Chicago Tribune, Monday, March 30, 1981 Section 2
New wrinkles to an old tradition at the Luxor Baths
By Barbara Brotman
Eileen Fulmer, slender and deeply tanned, rushed into the dining room, shouted “Hi, everybody,” and threw herself into Marge’s ample embrace.
“Ohhh,” Marge said, patting her on the back and beaming, “you missed me, huh?”
“Oh, God, yes,” Fulmer said as Rose and Estelle came out of the kitchen to hug her. “I just got off my plane, and look where I am. I have a good masseuse in Phoenix, but there is no place like the Luxor.”
Fulmer, at 39 an attractive testimonial to the benefits of the Luxor Baths, was back in Chicago for the first time since she moved West in November. That the Luxor was the first place she went didn’t surprise Marge, her masseuse, Estelle, the cook, or Rose, the waitress. Luxor patrons are fiercely devoted, and the most crowded times at the bathhouse are often Sunday afternoons and Wednesdays Ladies’ Days at the Luxor.
The Luxor Baths on North Avenue just west of the intersection of Damen and Milwaukee avenues is a relic of Chicago’s past, of the days when immigrant men and women had hygienic need for a classic Russian bathhouseÑor schvitzbad, as they would more likely call it. Home to several generations of mobsters, meeting place for politicians, and a comfortable background for honest talk, the Luxor is a living, working repository of the city’s history.
Today, there is only one other place like it in Chicago, the Division Street Russian Baths, immortalized in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift. But when the Luxor was built in 1923, such bathhouses were the communal bathrooms of the working class.
“We didn’t have any bathtubs, honey,” said Rose, a solid, businesslike woman who gets impatient with customers who take too long making a choice between a bagel with cream cheese and schmaltz herring. “We had to use the public bathhouses. I first came here when I was 7 years old; my mother took me. I took my kids when they were born, and when they got married, I came to work here. That was 20 years ago.”
Al Udolph, 71, has also worked at the Luxor for 20 years, as the cashier in the front entrance. He remembers the days when crime syndicate leaders talked business in the Russian room.
“A lot of them don’t come here any more,” he said. “They’re getting old, too. I’m kind of sorry, because come Christmas time, they used to take care of me pretty good,” he added, winking genially.
In fact, as late as the mid-’70s, undercover Chicago police were working the Luxor, posing as busboys or customers, so they could listen in on conversations of syndicate members who would head for the Luxor straight from prison release to check in with Joseph (Doves) Aiuppa, a Capone muscleman who became Mafia chief of Cicero.
The Ladies of the Luxor
The ladies who work at the Luxor are a first-name lot; for the most part, sturdy, older women who swear by its heat treatments.
“This kind of heat, you will not get it no place,” assured Estelle, popping a pale blond, curler-filled head outside the kitchen. She has been coming to the Luxor for 39 of her 66 years.
“That’s why we look so young,” Marge said coyly, dipping a fork into tuna fish salad.
“Damn right,” said Rose.
But there are changes afoot. Two young lawyers, Mike Robbins and Ronald Tash, bought the Luxor in July from Irving Rosenberg, who retired to Florida after running the Luxor for 26 years. They are in the process of installing a gymnasium with weights, boxing bags, and exercycles, and they plan to install Nautilus equipment after that.
They have scrubbed and redecorated, too. Marge said enthusiastically, “Lookit, we’ve got carpeting! Every week, I come in and say, ‘Next week, it’s going to be candlelight.’”
Robbins, 33, a former prosecutor for the Cook County states attorney, says he wants to attract more young peopleÑmany of whom have already discovered the place and become regulars by adding the exercise equipment and keeping the place cleaner.
A Tradition Persists
But the Luxor will remain the Luxor, he maintains.
“I can put a gym in, but nobody else can put in a Russian bathhouse. I’m not trying to gut the place and make it a racquetball club.”
Indeed, it would take a lot of gutting to make the Luxor a racquetball club. For now, it looks more like a cross between a disinfectant station for immigrants and a spartan European health spa, beginning with the Turkish sauna where many Luxor patrons start their ritual.
Wooden chaise longues that look like they were spirited from the sanitarium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain fill the white-tiled room. The temperature hovers around a comparatively mild 130 degrees, but the patron who ventures inside without flip-flops is quickly reduced to a shrieking mass of quivering flesh, hopping desperately from foot to foot on the searing tile floor before bounding onto a chair which, if it isn’t covered by a towel, will send the hapless soul hurtling skyward.
That little dance alone is worth 400 calories.
Downstairs, through an institutional-tile room where Marge, her loose muu-muu pulled down below a black bra, is giving a massage to Eileen, are a few open showers and the two other hot rooms. The vapor room is a narrow space…
A few new wrinkles added to the Luxor Baths tradition
The vapor room is a narrow space with a marble bench. And at 180 degrees, it is too hot for most first-timers to enter standing up.
The trick is to drape a towel across your back and over your head to catch the scalding water that drips from the ceiling and crawl in on your hands and knees. The hardy of constitution can gradually rise from the floor to the bench.
There is also a small pool downstairs, more for cooling off than swimming laps, and a whirlpool. But the most popular room in the house is the Russian room.
