By Dan Woods, writer and tech expert
For the heat-seeking sauna-meister, the prospect of an outdoor sauna festival typically inspires a skepticism usually reserved for alcohol-free weddings or authentic chicken made from soy protein. One imagines the worst: the lukewarm ambient air of a poorly sealed tent, the boorish intrusion of the uninitiated, and the nagging question of why one didn’t simply retreat to the reliable, musky embrace of one’s go-to hot room.
And yet, there I stood in February at Domino Park in Williamsburg, watching the East River wind whip through a village of fifteen wooden huts. The event, titled “Culture of Bathe-ing,” was a multi-dimensional experiment in communal perspiration. It was, as it turned out, less of a tourist trap and more of a high-steam mark in the city’s evolving relationship with the schvitz.
Skepticism at 194°f.
I arrived at the Culture of Bathe-ing Sauna Festival at Domino Park carrying all of these reservations like a towel over my shoulder. The event, which ran from February 12th through March 1st, was organized by the Therme Group — a Vienna-based company that operates large-scale thermal wellness complexes around the world. Shaelyn Crutchley, president and CMO of Superior Saunas, in Minneapolis, who helped to produce on the ground, spent years designing experiential events for brands like Pepsi before she redirected her talents toward the more elemental pleasures of steam and stone..
Fifteen saunas, in various shapes and configurations, had been arranged in a loose village across the park’s waterfront esplanade, each one staffed by an attendant in a red jacket whose job, like a doorman at an LES jazz club, was to manage traffic and preserve heat.
A sauna village on the East River
The setting was pure WPA-era New York, if the WPA had been commissioned to paint a hipster’s fever dream. To the left, the Williamsburg Bridge loomed like a steam-punk iron harp; to the right, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings stood sentinel against a swirling gray sky. Twenty- and thirty-somethings in minimalist swimwear navigated the slush with the practiced nonchalance of people who have already decided that pneumonia is a small price to pay for the vibe.
The immersion was literal. The setting had a quality that New York occasionally produces and that no other city quite replicates: the sensation of stumbling into something genuinely improbable. To walk from the changing rooms — a full block away, through ordinary street traffic, in one’s bathing suit — was to become briefly, wonderfully absurd. Dogs were walked past you. Joggers gave you the look New Yorkers reserve for the merely eccentric rather than the dangerous. The village itself was open to the air, and the saunas, ranging from a converted Airstream trailer to a mirrored cube to a portable canvas tent that, against all reasonable expectation, got ferociously hot, were arranged like stalls at some Nordic food court.
Thermostat tension: purists vs. tourists
The central challenge of such a festival is the “thermostat tension”. The sauna purist and the sauna tourist want different things from the same hot room. This is, of course, the problem with any utopian project. The purist wants silence, heat so intense it feels like a physical confrontation, and the companionable anonymity of people who understand that a banya is not a networking event. The tourist wants to feel something new, to be initiated without being overwhelmed, and perhaps to post about it later.
Crutchley’s solution was structural: several of the saunas were designed with two rooms, so that the inner chamber, insulated from the constant intrusion of the curious, could build and hold real heat. She also discovered, during staff training, that the red-jacket attendants did a markedly better job of managing the rooms after they had been allowed to experience the saunas themselves — a finding that speaks to something universal about the relationship between knowledge and vocation. Going at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning, as I did on my second visit, meant fewer door openings and a heat I found almost more than I could bear, which is precisely what I had been hoping for.
Crutchley, who speaks about sauna culture with the precision of someone who has thought about little else for several years, was candid about the central paradox of the enterprise. “We’re trying to create the most optimal, approachable, sampler experience for the beginner,” she told me, “and at the same time create new, unique experiences for those who are very experienced in this space and travel the world for saunas.” She paused, with the equanimity of someone who has made peace with the impossible. “At the end of the day, not everybody is going to be 100% happy.”
The Aufguss conversion
For the connoisseur, The richer revelation, though, was the Aufguss, a German word that means, approximately, “infusion”). The Aufguss is a ritualized ceremony in which a master pours scented water over heated stones and then orchestrates the resulting steam through the room with a large towel, in motions that range from the meditative to the frankly theatrical. I had attended one such session at a Manhattan bathhouse and came away more baffled than enlightened.
The masters assembled for Culture of Bathe-ing were a different category of practitioner, drawn from the best saunas in Europe and Japan. Their fifteen-minute sessions — suffused with essential oils, accompanied by music, structured with the care of a guided meditation — converted me entirely. There is something about the combination of extreme heat, darkness, scent, and the shared vulnerability of bodies in a room that produces a state of consciousness adjacent to transcendence, or at least to whatever transcendence looks like when you feel rivulets of sweat passing through your eyebrows.
