AUDASE

After 124 Years, the Russian and Turkish Baths Are Still a Hot Spot

A longstanding bathhouse in the East Village has found ways to attract a new generation of customers — though they tend to come only every other week.

By ANNIE CORREA NY TIMES

On a recent Monday evening, it was hard to find a bit of bench at the Russian and Turkish Baths in the East Village. It was cold out, and people crowded the saunas — young, slim and in skimpy bathing suits.

The 124-year-old bathhouse on East 10th Street has long been a New York institution, a bona fide melting pot, where the sweat of celebrities mingles with that of rabbis and taxi drivers. It’s where downtown denizens have gone to detox and discuss the deeper things of life, and where Orthodox Jewish men have gone to convene, or to hide from their wives. For much of its existence it has been a men’s club for those far beyond the age of vanity.

Now, it’s a little different.

On that Monday, the patrons were still mainly male, but rather than bellies the size of airbags, many of them had washboard abs, and the discussion turned not to aches and pains but to Tinder dates. “The hipsters come in with their Groupons, sporting their tattoos and their man buns,” Rich Trince, 50, a longtime regular, said later.

The 124-year-old bathhouse on East 10th Street in the East Village. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times

The fabled baths — housed in a tenement basement and frequented by Frank Sinatra and John Belushi — have been claimed by the denizens of the new New York, as shvitzing has joined shuffleboard, brewing beer and pickling as a pastime enjoyed by millennials as well as retirees.

It was inevitable that change would come to the baths, with the East Village transformed and a bathhouse renaissance in full swing — there are the Russian banya of Brooklyn, the sumptuous Spa Castle in Queens, boutique spas in Manhattan like Aire and the Great Jones Spa, with its indoor waterfall.

But at the Russian and Turkish Baths, the new order reigns just half the time.

For years, the two Russian owners, Boris Tuberman and David Shapiro, have split the bathhouse business down the middle, running it on alternate weeks. (More on that in a moment.) They share expenses and the costs of repairs, but have separate corporations. A sign in the lobby reads, “Cards for Boris and David weeks must be purchased separately.”

In the past, the arrangement was easy enough to ignore, regulars say. Every other week, a different staff appeared behind the front desk, like two casts for the same play.

But some years back, Mr. Shapiro’s son Dmitry, 42, took over his father’s shift and began offering online promotions through companies like Groupon. On his weeks, the baths “became a little less eccentric,” said Jen Emma Hertel, one of Mr. Shapiro’s front-desk clerks, as they began to fill with young Brooklyn types and thrifty tourists.

Mr. Tuberman, however, resisted Groupon — and, for that matter, the Internet. “I don’t have memberships,” he said. “I have cards which don’t expire.”

On his weeks, there are no computers behind the counter, no swipe cards. The front-desk staff, which includes the owner and three Russian-speaking managers, uses punch cards and ledger books. Mr. Tuberman, 75, even disconnects the phone.

Customers can check whose week it is on the bath’s website.

The old system of alternating weeks has had various effects. One has been to thoroughly confuse people who arrive with a Groupon on the wrong week. It has also preserved, at least half the time, something of the old world of the shvitz.

On David weeks, as they are called, there is a new crowd. But on Boris weeks, the regulars are still “vaguely Slavic, vaguely paunchy,” as Charles Kramer, a 62-year-old lawyer and a regular for decades, described it, patting his belly. “You could blink your eyes and be back.”

On a recent Boris week, Warren Odze, a Broadway musician, had returned to the baths for the first time since the early 1980s. Many things were as he recalled: A little kitchen in the lobby served Russian-Jewish fare, and below ground, in a narrow space not much longer than a subway car, customers sat in towels in a misty Turkish steam room and a piping hot Russian sauna, received platzas, or therapeutic thrashings with oak branches, and dipped into an ice-cold pool.

Mr. Odze also noted the changes. The price of a day pass had quadrupled, to $40. There was a juice bar, a women’s locker room, women. Three decades ago, it was different. “There was nothing healthy about it,” he recalled. “It was steaks and big bagels. ‘Goodfellas,’ but the Jewish version.” In the basement then, Mr. Odze said, “it was old men basking and groaning, and I was scared of all of them.”

