It’s a little after 9 p.m. on a Friday night and the mood is incandescent at one of New York City’s largest saunas, which is almost certainly its loudest. The place is packed, throbbing with ambient beats and the din of about 75 toned, poreless young cosmopolites, laughing and chattering and glistening in the amber glow. It’s like a high school cafeteria, if the cafeteria were filled with only the popular kids and they were all wearing bathing suits.
“Get some water. We’ll be taking off in a few minutes,” says an intimidatingly serene woman wearing a headset.
This is the evening social at Othership, a bathhouse meets block party with three main offerings: the sauna, a room of ice baths, and a gathering space with tiered seating and a fireplace. The weary city dweller in search of a spa retreat to indulge in a little “me time” will not find it here — Othership is designed for “we time.”
Tonight, “we” include Riley Godshall, a 28-year-old medical device sales rep here to check out the sober scene with friends, and Siddhant Jawa, a 35-year-old vice president at Goldman Sachs who comes three days a week to deal with stress.
Over the course of the evening, my fellow journeyers — as Othership calls its patrons — and I move from sauna to ice bath and back again. We mingle at the tea station, where everyone seems aggressively present in a way you can only be when your phone is locked away.
Before the cold plunge, an Othership “guide” instructs us to “take the deepest breath you’ve taken all week, y’all.” Then, as we exhale together, we lower ourselves into pools ranging from 40 to 50 degrees.
After two minutes, I emerge like a great white shark breaching, high with hysterical strength. My tubmate beams at me, and we high-five as if we’ve just won the playoffs. A guide says he’s proud of me but walks off before I have a chance to ask him why.
Othership is an exemplar of “social wellness,” a watchword of the self-care economy. It was popularized by Jonathan Leary, who started the group-friendly health club Remedy Place in New York City in 2019 to answer the question: “Why is being social always centered around alcohol and food?”
Now, it seems the term can be applied to nearly any activity where people get off their phones to commune with others. Run clubs, sober raves and book clubs all qualify.
Social wellness’s dark twin is loneliness, one of the post-pandemic era’s most agonized-over ills. In 2023, the U.S. surgeon general published an advisory: Even before Covid lockdowns, about half of U.S. adults reported experiencing loneliness, and it’s even worse among young adults.
“A lot of us feel like we’re on our own in the world,” said Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University and the author of “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.” Remote work, decline in religious participation and waning trust in institutions all contribute to our sense of atomization.
An unmet social need of this size presents a business opportunity, and modern bathhouses are making a go at it. Othership provides programming that promises you’ll “connect meaningfully with other human beings.” At places like Bathhouse in New York and Sauna House in Florida, North Carolina and South Carolina the main offering is less curated, encouraging people to hang out and use the facilities at their leisure.
Capitalizing on people’s hunger for in-person experiences, these places emphasize connection and belonging. But can $64 for an hour or two of bathing with strangers really be a way to build community?
Othership was started in Toronto in 2019 by Robbie Bent, an early employee of the cryptocurrency platform Ethereum, along with his wife and three friends. At first, they touted health claims often cited about cold plunges. “Then we realized nobody actually cares about that stuff,” he said.
Today, Othership offers themed classes like “Gratitude” and “Hardwiring Happiness,” as well as some geared toward friendship and romance. In most classes, participants — most of whom are 25 to 45 — are guided through breathwork, movement, sauna and cold plunging.
Doing something hard together creates camaraderie, Bent said. So after journeyers are shepherded from pool to sauna, guides often encourage them to share their feelings with one another, an element inspired by group therapy, he said.
The idea of spontaneous confessional at 7 a.m. filled me with dread as I ducked into Othership for a “Self-Care Sweat” class. I was skeptical that an exercise like this could possibly work, but I marveled at the ease with which my classmates seemed able to access their emotions in the presence of strangers.
The need for a “third place” that’s not home or work is particularly acute after the Covid lockdowns, said Sheila Liming, the author of “Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time.” That, along with digital fatigue, has created a hunger for in-person experiences.
But she pointed out that paying for community can be a tricky proposition. When connection is sold as a product and social interactions are curated, some people might thrive, but others “might feel like that’s not entirely authentic,” she said.
Public bathhouses have served as social hubs since ancient Rome and remain popular in many countries: Japan has its onsens, Turkey its hammams and Finland its saunas. But in the United States, public baths faded in the 20th century with the rise of indoor plumbing.
The counterculture of the 1970s fostered a wave of interest in communal bathing, and in cities it was popular among gay men, but this ebbed with the AIDS crisis, said Mikkel Aaland, the author of “Sweat,” a foundational 1978 illustrated history of the sauna.
In 2025, bathhouses are back in New York City. The Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan alone is home to Othership on West 20th Street, Remedy Place on West 21st, Bathhouse on West 22nd and Elahni on West 27th.
The Altar, which will offer sauna and cold plunge under the banner “Health as a Cultural Gathering Space,” is set to open on Fifth Avenue at 17th Street this fall.
Two blocks from Othership, Bathhouse — a 35,000-square-foot underground warren of saunas and pools — is plying its own version of the shvitz. But Bathhouse doesn’t engineer social connection. Instead, patrons create their own circuits, akin to a classic communal bathing experience.
The real action is in the large neutral pool, heated to an inviting 98 degrees. There, couples and small groups congregate, lingering in a communal womb. (Earlier this year, there were reports on social media of people who developed urinary tract infections after visiting Bathhouse. The owners denied the claims and insisted on the facility’s cleanliness.)
While Othership might cater more explicitly to someone looking to make friends, Bathhouse still provides the opportunity to relax in the presence of others, even if you don’t walk away with a coffee date.
“People think ‘social’ means you have to meet people,” said Robert Hammond, a founder of the High Line who has been working to bring German bath complexes to the United States. “Even if you’re not talking to your neighbor, being around your neighbor” can be a beneficial social experience, he said.
I did not expect to like the modern bathhouse experience. I feel deep affinity for the Russian and Turkish Baths, on East 10th Street, where a man will beat you with oak branches in the sauna, dump a bucket of cold water on your head and never once ask about your feelings. But after weeks spent at these newer places, I emerged optimistic about their potential to foster connection.
People may initially be drawn to modern bathhouses by health claims picked up from popular wellness personalities, Hammond explained: “They think it’s going to help them live to be 100.” But that doesn’t account for why bathhouses have endured for thousands of years.
The staying power can be attributed to the community people find there. “They might come for the trendy wellness part,” he said, “but what keeps them is the social.”
Melissa Kirsch is the deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle at The Times and writes The Morning newsletter on Saturdays.
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