How Social Can Sauna Culture Get? This Steamy Festival Tested the Limits

About a month ago I was sweating in a thirty-year old concrete temazcal, built into the bathroom of a house in Oaxaca—an ancient sweat lodge ritual led by a temazcalero named Larissa. Today I’m sitting in an Airstream trailer that’s been converted into a sauna, parked on the shore of the Hudson River in Williamsburg’s Domino Park. Steeping in 180-degree heat can be transformative, and at the very least, zen. But despite the slight head high, there’s something about this sauna event I’m attending that feels very New York. Maybe it’s the throng of helpful festival volunteers, or the locals walking their dogs along the waterfront, peering into the saunas as they pass. Maybe it’s the pop-up American Eagle–sponsored ice rink across the street?

Or, maybe it’s that I’m in one of 16 individual saunas plopped on the waterfront, each offering a slightly different sweat: from wood-fired steams in a barrel sauna with a woodburning stove to the "AirSteam" I’m sitting in (ha!), cleverly retrofitted with black waxed cladding, long wooden benches, and a small window that looks out at the remaining ice floe making its way down the Hudson, passing slowly beneath the Williamsburg Bridge.

New York is home to some great bathhouses: the East Village’s Russian & Turkish (now co-run by the family of its longtime owner-operators, Boris Tuberman and David Shapiro, who still have alternating weeks of operation) was opened in 1892; Spa Castle in College Point has Korean scrubs and rooftop hot tubs; Mermaid Spa in Seagate offers a traditional "platza service", which involves being massaged by a birch venik (a bundle of birch, eucalyptus, or oak tree twigs tied together). But the tide seemed to turn when Bathhouse—meant to be a more refined take on bathing, with low lighting, streamlined cement, and pools of various temperatures heated by Bitcoin mining—opened in 2019, first in Williamsburg and then in Flatiron. Then came a slew of modern bathing spaces: Othership, World Spa, and Akari, to name a few. There’s even an abbreviated bathhouse experience for the typically busy New Yorker: a "temperature contrast session" at Elahni in Flatiron, where you can "reset your nervous system" by rotating through a circuit of sauna, shower, and ice bath three times and be on your way in just an hour.

It’s almost surprising, then, that it took this long for a sauna festival to occur. Amid the chill of winter (and between two snow storms), from February 12 through March 1, Domino Park was home to the largest sauna village ever staged in the United States, or so claims the Culture of Bathe-ing—an event series that started as a WhatsApp group of bathhouse operators, which led to an NYC meet up and now has its own Substack. It’s being put on by Therme Group—big developers of wellness destinations that often involve thermal bathing and spa in hot spots like Dubai and Bucharest—and aside from pushing the already-bustling bathhouse agenda, it wants to show New Yorkers that bathing can be first (and even foremost) a social experience. Sweaty, definitely, but also collective.

"I would like to see sauna culture in the U.S. move out of gym and spa spaces and beyond the optimization cycle," says Robert Hammond, Therme Group U.S.’s president, who sees connection as a way of embracing "ritual, performance, and culture, not just recovery." It’s a heartening message from an investor in big bathing spaces, as so much conversation about sauna has recently revolved around how long you should be in super hot or super cold environments—not necessarily what you should do while you’re in there. If Hammond’s way out of optimization is by way of embracing sauna as a potential "third space" (to use the old phrase recently embraced by Gen Z as an inspiration to disconnect from devices, and meet people the old fashioned way), he’s found something that’d be worth paying extra for. "[The festival] echoes how bathhouses once functioned as civic infrastructure and still do in many parts of the world," Hammond adds, pointing toward cities like Helsinki and Seoul, where people gather to bathe weekly, not just on special occasions. "We wanted to place bathing back in the public imagination, not tucked behind a spa door."