Mr. Odze said the bathhouse had become “trendy.” Still, he said, there was a remnant of the period he remembered. “I was happy to see there were a lot of, as they say among us Jews, schlubs.”

He added: “There were these old guys, and they were just there to sweat it out. They were not shy at all to let their big guts hang out. They were like, ‘I don’t care if you’re 20 and in a bikini, get out of my way.’  ”

Bathhouses were once ubiquitous in New York, the result of a city effort in the 19th century to keep residents in teeming immigrant neighborhoods clean before most homes had hot water.

The Tenth Street Baths, as they were long known, are thought to have opened in 1892. In their prime, as bath lore has it, they were a hangout for gangsters who talked business in the saunas and so preferred deaf-mute masseurs. Vodka was served in the lobby.

By the mid-1980s, when the elder Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Tuberman bought the baths, there was still one mute masseur, but the glory days had long passed. Most bathhouses in the city had closed decades earlier; almost all of those that remained were shut down by the authorities in 1985, as AIDS swept New York, for operating as gay gathering places.

The baths on 10th Street, which had a sign proclaiming the business the “straight place,” were among the few spared, but they were in shambles.

Mr. Tuberman had arrived in New York from Leningrad. His partner came from Siberia via Uzbekistan and Europe. (David Shapiro, who is 70 and lives in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, declined a request for an interview and provided answers through his son.) The two had been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. Along with a third partner, they paid $850,000 for the baths and the five-story building, with no money down, in 1985.

After the city crackdown, they found themselves with a virtual monopoly. But “it was pretty much a flophouse,” the younger Mr. Shapiro said. The previous owner, Al Modlin, had died in 1981 while giving a platza, and the family friend who took over was overwhelmed. The roof was caving in; the linoleum floors were peeling back. Men stayed overnight on bunk beds meant for naps.

Mr. Shapiro and Mr. Tuberman changed the locks, added tile floors, fixed the roof and added a deck modeled on a dacha, or Russian country house.

Business picked up, and they bought out the third partner. But privately, the owners’ relationship grew strained. They divided the days of the week; then they began to alternate weeks. The split became public in 1992 when a sign appeared on the lockers that read, “The bath is now operated by separate owners on alternative weeks.”

Both parties were vague about the origins of the conflict. “It wasn’t a single event,” Dmitry Shapiro said. “It’s just two people who are fundamentally different. My dad is very rigid and detail-oriented. And Boris is not a man who believes in rules. I don’t think he has a process. He does things on the fly.”

Mr. Tuberman called it a “profit divorce.”

“One day I come up with the idea,” he said. “God made seven days. Why not share them?”

A 1993 article in The New York Times warned of an “uncertain future” for the bathhouse and questioned whether it could survive the owners’ unusual business arrangement.

But more than two decades later, the baths are still here, and the owners are still alternating weeks.

The secret to their survival came down to one important business decision, Mr. Tuberman said recently. “I am a fan of U.S.A. which has made a great thing,” he said. He took a pen and scribbled something on the back of a punch card.

“Nobody has made that. Nobody give that. I’ve become very successful because of the golden word.”

He slid the card over.

It read, “CO ED.”

When Mr. Tuberman and Mr. Shapiro bought the baths, there had been one all-female shift per week. The new owners gradually made nearly all days coed. After an awkward period when both sexes shared one dressing room — where “the women found interesting ways of pulling their brassieres through their sleeves,” recalled Mr. Kramer — they raised a wall of lockers, creating the cramped men’s and women’s rooms that exist today.

The owners arguably ushered in the bathing trend by turning the baths coed and making what at the time were considered prissy additions: juice, mud masks and, later, an aromatherapy room. But in recent years they seem to have made few concessions to changing tastes.

The bathhouse still looks like a hostel with a flooded basement. The staff shouts in Russian as young men appear from downstairs with arms full of wet towels. The paint on the roof deck is peeling. The chocolate-brown towels have faded to tan.

In the era of Spa Castle, it’s still Spa Tenement.

They do not offer a Golden Caviar Pore Refining Facial. But you may help yourself to the industrial-grade pink soap in the showers.

And people keep coming.

On a recent Boris week, Mr. Tuberman sat behind the counter in a blue puffer jacket. He spends his off-weeks in Miami Beach, where he has another bathhouse of the same name. But on his weeks, he returns to New York to set the heat each day and sell punch cards.

