Everard Baths

Before this building became a legendary fixture of New York City nightlife, it served as the First Free Will Baptist Church, built in eighteen sixty. The structure underwent a radical transformation in eighteen eighty-eight when James Everard, a prominent local brewer, converted the former house of worship into an opulent Turkish bathhouse. Patrons arriving in those early years walked past spigots shaped like dolphin heads that poured water into mosaic-tiled pools, a far cry from the utilitarian public baths that served the city's tenement populations at the time.