Welcome to something I’d like to make a somewhat recurring feature here at The Melt as long as my body and wallet can handle it. I’m calling it the Schvitz Diaries, my thoughts and musings on various hot, usually public baths I take. For two years, I was unable to partake in one of my favorite pleasures of sitting in a dark, steamy, sometimes blisteringly hot room with a few strangers and just sweating. It is one of the most stereotypical things about me that I truly love a good schvitz, and having spent two full years thinking about how much I couldn’t wait to sit in a sauna again, I’ve decided to take this opportunity to experience and re-experience schvitzing and document it. This week, we’re starting off a little fancy with the vacation/start of the new year treat I gave myself at Zemi Beach House in Anguilla which had me sweating with mud covering my entire body. If you’re grossed out by sweat, then feel free to turn back now. But I promise you that this won’t turn into some David Cronenberg horror weirdness. It’s just me talking about the experience of sitting in this marble beauty all by myself for an hour.
So first, you might be wondering what a hammam is and the simple answer it’s a steam bath that people in the U.S. or the U.K. might simply call a “Turkish bath.” For those of us that live in New York and are either Team Boris or Team David at the Russian & Turkish Baths on 10th Street, you might read that and think that you’ve been going to a hammam all along. The truth is I don’t think you’d be either wrong or right to say that. When the place opened in the late-19th century, there wasn’t an especially large number of either Russians or Turkish people in the area that I know of. Jews, yes. Jews from Russia? Some. But the R&T Baths (as we’re calling it now) was actually called the 10th Street Baths until some point in the 20th century. I can’t pinpoint exactly when, but I did read a 1921 Times article that called it “a Turkish bath establishment” with no mention of the word Russian. All the way up to a 1984 article that quotes a guy named Max and talks of “Big, fat men, in large part; naked men who sweat profusely in the steam bath before going upstairs to puff stogies, argue a game of gin rummy, converse in full chorus, tell dirty jokes, toss back shots of vodka, consume steaks the size of sides of beef - both sides - and proclaim that they would not want to be anywhere else in the world,” who hung out there calls it the Tenth Street Baths. But it also says it was “the only traditional Russian-Turkish bath surviving in the five boroughs.” When I asked one of the brothers that runs the place when it got the name Russian-Turkish, he dismissed me and said “I don’t know,” then started looking at his phone.
So yes, technically there is a hammam in the East Village since the Turkish bath is a steam bath unlike the baths of ancient Greece or Rome which was just a bunch of people pouring hot water over themselves and whatever perverted weirdness those Zeus lovers got into. The Russian part is the banya, the part that is more of a traditional sauna. Neither of them looks anything like the one I visited in Anguilla. The Russian & Turkish—and I say this in the sweetest way possible—feels a little like you’re taking a trip with Dante through the Circles of Hell. The Zemi Beach House hammam, on the other hand, is an opulent, light, all-marble space with a little light music playing, some sunlight coming in through a window, and enough space to walk around and find a different level of sweating.
That was sort of a key to my experience. The hammam is pretty big, but I was also the only other person in there. I sat on one of the marble benches and I could feel the sweat slowly coming out of me. Anybody who has ever purposely worked up a good schvitz knows that it can feel like a magnet is slowly pulling little droplets out of you for a few minutes, and then you hit the schvitz zone. You’re going good, sweating like crazy, telling yourself the toxins are being drained out of your body. I think it took about a minute and a half or the sweat to start coming, three minutes until I was full-on schvitzing. My guess is that if there were a few other bodies in there, the combined heat would have an overall impact on the temperature, but I’m happy I didn’t have to find out. Sitting in an all-marble hammam in the Caribbean is a pretty baller experience.
But since this was my Special Treat to myself, I also tried something I’d never done before and added on the mud. Yes, I sweat for a good 15 minutes, then laid down on a big slab of marble that made it feel like I was about to be ritually sacrificed, and they slathered a bunch of mud all over my body and had me sit there, sweaty and muddy, just like the good lord intended. I haven’t done many mud treatments, and this was the first time I’d ever done one in a hot room. But damn, it was nice. The whole reason I go schvitz is that I want to feel like I got something out. I don’t really know how much good it is for my body or if it’s psychosomatic, but I do feel really great after sitting and sweating for a bit. Maybe it’s my Eastern-European genes, but I feel like sweating is releasing stuff you don’t want inside of you. Adding some mud to the whole thing makes it feel as if you’re cleaning off the outside. That’s why I’m generally a big fan of a platza where they hit you with twigs and leaves, but the mud isn’t as intense of an experience. You just sit there and breathe and there isn’t some large guy named Vlad hitting you with branches.
Now the downside. The schvitz, no matter where it’s from, is usually a communal experience and I probably would have had more fun sitting in there with a few friends. Would I have been as relaxed? Who is to say? But I did find myself thinking, “Man, it’s lonely here in this hammam,” but then my mind would drift away and I could just focus on the sweat.
As for the price, it was a bit much but, again, this was My Treat to myself. I paid $290 plus a tip for the treatment and then an hour-long massage. To be honest, that’s not a terrible deal considering I got the place to myself. I calculated it and the same sort of treatment would be about $40 less in NYC and here you’re usually crammed into the baths with tons of strangers, at least a quarter of them total schvitz amateurs. I’m fine paying a little more not to have to be around a few 20-something bros sweating out the IPAs they put on their dad’s MasterCard the night before. As they say in the commercials, getting away from the dummies while you schvitz is “priceless.”