“If you try and buy a day pass, Boris will say: ‘You’re stupid from the heat! You have to buy passes!’  ” said Julian Colucci, a 25-year-old video producer. “He would sell passes to a terminally ill person.”

Downstairs, that Friday, Boris regulars sat on a bench beside the pool like patrons of an old dive bar, their arms hanging over a railing draped with wet towels.

“I’ve been coming here 40 years,” Mitch Zykofsky, 57, a retired police sergeant, said. “It’s still a mystery to this day why Boris and David had that feud, but somehow I fell into the Boris camp.”

“Boris has been like a father to me,” said Gary Hope, 48, a former boxer who recently played a drill sergeant in a Halls cough drops commercial.

Behind them, men waded into the frigid pool and turned in circles with beatific grins, arms outstretched, like polar bears.

Julia Hughes, 30, a former East Villager who had moved to Brooklyn, said: “On Boris weeks, I find the characters are a little more eccentric, a little more fun. You never know what’s going to happen.”

But by broad consensus, it was the heat that most defined a Boris week.

“On Boris’s weeks, the hots are hotter, the colds are colder,” Chris Sullivan, a 35-year-old actor, said, a claim repeated by almost all Boris loyalists, including Mr. Tuberman himself.

Mr. Shapiro, when asked about that assessment, said: “I’ll let him say it. It makes him happy.” He added: “Hotter is not better, you know.”

Both would say only that the Russian Room, the hottest of the five steam rooms and saunas, was heated to the mid- to high 190s — about the temperature recommended to slow-cook a roast.

And so which weeks are actually hotter will remain a secret of the shvitz.

The following Monday, the start of a David week, the computers were back behind the desk, along with a friendly Midwestern woman, Ms. Hertel, swiping cards. In the lobby, beneath yellowing head shots, a young Groupon customer read a book by Amanda Palmer as she waited for her friend. It was quiet.

Downstairs, though, chatter echoed through the corridor and there was, indeed, a parade of tattoos.

In the aromatherapy room, a man described a visit to a tea shop where the cheapest item was a $21 pouch of loose-leaf plum-leaf tea. Someone else said, “She touched my knee, so then I touched her knee as well.”

Beside the pool, in the same baths where mobsters are said to have once made deals, a voice rose from the steam.

“Do you know anyone in children’s books?”

In the searing Russian Room, the three tiers of benches were full, so men stood around a water trough, trying to talk casually as they dripped sweat.

A couple held hands, closed their eyes and issued a guttural om.

In the corner, two older men took in the spectacle from a top bench. One wore a traditional Russian bathing cap made of yellow felt. The other had a wiry gray beard and rubber clogs. He spoke loudly about the baths, as if to command an audience, but no one was listening.

At some point he leaned forward as if to rise, but he found his path to the trough blocked by bodies. He put his hands around his mouth.

“Young man!” he said.

Everyone looked up.

“Hand me a bucket.”

By filling the baths using online coupons, Mr. Shapiro said, he is pulling them into the 21st century.

He pointed out that they had survived the economic downturn and transformed their block, where there is now a Pilates studio, a gluten-free cafe, a water bar.

If the baths had held their own against the competition, it was because of his innovations, he said. “Boris doesn’t have an email address,” he said.

Mr. Tuberman was more philosophical. “I know the reason I am here,” he said. “Life is so difficult. Russian, Jewish, Catholic, Muslim. They all fight. They can’t get along. I am the one who brought them all together. It’s like a church, but a different church. It’s like one big meeting.”

In other words, heat it and they will come.

Mr. Shapiro agreed that the baths were about tolerating others — namely Mr. Tuberman. “He is like the crazy uncle I never had,” he said, shaking his head. “There is no other way to describe him.”

But here’s another secret from the shvitz. On one evening, a familiar face was spotted in the saunas. His hair was slicked back, his cheeks beet red from the heat. It was the younger Mr. Shapiro. On a Boris week. He smiled sheepishly.

He later explained that during his workweek, he had little time to strip down and steam. And, he added, the owners’ relationship is not as bitter as it once was. Times had changed.

But one had to wonder if on Boris weeks, surrounded by the grumbling sorts that had always been his second family, Mr. Shapiro himself didn’t feel a little more at home.