reform following the 1849 cholera epidemic, with new worries about typhoid, and the wider acceptance of the germ theory of disease.[ii] Bath reformers maintained that the baths would not only improve health, but also improve the moral character of the poor, making them better citizens. Public baths aimed to bridge the gap between the classes and help achieve a small measure of social justice. Cleanliness was extolled as one of the hallmarks of civilization and progress. [iii]
The first demands for public baths came with the waves of Irish immigrants, and didn’t wane until the mid- 20th century, as the massive influx of refugees from eastern and southern Europe subsided. The notion that slum lords should be required to provide bathrooms for their tenants was largely disregarded as cities exploded with new tenements.[iv] This history was exemplified in Boston, where the Massachusetts Sanitary Commission in 1850 reported that the lower classes could not afford the cost of the 12 commercial bathhouses in the city.[v] A joint committee of the common council and Board of Aldermen was set up in Boston in 1866 to study the locations for new public baths. Even as late as 1940, about 90% of North End homes were without private baths and about 50% lacked private toilets.[vi]
On Oct. 15, 1898 the Boston Herald proudly reported the opening of Boston’s first year-round public bathhouse, the Dover Street Bathhouse in the South End. “The inauguration of winter bath-houses for the free use of the people is something of a novelty in any city in this country, and Boston has the proud distinction of being the pioneer in the work,” the newspaper said. Although bath reformers can be criticized for not demanding for the poor the same private bathing facilities that they enjoyed in their homes, Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy maintained in 1898 that the public baths were “architectural monuments of the city” which raised “the whole idea of public bathing to a high and dignified plane.”[vii] After Dover St., all the city’s new public baths, would be constructed to include gymnasiums. The most notable example of this was the ornate North Bennet Street Bath House, as cited by Maureen Meister, Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2014.)
By 1916, The Boston Globe recognized that the North End’s North Bennet St. area had become “Boston’s Public Service Corridor,” thanks in large part to the elegant Bath House and Gymnasium, schools, and the adjacent Prince Street Playground, which featured “a beautiful pergola” topped with rows of spruce and hemlock trees.[viii] The playground, which extends from Prince Street to North Bennet Street, has been in continual use for over 100 years, in the heart of the dense North End community. The bathhouse building remains the last of four buildings flanking the playground, designated together with the playground in MACRIS as the North End Municipal Area. The other three buildings, two of them schools and one a public library branch, have all been sold to private developers and turned into condos. The bathhouse and playground remain public areas owned by the city of Boston. By 1916, the Boston bath system included 15 year-round baths, most with gymnasiums attached.
World Welterweight Champion Tony DeMarco started his boxing career at the North End Bathhouse, in the 1940s.[ix] The municipal bath program was discontinued in 1959, but the North Bennet Street Bath House and Gymnasium remained used regularly as a bathhouse by an estimated 900 North End residents until it closed in 1976. In 1985, the building was restored and repurposed as the Nazzaro Community Center, with youth, senior citizen, and other recreational and community programs for all ages. The community center was named for Michael A. Nazzaro Jr., who gave up a promising job in Washington DC in the 1950s to come home to Boston to rescue his neighborhood from destruction by the New Boston Committee and the Boston Redevelopment Authority. As a Massachusetts state representative, Nazzaro saved much of the neighborhood from being taken by eminent domain for development, as had happened in the adjacent West End.[x] The North End community votes and holds its meetings today in the Nazzaro building. It underwent another $1 million renovation in 2004 under Mayor Thomas Menino, Boston’s only Italian-American mayor.
The North End (Polcari) Playground spans the length of the block from North Bennet Street to Prince Street. Today the Nazzaro Community Center and the playground, which was renamed for Capt. Louis Polcari, a North End World War II hero who served on General MacArthur’s staff, remain heavily used as the center of community life in the North End. Citizens vote here, seniors meet here, schools bring their students here for recess and after school programs, and neighborhood residents use the gym and lighted outdoor basketball court both indoors and at the playground. Old timers still remember taking their showers here, and, as teenagers, getting ready for their dates: “Back then there was no bathtub or shower in my childhood apartment. We had the North End Bathhouse,” wrote Natalie Cinelli in NorthEndWaterfront.com a year ago. “My cousin Lucille, who grew up with me in my grandmother’s building on the fourth floor, recalls the Saturday nights at the bathhouse when all the young girls would be getting ready for their big dates, doing their hair, primping and putting on makeup, gossiping about boys. A true communal experience!”[xi]
Bibliography
MACRIS forms: BOS.ACN and BOS.5405
Architectural Review, Vol. II, 1904
Boston Daily Globe, “North Bennet St. Now is Boston’s Public Service Center, Apr. 6, 1913
Cinelli, Natalie Romano, “Then and Now—Boston’s North End,” NorthEndWaterfront.com, Aug. 1, 2017.
“Boston’s North End: An Italian-American Story,” film by the North End Historical Society, 2016.
Goldfeld, Alex R., The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood. (Charleston: The History Press, 2009).
Landow, Sandra, Municipal Building in the North End, 1979
Legacy.com Michael A. Nazzaro Jr. obituary
Meister, Maureen, Arts and Crafts Architecture: History and Heritage in New England (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2014.)
Williams, Marilyn Thornton, Washing the Great Unwashed: Public Baths in Urban America, 1840-1920 (Columbus: 1991, Ohio State University Press)
Boston maps and atlases 1874 (Suffolk Co.,) 1883, 1888, 1902, 1908,1912, 1917, 1922,1928,1938.
Sanborn fire insurance maps: 1867,1885, 1895, 1909, 1929,1951.
City Planning Board. City of Boston. The North End. A survey and Comprehensive Plan. Boston: City Printing Department, 1919
“North Bennet Street Bath House.” In Municipal Register for 1912. Boston: City Printing Department, 1912.
“Playground. North End. Ward 6.” In Receipts and Expenditures of Ordinary Revenue, 1989-1902. City of Boston, Statistics Department (Boston: Municipal Printing Office, 1910), 157.
Reports of Proceedings of the City Council of Boston for the Year Commencing 5 January 1953 and Ending 2 January 1954. Boston: Printing Section, 1954.
[i] Ibid, pp. 77-79
[ii] Ibid, p. 14, 24.
[iii] Ibid, p. 2, 22-27
[iv] Ibid, p. 26
[v] Williams, Marilyn Thornton, Washing the Great Unwashed (Columbus: 1991, Ohio State University Press ) p. 15
[vi] Goldfeld, Alex, The North End: A Brief History of Boston’s Oldest Neighborhood, (Charleston, 2009, The History Press.), p. 168
[vii] City of Boston, Statistics Department, City Record 1 (Oct. 20, 1898), 593. As quoted in Williams, p. 136.
[viii] “North Bennet St. Now is Boston’s Public Service Center, Boston Daily Globe, Apr. 6, 1913
[ix] Tony Demarco, interviewed in “Boston’s North End: An Italian-American Story,” film by the North End Historical Society, 2016.
[x] Michael A. Nazzaro Jr. obituary, Legacy.com
[xi] Cinelli, Natalie Romano, “Then and Now—Boston’s North End,” NorthEndWaterfront.com, Aug. 1, 2017
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