That sounds quite nice. I wonder why public baths never really took off in the States. In the records I can find, they seem to have a less than savoury perception.
I don't mean to offend but I suspect it's because people in the USA, at least in cities, just can't take care of public places.
There's urine in the train stations (either visible or smellable), elevators shut down by faeces, people shouting, yelling and preaching in the streets, also, toilets, often even in private restaurants, are disgusting.
I don't mean to say that things are always like this, all the time or in all cities and I understand that it's a minority of people who cause these problems but the problems are far from uncommon.
With a place like a public bath in particular, cleanliness is extremely important and I just can't see it working. It only takes one inconsiderate person relieving them self in the water to ruin it for everyone and I find it hard to believe that in a day in an average US city you wouldn't find such a person. My impression is that it works in Japan because the society is extremely communal and you're far, far less likely to find such an inconsiderate person.
I can kind of see it working in smaller US communities where people know and respect each other though. In small communities, everyone knows each other and people are much less likely to be inconsiderate towards friends and acquaintances than they are towards strangers.
A "public bath" isn't the same as a "public place", which has a wide range of meanings. Think of it as "open to the public", similar to how a pub="public house" even though it's privately owned and people can be kicked out.
A public bath has an entrance fee and staff, including cleaning staff.
While a train station doesn't have an entrance fee, even to access the elevator.
The streets are even more "public", in that speech like preaching has very few restraints. But a public bath has no obligation to allow yelling and preaching.
One of the ways people do public baths in the US is to join a gym. Another option is to go to a spa. Those two provide most of the market need for a public bath.
Other cultures also integrate a social experience in the public bath, but that is coupled to historical reasons not related to your objection.
It's not only in cities. In the USA, public facilities outside of exclusive areas are usually associated with those considered poor and personal failures.
Combined with the resentment that most people have towards subsidizing public facilities and services used by/built for those who need them (even though in the USA, it's a fraction of what's used towards foreign interventions), there's little if any incentive in maintaining, let alone building more public/publicly used places, especially ones that will end up being used exclusively by the people they want nothing do with (who often internalize this open resentment and further contribute to the problem of poor quality public facilities).
I highly doubt the causation goes in this direction. I think it's just a matter of culture. People in the US litter way more than people do in Japan, for example. I agree with the other poster that it's really just a small minority, maybe even less than 1%, of Americans that just ruin public facilities for everyone. But this minority does exist.
You could argue that we are just using coded language for homeless people, which often is more of a combination of mental illness or substance abuse problems and abject poverty. But I think there are plenty of people that ruin public services aside from the homeless. Even as a lifeguard of private pools, I've had to deal with large amounts of litter, abandoned trash, and feces/urine on regular bases.
there are just a lot of people who things the world owes them something and they have no respect for their surroundings / community.
I was waiting for the subway, and this guy leaning against a trash can throws his trash on the ground. If I didnt see things like this nearly every day I would write it off as a one time occurrence.
Certainly while there are cultural aspects at play, it's impossible to ignore the reality of certain areas in America being cleaner and less littered, and better serviced than other areas, and a large part of that has to do with the money available for people who inhabit and regularly use those spaces/facilities, and the ability to keep away certain demographics in order for the money to continue to be available.
Do you have any data that would suggest that funding limitations are the problem? Because when it comes to other sorts of public services (schools, transit) we spend more than other countries. To get worse results. I ran the numbers the other day, and for example the NYC MTA spends about twice as much per ride as the London Tube.
This U.S. resident agrees with you. It's a definite downside to our individualist priorities and inability of law enforcement to do much about public nuisances.
There is also a huge emphasis on being a "taxpayer."
"I paid taxes this year, therefor I am entitled to do whatever I want with public property."
It's one of the reasons something like the autobahn can't work in the US. Some Americans just love to drive 20 mph under the speed limit in the left lane because "I'm a taxpayer and this is my road! I can do what I want." A no-speed-limit highway in the US would require one lane per citizen.
Recently, I've seen signs attaching fines to driving in the left lane below the speed limit or not allowing a car to pass. There are still drivers that stay below but I think with the new signs they are becoming a smaller subset. This was in South Florida btw.
