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Before the introduction of Croton water in 1842, bathing and
toilet facilities were almost unknown in New York row houses.
. . . Toilet facilities consisted of chamber pots in the pantries
between the front and back bedrooms and a “bathing house” or
privy in the back yard. . . . After a plentiful water supply
was assured in the mid-1840s, newly built row houses included
one or two bathrooms. [Diarist] George Templeton Strong
. . . declared: “Tried our new bath room last night—worth
the cost of the whole building.”
Often the second-floor hall bedrooms in the back of the house
became the family toilet and bathroom, and handsome marble wash
basins
soon appeared in the old pantries between the front and back
bedrooms or in a niche in the wall in the bedroom itself.
The
high cost of pipes, valves, and fixtures, not yet mass-produced,
limited nearly all row houses in the 1840s and 1850s to far more
modest bath and toilet arrangements. Even the magnificent basement-and-four-story-tall
brownstone-fronts of the 1850s originally had only one or two
large bathrooms for the entire family; the servants still used
the earlier
chamber pots and bathed in a tub in the kitchen. In houses with
a bathroom in the 1840s, hot water often had to be carried upstairs
from the kitchen where it was heated in a “log boiler,” at
the back of the kitchen stove, by the hot air and smoke passing
up the chimney.
During the 1860s, dramatic improvements in toilet
and bathing facilities appeared in New York row houses. Large
row houses
had bathrooms
on the several bedroom floors. When the “circulating boiler” or
hot-water system replaced the old log boiler arrangement, hot
water was available directly from the tap in the bathroom and
bedroom
wash basins throughout the house.
As plumbing arrangements in
the city’s dwelling houses improved
and expanded, New Yorkers’ attitudes toward the bathroom
also changed. “What was known a few years ago, even as
a luxury, is now a necessity,” remarked [architect] Samuel
Sloan. By the 1860s, “the polished metal tub and tubular
shower, with silver, marble, and walnut setting, are esteemed
necessary for comfort, in very moderate houses.”
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