One of his problems (and the problem of any other modern bathhouse operator) lies in the pricing. Tickets for the festival were $60 to $95 (depending on time and day, granting you access to all of the saunas for a two-hour window), which is a price range that has already become standard practice in New York. The city’s bathhouse culture is tragically stunted by inaccessibility, something even a festival with multiple sponsors (Therme, but also Athletic Brewing Co. and Vital Proteins) hasn’t been able to avoid. But unlike other city bathhouses, the festival proudly boasts a wider variety of saunas for those with the means to attend—like a cedar-walled mobile unit by Rhode Island company Altaer, an Estonian-made Leil, or the traditional Finnish löyly—a treat for those who love bathing, but perhaps haven’t been able to experience all it offers across the globe.

"I think what a lot of people are used to is a hot box and they don’t know how they’re supposed to feel in that space," says Courtney Wittich, a self described thermal journalist, sauna sommelier, and bathing connoisseur who writes S.P.A., a Substack covering what has recently become a billion dollar industry. (Full disclosure, Wittich has appeared in a few Instagram Reels promoting the festival.) "If you enjoyed a specific type of steam [at the festival], you can seek that out more authentically on your travels or whatever or wherever else you go. I’ve been calling it the post-iPhone leisure world," says Wittich with a laugh. "These are not trends, they’ve been here forever. But I do think that we’ll have people reverting back to a more nostalgic way of living to feel more human again."

When I arrived for the afternoon sessions, bathers were making their way across River Street from the festival’s makeshift locker room to the waterfront, some already donning a Culture of Bathe-ing branded sauna hat. Many came with friends, but it’s made quite clear that this isn’t a place for solitude: the festival offers an international selection of steams, but also bathing-adjacent programming: Romanian Aufguss performers whip towels with flourish as part of a dance-like tradition to push hot air around a sauna, guided meditation happens throughout, and I was even roped into some collective storytelling—proof that when it comes to sauna culture, America (and especially New York) is a melting pot of traditions pulled from other places. Which means there are also things you’re certainly not going to find in traditional Japanese ryokans, Moroccan hammams, or even Russian banyans, of which there are many in the city. For example, DJs: an element that may draw some to the event (especially during the nighttime sessions, pushed as an "alternative night out" to the bar scene), but reminds others that if there’s one thing New York bathing tends to lack, it’s a sense of soul. Big tech’s influence (cold plunges, and the like) as well as the general economics of the city make it so the new slew of bathhouses opening could all be described as fancy enough to demand a gym-like membership, but also often utterly vibeless.

The true test of the festival’s "gatherability" comes with its most illustrious centerpiece: the seventeenth sauna that was not plopped, but handbuilt on-site: an impressive black-winged structure named Attercop (named after a venomous spider, not quite the most health-inspired emblem) designed by Finnish architect Sami Rintala that claims to fit 75-plus bathers, all seated on steps facing each other with a view of the river and a 750-pound stove placed in between. Because how can you claim to encourage a party atmosphere without enough space to throw a good party? It’s also perhaps a test of Hammond’s thesis for NYC: Do bathers want to treat sauna as a social hub? Do we even know how to do so?

"Americans don’t know how to gather in big [sauna] spaces in an etiquette kind of way because we are trained to go to concerts or to football—we’re supposed to be screaming," says Kelly Crimmins, the owner-operator of Big Towel, a sauna company with two woodburning units that sit on a small lake in Germantown, New York. (Crimmins also just opened a second location on the shores of the Hudson in Kingston.) Big Towel’s small saunas don’t have DJs, nor any sound-based accompaniment; in fact, Crimmins would rather you not blab loudly about a break up while others are trying to zen out. (But she does offer other types of creative programming, like butter churning with a nearby farm—and it’s not unusual to chat about local goings-ons at Big Towel; it’s actually quite nice!) Crimmins offers her saunas from $22, making it more of a weekly resource than a relaxing treat. "It’s that question of maintenance versus novelty," adds Wittich, which really is the ultimate push and pull of the sauna boom.

Can New York City be a bathhouse town for the people? Culture of Bathe-ing thinks so, but ultimately any endeavor backed by big investors will struggle to offer an option for regularity like a smaller operator can. "I hope the future of sauna is that people keep making spaces where people can feel that anyone can literally come and won’t feel like, Oh, can I touch this? Or can I sit here? What is this? Am I allowed to drink that? And also just affordable in pricing as well. You want people to be able to come often," says Crimmins.

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