Honestly, I've never seen this kind of belligerence. I mean, I understand that the feeling exists that since one paid taxes, one is more entitled to public services than those who don't (and vice versa). But Americans in general seem to be very law-abiding citizens (there are exceptions, as is everywhere).
Public baths in Japan also typically ban guests with tattoos, because tattoos are associated with the Yakuza in Japanese culture, and the presence of Yakuza would make other guests uncomfortable. Imagine doing anything even remotely similar in the US.
OTOH, the US does have public pools. I've never been to one, though, so I have no idea what they are like. If anyone has experiences, please share.
Public pools are generally fine. They usually have a small fee to use, so they aren't truly public in the same sense as the local playground. In my area, most pools are county or town operated, with a discount rate for residents and a higher rate for non-residents. Usually, $5-$10/visit for non-residents, which also buys access to the locker room/showers and any gym equipment.
I imagine the public baths in Japan are similar. So, there is an entry fee that funds a small staff to keep the bathhouse in good repair.
Edit - as an aside, I visited Iceland in January. The public baths/pools were amazing. The entry fees were minimal (a few euro, a bit less than entry to a pool in the US). Facilities were all clean and well maintained. But, it's also part of their culture. Like bath-houses in some nations, people go to the pools to hang out and socialize in the evening.
> There's urine in the train stations (either visible or smellable), elevators shut down by faeces, people shouting, yelling and preaching in the streets
I'm not reacting to any offense, as I agree the US has these problems. However this also describes very well my time spent in metropolitan Spain, France, and Italy.
I'm sure racism also plays into this a lot. So public baths are very common in Korea as well, which is a pretty homogeneous country (similar to Japan).
Like you mention, Urban areas in most of the US tend to be overrun by poor and downtrodden and are generally unsanitary. But my personal experience, of having seen gentrification here in Austin, Texas, has been that Urban areas in America are maintained well when those areas are out of the reach of said poor and downtrodden. e.g. in Austin, the downtown region is infested with homeless people and panhandlers, whereas the new development in north austin (called the Domain) is much much cleaner. So I don't think Americans in general are prone to littering or keeping urban areas dirty.
> There's urine in the train stations (either visible or smellable), elevators shut down by faeces, people shouting, yelling and preaching in the streets, also, toilets, often even in private restaurants, are disgusting.
This is a very SF-centric view of the US.
The closest I've come to this in Boston is seeing people sleeping on subway benches.
>I can kind of see it working in smaller US communities
Communities that small do not need laundromats. Cities and suburbs have done a very good job making themselves so impersonal that you don't really get that level of community except in actual "small" towns.
It is also partly because we are less inclined to lock up, beat or detain people who violate social norms in western countries anymore.
Neither do we socially support those properly, turns out running mental health and substance abuse support is difficult, politically charged, full of potential for liability, thankless and expensive.
I have older relatives who were involved in the mental health system in the 50's and 60's, it was, to put it mildly, not a particularly humane time but "it sure got crazies off the streets".
On a related note, in .jp the police can detain you for about a month without charging you.
Japan has a backwards view of mental health, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Yet public places are immaculately clean.
The fact is that western people and law enforcement tolerate vandalism, littering and antisocial behaviour.
Recently, on Seattle's airport train, I saw a person openly taking garbage out of their bag and throwing it on the floor. No one said anything - just another day on the dirty train.
I don't think someone would dare do that in Japan or Singapore.
"Americans are more likely to pee in the pool than Japanese"... I would love to see that study! I have my own racist hypothesis about the outcome, but yours seems quite rational to me too.
As a Dutch chauvinist, I beg to differ. We generally take excellent care of public places. This is a combo of culture and government services actually cleaning stuff up every once in a while. Of course, this is HN, so cue some replies about horrible stinky places in the Netherlands, but as a general rule I stand by this. SF is a pile of poo compared to an average Dutch city.
And then I haven't even mentioned Luxembourg. That entire country is so clean and tidy that it almost looks like a cartoon.
