days set aside for ladies only, Mondays and Thursdays. The average number of visitors to the Philadelphia baths every week was about 28,000, with a "great crush" of boys appearing after school hours, boys who were likely to ignore their 30-minute time limits. Operators discouraged the use of soap. By 1904 Pittsburgh would have its third municipal bath, the Wash House and Public Building, built by private contributors but maintained by the city. A New York state law of 1895 required every city over 50,000 in population maintain as many public baths as their Boards of Health deemed necessary, providing hot and cold water for at least 14 hours a day. Despite that mandate, the first civic bathhouse in New York City, the Rivington Street municipal bath on the Lower East Side, opened five years later. This amounted to a national bath-building movement that peaked in the decade between 1900 and 1910. By 1904, eight of the nation's ten most populous cities had year-round bathhouses available to the working class. In 1922, 40 cities across the country maintained at least one or two public facilities, and the city with the largest system of baths was New York City, with 25. Other notable constructions of the period/include Bathhouse Row in the spa resort town of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the Asser Levy Public Baths in New York City, completed in 1908. Gallery See also Bathing culture in Yangzhou – China Gymnasium – ancient Greece Steam shower Sweat lodge – Native American Water park References Bibliography External links Sauna