bathhouse

> My grandparents didn't have a shower, but went to the communal bathhouse once a week. My parents didn't have central heating in one of their homes.

My grandparents didn't have a shower, but went to the communal bathhouse once a week. My parents didn't have central heating in one of their homes.

I haven't been able to find any when searching, aside from The Club, which technically fits but as a bathhouse for hookups, wasn't really what I had in mind. I know lodges centered around professions more or less fell apart, and perhaps the last vestige of secular groups would be country clubs.

Calling it a 'bathhouse' is accurate but sells it a bit short: it's an almost perfectly preserved complex: if you put a towel rack up you could open it for business tomorrow. To my mind, it rivals Pompeii in conveying an impression of Roman life.

A couple hundred feet from my hotel was a bathhouse that technically only sold massages. There was an awful lot of businesses that technically were only selling "glassware" and not recreational drug paraphernilia.

Also, it is responsible for some ignoble controversy around the new public bathhouse in my old home town. Apparently there was a perfect storm, in that the building both has a poorly designed ventilation system, _and_ inconveniently located restrooms which tempt people to... No deaths so far, but several people complained about the bathhouse air making their asthma flare up, and when measured the concentration was above the health and safety limits [2].