>We generally take excellent care of public places. This is a combo of culture and government services actually cleaning stuff up every once in a while.
Ok, I've gotta take issue with this.
Dutch people litter. All the time. People rarely seem to clean up after their dogs. People place their trash bags out on the curb (where there aren't underground bins) far earlier than they should, resulting in trash-strewn streets and fat, obnoxious seagulls. It's a mess. Beer cans left on bridges and park benches. Energy drink cans tossed to the side. Cigarette butts strewn carelessly. Firework refuse absolutely fucking everywhere a few weeks either side of New Years. Bikes left as litter.
There's always someone who comes along with a street vacuum, or a team of people going along with bags and pickers. It seems to me that people have little respect for not littering because it's always someone else's problem, and there's always going to be someone cleaning up after you.
So if by "we" take care of public spaces you mean "lots of people get paid to clean up others' carelessness," sure, but in six years I've seen little to suggest that not leaving trash just anywhere is strong tenent of Dutch culture.
My hunch is that urban areas of the NL are essentially all developed and man-made, in that every street, sidewalk, tree, bush, patch of grass is planned and raw, untouched nature is relatively less accessible and visible. Therefore people perceive this urban "fabrication" with its attendant cleaning staff as less precious, less worth keeping clean than some primeval forest or national park.
I could be wrong, of course, and this is all just my own perception. But I really fail to recognize the cultural cleanliness that you say embodies the Dutch.
Last time I was in Amsterdam the people who clean up the metro stations were on strike. I didn't know this and I was thinking, "Wow! I really expected things to be cleaner than this." It was quite a mess the whole week I was there. That said, away from the stations things seemed very well kept.
It's not true, though. SF is pretty much average in this regard.
Americans in general just don't seem to care about public spaces, pretty much anywhere in the country. I've travelled to many US cities and the only reason other cities some how feel "cleaner" is because there's literally nobody walking in them.
The cities made for walking (like NYC and maybe Boston) are on par with SF. Maybe less dog poo everywhere though.
There are other places yes but out of the countries I've visited, the US is definitely one of the worst. All the Europe I've visited (Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Istanbul, south-eastern region of Russia) has been about as well kept as Australia, my home country. Aside from Malaysia, I can't think of a country that's worse than the US. Even the (disclaimer: nicer, less impoverished) parts of Mexico I've visited were arguably better maintained.
Another disclaimer: I live in the Bay Area and that's where most (but not all) of my feelings about US public spaces come from.
The Bay Area is bad even by American standards. But the places I've been in America do tend to be rather shabby in comparison to places I've visited abroad, in general.
Lol what? In Berlin you see heaps of trash, broken furniture and fridges on the sidewalks once you leave the main roads. The city stinks in the summer (guess this is due to not enough water in the sewage). In Neukölln (and other parts of the city) you gotta take care of druggies everywhere. Parts of the city have a severe neonazi problem (left-wing and "foreign looking" people are getting beaten up, and their cars torched). Rents are skyrocketing and the government doesn't care much except to fight those who protest against gentrification.
IMHO, Paris is fairly dirty (like 60% San Francisco dirty). Especially the subway is a mess, and there is no law enforcement (e.g. minor children begging during weekday and no-one does anything). Many of the trains are vandalized.
St. Petersburg is much nicer than Paris (at least in the summer). Surprisingly, the it is cleaner even though the country is poorer.
It might be the large US population of homeless people worsens this (especially in the bay area), as they have no better option than to leave their waste in public places.
Years ago I travelled through norcal without stopping in to SF. Started in Crescent City, traversed into Oregon, past Shasta region and the farthest south I achieved was to Santa Rosa. Headed east to Oroville and then back to Crescent City to catch my prop flight to SF for the flight east.
Wonderful personal trip on the winding mountain roads and experiencing the abrupt climate|vista changes in an hour+ from pacific coast to desert. Morning 50 degrees, afternoon 80+.
It was my first time in norcal and the thing that shocked me the most (reading my emails to friends from that time) was the filth, poverty and mental illness in the towns and cities.
