Have you ever asked yourself, while walking past a beautiful Beaux-Arts structure or an abandoned, 1930’s-style industrial building covered in graffiti: “what was this once?” You may have recognized the lettered facade of a washed out sign, or etched out on a preserved piece of stone, the same word: BAINS. Bathhouses. They scatter our city in matrices mapping an untold story. But why are there so many, especially so many that have been abandoned?
So, we set out to find out. Where did it all begin?
It is nearing the late 1890’s in the Golden Square Mile. Sherbrooke Street is a lavishly wide avenue, where opulent homes cement 70% of Canadian wealth. By the 1880’s, Montreal had secured tremendous affluence in the form of a self-made generation, churned out of the industrial revolution. The wealthy are now stationed in brick homes behind wrought iron-fences, or galavanted on carriages through the tree-lined streets. It is in these carriage rides that we find our unsuspecting heroes: white, elite women, born to the New World with an Old World inheritance. More on this later.
Turning our picture towards the south, the downtown is swamped in the industrial landscape that would become a focus for these women. The working-class neighbourhoods are as one Royal Commission coined it, “nests of contagion,” where men, women and children worked in textile mills, tobacco, and food processing factories. Slums grew from the industries, and now meagre family incomes can barely support a toilet (let alone a powder room). In most neighbourhoods, the lavatories consist of community privy pits in the backyards, and houses have no facilities for bathing. Only miles from 70% of Canadian wealth, 75% of homes had neither a toilet nor shower.
Dangerously Unsanitary Conditions
The first effort to organize a national public health association by Montreal health officer Dr. A.B. Larocque had tried, and failed, in 1884 on “account of the great distance between the different members of the executive.” Unsanitary conditions prevailed, and by 1885, a smallpox epidemic ravished the city, spreading at first within, and then beyond Hotel Dieu hospital, with the death toll culminating at 3,157. The episode would be the last uncontrolled smallpox outbreak in a modern city. It led to the establishment of Quebec’s provincial health board in 1887. Even with this huge step forward, Montreal would continue to have the highest infant death rate on the continent, and it was becoming clear to the comfortable, affluent, non-citizens sitting in their carriages on Sherbrooke that something must be done. The female elite of Montreal would become among the first advocates for a city-wide public hygiene campaign.
Women of Action
It was around this time that Canadian women would begin to expand their fields of influence, out from the ears of their husbands to the first strongholds of formalized female activity. With few rights as citizens, these women were loath to forget a strong sense of civic duty. Their sympathies were quickly engaged by the squalor engulfing a vast majority of Montreal’s poor, working-class and immigrant citizens, who continued to live in filthy conditions without any means for relief.
The Rise and Fall of the Bath
From the position of mother and reformer, Montreal’s female elite brought forth the motion to open public baths in the city. The Montreal Local Council of Women pioneered its own inquiry board, sent letters to Boston and New York for equipment, and consulted with clergymen, doctors and city officials before being granted land and free water by the City Council in 1899. Between 1910 and 1930, the city of Montreal decided to establish a public bath in each working-class neighbourhood. Even more were added during the Great Depression, creating the local web of bath houses we see today.
Prosperity during the 1940’s led to the normalization of tubs and toilets in the common home, and increased leisure time meant most pools were geared towards recreation. Now, many of the pools remain intact and function as originally intended, and some have been entirely repurposed (for example, the Bain Saint Michel, which has been turned into a theatre and the Bain Mathieu has been converted into a party venue). Others, however, have been entirely abandoned.
The wide web of shuttered relics represents a long and well-intentioned history of public hygiene reform in Montreal. These abandoned bathhouses, which may now run rampant with rats, vandals, and Instagrammers, serve as a symbol for a strong message. Reading those graffitied signs, call to mind the simple story of men and women who went beyond themselves to influence our city for the better, leaving their mark behind the simple word “bains.”
