Gay bathhouses san francisco
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It offers various facilities including saunas, steam rooms, private cabins, and a gym. Has not been good for democracy. It features a range of amenities including saunas, steam rooms, a hot tub, and private rooms. With its diverse offerings and relaxing atmosphere, Archimedes Banya provides a rejuvenating experience for LGBTQ+ individuals and visitors.
Eros
Eros is an LGBTQ+-friendly bathhouse and spa situated in the Castro district of San Francisco.
Has not been good for civic life. The Barracks off Folsom Street laid the foundation for what’s now known as the Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District.
The Barracks burned down in 1981.
As Born tells the SF Business Times, Maze SF would be "elevated," open 24 hours a day, and would be "unapologetically queer." As he explains it to the publication, "This isn’t your daddy’s old bathhouse with plywood walls painted black.
So zoning changes were adopted to allow adult sex venues, including bathhouses, in parts of the city that have a historical connection to San Francisco’s queer community, including Upper Market and the Castro, the Tenderloin, and present-day SOMA.
But the bathhouse boosters’ work still wasn’t done.
“Some of these folks, again — as they continued to work their way through the approval processes — found that there was some pre-1980s regulation of bathhouses in the police code that was going to make it hard to get their permits.”
Mandelman referred to Article 26 in the SFPD code, an ordinance adopted in 1973 that mandated bathhouse owners maintain a daily register of patrons, including their names and addresses, the time they arrived, how long they stayed, and their room number.
One advocate for the baths’ return, Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District board member David Hyman, called the police overreach “insulting.”
“Actually enforcing it would be wasteful of police resources, possibly unconstitutional, and of little or no value to the cause of public health and safety,” he said last fall.
The Board of Supervisors — and the SFPD — agreed.
Well, almost.
After running a five-year gauntlet through the city’s byzantine laws governing traditional gay bathhouses, officials promoting their return repealed the last of a set of archaic regulations blocking them late last year.
Now, it’s up to prospective bathhouse owners to get them off their mood boards.
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San Francisco had been home to scores of baths catering to gay men since one of the first, Jack’s Turkish Baths, opened in the 1930s near Polk Street, once the epicenter of gay life in the city.
The baths’ heyday was in the 1970s when gay men swapped 501 Levi’s and lumberjack shirts for a short white towel hanging low on the waist.
The smell of sweat, poppers, chlorine and street weed filled the air.
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If you can imagine it, it happens in a bathhouse. And I hope that our muscles for that are not so atrophied that these things wouldn’t be successful if they opened.”
“I think a lot of good can come out of people getting together — not just getting off, although getting off is great — but I think community spaces are important to the community.”
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Archimedes Banya
Archimedes Banya is a unique LGBTQ+-friendly bathhouse and spa located in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.
At the Ritch Street Health Club, guests cruised an interior evoking a Minoan palace. With its inclusive atmosphere and diverse clientele, Steamworks Baths provides a welcoming space for relaxation and socializing.
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Local contractor Kevin Born is looking to take advantage of the recent change in San Francisco law allowing adult bathhouses to exist again, and he has plans to create a luxury version of a bathhouse in a two-story building he owns on 12th Street in SoMa.
Born, who owns and operates Ashbury General Contracting & Engineering and is a part owner of the Midway nightclub, has submitted plans to the city for Maze SF, a new, upscale gay bathhouse that he hopes to create inside a two-story building at 40 12th Street — a few blocks from the SF Eagle, and a half block south of Market Street.
“The legislative process has been a little more involved than I had hoped or expected,” gay Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who spearheaded the effort beginning in 2019, told Gay Cities.
“I’ve been involved in San Francisco politics and queer community politics for a couple of decades, and all through that period, there were folks in the queer community, older folks who remembered the bathhouses and either felt that it had been a mistake to close them in the first place or felt that it was time to get them reopened.”
“Younger people who’d heard about the bathhouses couldn’t understand why San Francisco — uniquely apparently — how this very queer city doesn’t have these kinds of facilities,” Mandelman said.
Has not been good for our business, our retail establishments, our bars and restaurants,” he said.
“I think it’s good for human beings,” Mandelman said of community spaces like the baths. And that’s both a good thing financially for the people who are trying to operate them, and then I think actually makes for a better experience for patrons in those establishments.”
Adding alcohol to the mix could be useful, he said.
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You’ll feel like you stepped into the Four Seasons Spa."
The move to open a bathhouse comes five years after openly gay supervisor Rafael Mandelman first proposed rolling back the local ordinance that, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, outlawed gay bathhouses for both political and public health reasons.
Article 26 was repealed in December.
“So I hope that, as a legislative matter, the job is done, and now it’s on the entrepreneurs,” Mandelman said.
The supervisor shared that at least four are on that list. With its central location and inclusive environment, Eros offers a comfortable space for LGBTQ+ individuals and visitors to unwind and connect.
Steamworks Baths
Steamworks Baths is a well-known LGBTQ+ sauna located in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood of San Francisco.
That addition would be “beyond our local capacity,” he said, and require a regulatory change at the state level.
Mandelman’s predecessor as District 8 supervisor, gay state Sen. Scott Weiner, could pick up the bathhouse baton and run it to Sacramento.
More important than extras like booze (or legal weed, for that matter) is simply getting people together, Mandelman said.
“I think our retreat into our personal spaces, our own homes, our own technology, has not been good for people.
Another prospective bathhouse operator also demurred.
It’s an indication that the competition is heating up among the small coterie of would-be bathhouse toppers, who have draped a white towel over their plans.
Mandelman advised prospective owners as they contemplated what form their projects would take.
“If you think about the great bathhouses around the world, they’re not just sex venues,” he said.