It is a large room with several levels of wood benches, fitted with water spigots along the front edges, and in it is a unique type of heat. It is moist, but there is no steam. Large rocks piled into a vault made of three-foot-wide firebrick are heated all night by a gas burner that generates 1.5 million BTUs.
How hot do the rocks get? “About a gazillion degrees,” Robbins figures.
In the morning, the burner is turned off and a small steel door leading from the hot room to the vault is opened. A little water is thrown onto the rocks, and the temperature chugs up to a moist 175 degrees.
The point here is to sit until you think you’re going to die. Then you fill a bucket with cold water, stand in the middle of the room, and dump the water over your head until you can almost hear the hiss of steam rising from your skin. It feels much better than it sounds.
Add to that a rubdown with a soapy oak leaf brush for $3, a massage with cocoa butter and lavender oil for $5, and a leisurely meal in the dining room of sandwiches, salads, and Jewish delicacies, along with wine, beer, and hard liquor, and you have, at closing time, some mellow ladies spilling onto North Avenue, where a security guard waits to walk them to their cars.
“It feels so relaxing,” said Teresa Tarasewicz, who is Byelorussian, admits to being “past 70,” and whose skin is far smoother than that on much younger bodies observed at downtown racquet clubs. “You sleep good like a log. And the next day, you feel like butterfly.”
She has been coming to the Luxor since 1954 and can stay in the vapor room for up to an hour.
“I have guys in their 70s and 80s who look 15 years younger,” said Robbins. “They tell me the oak leaves draw out impurities. I don’t know about that, but it sure feels good.”
It may feel good, but an afternoon at the Luxor can in fact be dangerous for some.
Dr. Ralph Zitnik, president of the Chicago Heart Association, said a study has shown that at a mere 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity, the resting output of the heart doubles.
“That’s an extraordinary increase in demand on the heart, equivalent to moderately severe exercise,” he said. “And if you take these baths and suddenly dump cold water over someone, you get an intense constriction of blood vessels and a very marked rise in blood pressure. For a patient with underlying heart disease or high blood pressure, this could pose a significant risk.”
For young people in good cardiovascular health, Zitnik said, such heat exposure probably poses minimal risks. But he pointed out that it provides none of the benefits of exercise, which also raises the blood pressure and heart output but promotes muscle conditioning.
And the heat does no good for skin, either.
“The truth is, it’s terrible for you,” said Dr. Lawrence Solomon, head of the dermatology department at the University of Illinois Medical Center. “It dries the skin. For people with chronic problems such as psoriasis and eczema, it opens up all the blood vessels and adds to the inflammation. The heat is terrible for older people who have rosacea, which is very common redness of the face and bulbous nose. For young people with acne, the wet is terrible.”
As for all the Luxor addicts who swear they feel wonderful after a few hours in the heat, Solomon said plenty of his patients feel the same. They keep taking saunas and hot showers and keep coming back to him with their skin problems.
On top of all that, if the heat doesn’t get you, the schmaltz herring certainly will.
But there are other things about the Luxor that feel good.
Jane Wenger, 37, an artist whose photographs were just shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, said, “It’s not overcrowded or pretentious. I don’t like the kind of Near North place where the ladies have their shower caps and their bathing suits, and healthy-looking people tell you how to exercise.”
And she liked the democratizing effect of total nudity for all.
“Once you put your clothes on, you can tell where everyone’s from,” she said.
Not everyone takes kindly to the Luxor’s code of undress, which decrees that the sheets each customer gets at the door, along with a towel and piece of soap, be worn only in the dining room.
“Everyone is shy when they come here,” said Robin Ostencio, 24, who was forming graceful arabesques in the whirlpool. “But once they get in and see everyone else is naked, they relax.”
“If it’s their first time here,” Marge said, “the older ladies yell, ‘Drop your sheet no one’s looking on you!’”
“And I have all of these older friends that you just don’t get to meet elsewhere,” Ostencio said, affectionately taking the arm of an older woman in the whirlpool. “They’re all fascinating; they all have stories to tell.”
There is a warm camaraderie here, seen in the eyes of an older woman carefully showing a younger one how to give oak leaf rubs.
An aura of female kinship pervades this place, where newfound friends may discuss men in the vapor room, children in the Turkish room, and divorce in the Russian room.
One young woman spent her half-hour massage, in a room where five women lean over five tables and fill the air with the sound of slapping flesh, sobbing softly over an ended love affair, while her masseuse murmured, “There, there.”
Ethnic hostilities tend to get left at the door; Japanese patrons, Mexican and Polish masseuses, Eastern European immigrants, and milk-fed young suburbanites mix easily.
No one thinks it strange when Rose says to Hope Llaguno, a Mexican woman who has been a masseuse at the Luxor for 25 of her 74 years, “You want some matzoh?” least of all Hope, who likes matzoh.
Irving Rosenberg remembers the friendliness perhaps better than anyone: He owned the Luxor from 1953 until he sold it to Robbins and Tash last July.
“I was getting tired of it,” said Rosenberg, 75, who now lives in Deerfield Beach, Fla., near Miami. “Now I’m sorry I sold it. I’d like to be back. It’s in your blood all the people you meet, all the conversations. It’s like a real club. They tell you their hard luck stories and all their good luck stories.”