Sauna as cultural stage
The programming that surrounded the saunas was organized by Shoham Arad, a cultural consultant, in collaboration with Pioneer Works, the artist- and scientist-led nonprofit in Red Hook that has made something of a specialty of finding unexpected connections between disciplines. The events — which included DJ sets, live performances, and a lecture on the neuroscience of heat — were animated by the idea, which is both historically accurate and currently not widely held, that the bathhouse has always been a center of intellectual and social life, and not merely a place to get clean. Culture of Bathe-ing has a new book: Social Sauna: Culture of Bathe-ing that tells the full story.
But the evening’s finest argument for the sauna as cultural center thesis came from the performer Amber Martin, who recreated Bette Midler’s legendary residency at the Continental Baths, the gay bathhouse on the Upper West Side where Midler first became Midler, in the early 1970s. I had previously seen Martin perform in the Origin of Love show alongside John Cameron Mitchell — who himself attended the sauna village. She sang and contextualized and conjured with an energy that suggested Midler filtered through Janis Joplin and Liza Minnelli. Her account of how Midler introduced the song “Superstar” to a wider audience, including, improbably, Richard Carpenter, who made it a huge hit, had the texture of genuine historical scholarship delivered from a professor wearing a dress of bright silver sequins.
One question lingered, even as I sat there, warm and improbably content, listening to a woman channel the ghost of a bathhouse that no longer exists while the Manhattan skyline glittered across the water: Why? What manner of institutional ambition produces something like this?
Evangelism through heat and steam
Robert Hammond, president and chief strategy officer of Therme Group US, offered the company’s official answer when I spoke with him. “The mission of the sauna village goes back to the slogan we use: Be well. Have fun,” he said. Hammond is a man with an unusual résumé for a wellness executive. In 1999, he and Joshua David co-founded the nonprofit that would eventually transform an abandoned elevated railway on the West Side of Manhattan into the High Line — a project that required, among other things, the sustained belief that a piece of urban infrastructure could be reimagined as something people would actually want to inhabit. He has, in other words, some experience with the long game.
The Therme Group’s long game here is not difficult to decode, though it is executed with more subtlety than one typically expects from corporate event sponsorship. By hosting a sauna village in Brooklyn and commissioning lectures on heat neuroscience and inviting Aufguss masters from Osaka, the company is engaged in something like evangelism — creating demand for a category of experience that is emerging in the American market, confident that when the market reaches a tipping point, they will be positioned to serve it. Another name for this approach, from the tech world, is a blue ocean strategy. The idea is to become the leader in a market that is underserved by large players.
The company operates seven destination thermal complexes around the world, with eight more in development; one of their flagship properties, Therme Erding, outside Munich, contains, among other spectacles, a full-scale replica of Stonehenge in which each radial section houses a different sauna experience. (The appropriate comparison, which Hammond does not discourage at least in terms of customer passion, is to Disney World — if Disney World had replaced the rides with sweat lodges and the merchandise with mineral pools.)
The marketing, remarkably, was almost invisible. Athletic Brewing Company offered its non-alcoholic beers. A few products were available for purchase. In a domestic market obsessed with the “buy, buy, buy” of the wellness industry, the festival was refreshingly light on the hard sell. It was, instead, a form of what Hammond calls “bathing evangelism.”
Otherwise, the festival’s commercial intent was so lightly worn as to be almost touching. No one was trying to sell you anything except, in the most diffuse and idealistic sense, a way of spending an afternoon.
This is, finally, the truest thing about the Culture of Bathe-ing Sauna Festival, and perhaps the thing that makes it worth writing about at all. Every serious practitioner of sauna culture — everyone who has spent years returning to their particular hot room, who has introduced friends and watched them emerge pink-faced and converted — understands the impulse to share the thing you love. I have brought dozens of people to the Russian Turkish Baths on Tenth Street over the years, not because I expected anything in return but because I wanted them to feel what I feel. Therme Group, with its more than $1 billion in various sorts of financing, its Stonehenge replica, and its ambitions for the American market, is operating, at some level, on precisely the same principle. The best marketing they know how to do is to build a village of hot rooms beside the East River on a freezing February morning, add some amazing content and programming, and say: come in, take a load off, let the heat and stories work on you. The rest will follow.
Dan Woods is a writer and tech expert who has worked as a beat reporter at newspapers and as a CTO for tech startups. Evolved Media, the content agency he founded in 2002, has published many books about technology and other creative content. Since moving to NYC in 1988 he has been a devotee of the Russian Turkish Baths on Tenth Street and has sought out heat all over the world. He’s always looking to expand his enjoyment of saunas and to explore sauna culture and practice. Send him ideas at dan@danwoods.nyc.