The US is a big place, which averages away the extremes. In San Francisco, population 868k, there are about 10-12k homeless folks (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-homeless...), which puts it at over 1% homelessness. That's a tragic number for such a wealthy city.
Not certain how you can describe all of Europe that way. In my experience, European countries have very good upkeep of public spaces even by higher developed world standards, and especially compared to the US.
I'm not sure about littering/pissing/etc, but as an American, I'm constantly surprised by the amount of graffiti when I go to Europe. It far outstrips what I see here.
As a Californian, of course, they have far fewer homeless people there :)
Sweden and the UK seem roughly the same to me. The main streets of large cities are perhaps a bit dirtier in England, but the parks in Sweden are far worse when people leave all their trash for the bottle collector (not just the bottles).
As a person who grew up in Britain and now live in Sweden in cities with a comparable population size, I disagree.
London is an exception when it comes to the UK, there is a lot more investment in public services and it's not a true representation of Britain due to its multicultural component.
Sure, London has a level of investment in public services which is unrepresentative of Britain as a whole (though they also pay most of the taxes that fund public services.) But all big cities (and many small ones) are multicultural.
These responses are peak HN, it's hilarious and disappointing. The actual answer to your question is that tons of cities had beautiful public baths (I live next to a locked one), and shut them down when they became ground zero for AIDS transmission. Men were having risky sex in the locker rooms, and the closing of the public baths is seen as the turning point for the US taking the AIDS crisis seriously. The below address mostly private baths, but the rules ended both.
I think the answer is much simpler. In the US almost every home has a bathing/showering facility built in. There's not much need for a bathhouse. Because they weren't used by regular people very much, people got this idea that the only reason you would go to one is for some other reason.
In reality the total number of incidents of unsavory rendezvous in the bathhouses were probably not much higher than in countries with more extensive public bath house culture, but the percentage of patrons who went there for other reasons was considerably higher.
Basically without the normal activity masking it, the unsavory activity stood out.
My completely baseless view is that it's entwined with the relative views towards nudity in both cultures. If I had to guess, the age of Europe has forced cultural views of nudity to shape themselves around the presence of necessary public baths in history. In contrast, the relative youth of the US has meant that said cultrual establishment never caught on because private bathing was possible from the get-go of Anglo-US settlement.
It's not that they never took off (there used to be many, esp in urban places with lots of European immigrants), its that they run counter to the hyper-individualistic American mindset. And over time, communal features of American civic life have become objects of neglect if not derision (public education, public transport, etc)
I suspect it's a cultural thing. Japanese people are totally okay with group bathing while to Americans bathing is a more private matter. Leaving aside public baths for a moment, Japanese people often bathe together as a family -- something you rarely see here.
We have "public baths". They are usually called "YMCA's" and they charge a fee. There are saunas and steam rooms and chlorinated swimming pools at most YMCA facilities.
The USA passed the 50% indoor plumbing threshhold between the 1920 and 1930 census, so earlier people must have done something. I believe the question is no longer on the census long form as indoor plumbing is well over 90%.
I personally do 80% of bathing at the gym after exercise.
I suspect it's mostly just the underlying culture. Japan was more into baths/bathing in pre-industrial times than most of the world, and there is hot springs tourism.
There's urine in the train stations (either visible or smellable), elevators shut down by faeces, people shouting, yelling and preaching in the streets, also, toilets, often even in private restaurants, are disgusting.
I don't mean to say that things are always like this, all the time or in all cities and I understand that it's a minority of people who cause these problems but the problems are far from uncommon.
With a place like a public bath in particular, cleanliness is extremely important and I just can't see it working. It only takes one inconsiderate person relieving them self in the water to ruin it for everyone and I find it hard to believe that in a day in an average US city you wouldn't find such a person. My impression is that it works in Japan because the society is extremely communal and you're far, far less likely to find such an inconsiderate person.
I can kind of see it working in smaller US communities where people know and respect each other though. In small communities, everyone knows each other and people are much less likely to be inconsiderate towards friends and acquaintances than they are towards strangers.