The Luxor

  My maternal grandfather, David Podolsky, was principal owner and president of the Luxor Baths Hotel.  It was a well-known establishment in its time, located on 46^th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in New York City—just off the hustle-bustle of Times Square.  In that neighborhood, it was a favorite of Broadway actors and mobsters alike (think Damon Runyon).  It even got an appropriate gangsterish/showbiz line in Woody Allen's "Bullets over Broadway," about a struggling playwright being forced to cast a mobster's talentless girlfriend in his play.

  

Postcard from the Luxor.
[Source: Tichnor Collection, Boston Public Library.]

  In that day, "baths" was an appropriate description.  It would certainly not have been called a spa, and many would have called it a shvitz.  Nonetheless, it was a relatively posh place, not only with a degree of fame, but maybe even notoriety.  The bath area had the huge swimming pool shown above, surrounded by various hot rooms for shvitzing (cleaning out the pores by sweating): a steam room, a sauna, a Turkish hot room, and a Russian bath (in the latter of which one was vigorously scrubbed with an implement made of what I remember as soapy tree leaves).  There was also a "scotch douche," which in this case consisted of high-pressure hosing with cold water. 

  For those whose hearts could survive alternate exposures to heat in excess of 150º F and cold water not much above 50º F, there was on another floor a gymnasium for exercise, where massages could be had, and a rooftop solarium (but not one with much chance of overlaying New York pallor with a tan, for it was glassed in).  Dormitories were available where one could take a brief nap after these exertions, as well as many floors of hotel rooms for overnight stays.

  My mother was for many years the manager of the Luxor, an unusual position for a woman, because its clientele were exclusively male.  Since men roamed all floors above the ground floor clad only in towels or less, she couldn't inspect the operation first hand, but only through subordinates.  This led to some strange situations.  Once, she heard that women had been seen on upper floors, clearly not having entered through the lobby.  Suspecting collusion by some of the staff, on a hunch she posted herself one evening in the narrow alleyway between buildings on 46^th and 47^th Streets, and saw what was happening.  Planks were being placed between a window in a 47^th-Street building and one in the Luxor, over which "ladies of the night" crawled to enter the Luxor!  (I never understood how the 47^th-Street building was accessed.  I think it was another hotel, obviously coed.)

  My youth was replete with such anecdotes.  I've already described my mother's annoyance at the sometimes-incomprehensible and pettifogging application of health and safety rules by city inspectors.  Notices of minor "infractions" issued by them were understood as warnings, anticipating the holiday season when the same inspectors came to collect their "gifts."   Disregard of that nicety would result in the discovery during the next year of yet more-minute "infractions" of questionable authenticity.  My mother would choke on her anger, but then she would shrug and accept the "rules" as they were, and would pay up.  In that day, and probably now, the watchword in New York was "Don't fight City Hall"; the inspectors' level of jurisdiction was of course many layers below the City Hall of then-Mayor La Guardia, who was in general a paradigm of fair play, even though he might have been aware of this endemic lower-level monkey business.

  In an early year of high school I was allowed to take a group of my classmates to use the bath facilities.  It was the only time I ever entered them, and that was true of my classmates too.  Teen-age propriety having been more modest then than now, the visit was the cause of some embarrassment, since except for an occasional towel wrap in a hot room, all activities were in the buff.

  My sister and I were beneficiaries of the Luxor management in other ways.  She often worked week-ends running the hotel's telephone switchboard.  I would be called upon to audit stacks of charges to clients to make sure that they totaled to the amounts that had been posted to the hotel's books.  In my sister's case, it was honest labor; in mine it seems in retrospect to have been make-work, but at the time I didn't suspect that, and appreciated the 25¢ per hour I was paid.

  Shortly after my grandfather died in December 1945, the hotel was leased to another operator and my mother went on to a job elsewhere.  It was subsequently sold and vanished from our purview; later it vanished altogether, replaced by a modern skyscraper.  Also gone with it: most of the shvitzes of the day, superseded by tonier spas. What elegance modernity brings!