Smoke in the Shadows

John Reilly, M.D.

Dawn in New York City finds the Bellevue Hospital Emergency Department relatively quiet – the night’s “festivities” having played out by 2 a.m. and the staff enjoying a brief respite as the city slowly wakes up. Naturally, this break in the action is more likely to be enjoyed on weekday mornings. Wednesday morning, May 25, 1977 certainly fit that bill. Then a 4th year surgical resident, I was grabbing a cup of coffee in the ER when, at about 7:30 a.m., a call came through to the desk that ambulances were transporting several patients evacuated from a fire in Midtown. One after another, the casualties arrived, more than a dozen, all but one of them suffering smoke inhalation and many lifeless on arrival. The treatment rooms were suffused with the scent of smoke. I assisted with the mechanics of resuscitation and as I stepped back, I observed that, save for a uniformed fireman, all of the victims were young men and all were unclothed. Also unusual was the conspicuous absence of the crescendo of plaintive cries of family members who would ordinarily surge the ER waiting room desperately seeking hope in the midst of tragedy. The explanation for this unconventional scene became clear when word was “passed around” that these men were victims of a fire in the Everard Baths – an establishment known to provide a private and anonymous space for gay men to gather, generally at night. Indeed, the New York Times reported that “80 - 100 men” had fled the fire “clad only in towels or in their underwear”. Not surprising, then, was the Times’ observation that the known dead were more likely to have been “identified by friends rather than family members.”

Built in 1888 by financier James Everard as a traditional Turkish Bath promoting “general health and fitness”, by 1919 the establishment had become the target of police raids responding to complaints of “lewd behavior”. Doree Shafrir, writing for BuzzFeed in 2016, noted that for decades bathhouses stood on the “fringes of lawfulness” serving as social refuges for gay lives consigned to secrecy and shame. Characterized by Michael Rumaker in his book “A Day and a Night at the Baths”, the Everard, with 135 six by four-foot mattress cubicles separated by wooden half-wall partitions, was the “most venerable, loathed and affectionately esteemed baths in all of New York”. It was said, as reported by Ms. Shafrir, to have been visited by men from all social strata including celebrities such as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Rudolph Nureyev and the gay rights activist Larry Kramer.

It is noteworthy that the decade of the ’70’s in New York City had witnessed the emergence of a fully open gay urban culture. The Stonewall Riots of 1969 had, for many, pulled down the walls of the closet by breaking the hold of organized crime on gay bars as well as the routine experience of police harassment. Beyond the emergence of the Gay Pride Movement, the proliferation of gay bars and clubs and the publication of gay newspapers and magazines, Midtown Manhattan and Greenwich Village reflected a triumphant lifestyle offering and embodying success and taste carried with selfconfidence and social freedom. And yet, despite the increasingly powerful impact of the mainstream gay culture, bathhouses like the Everard remained the seedier, less regulated and increasingly unsafe sanctuary for those who still sought anonymity and, in some cases, promiscuity.

According to the New York Times, the fire was reported to have begun in a mattress, was extinguished, smoldered and re-erupted at 7 a.m. filling the building with dense smoke. Electrical power had been continued on page 4

Smoke in the Shadows

continued from page 3 cut off by the flames. A sprinkler system, mandated after an inspection over a year before, was in place but the installed pipes remained detached and dangling. The windows had been covered up with insulation and paneling. There were no fire escapes. The New York Daily News reported that “patrons were left trapped and screaming in dense smoke, some hanging from the windows crying for help”. The News further reported that “200 fireman and 32 pieces of equipment arrived” shortly after 7 a.m. by which time “three stories of the rear of the building had collapsed”. At least a dozen men had been brought down from windows by firemen.

Though destroyed, the Everard would be rebuilt and reopened.

There was a sad and ironic epilogue to the reporting of the lethal Everard fire. Newspapers, including the New York Times, felt it “fit to print” the names, ages and addresses of the dead, “effectively outing” those who, in life, sought nothing more than anonymity in their private lives.

Ms. Shafrir viewed the Everard fire as representing the “beginning of the end of the brief exuberant heyday of New York City Gay Nightlife.” More ominously and to that point, on July 3, 1981, the New York Times ran a story headlined: “Rare Cancer Seen in Homosexuals”. Kaposi’s Sarcoma had been found with an accelerating frequency among gay men, the majority of these cases presenting at Bellevue. The scourge of AIDS was yet to be fully realized. The epidemiology, pathophysiology and management of HIV were yet to be understood.

I left New York for Erie in 1978. When I returned for a visit in 1983, the city I left was unrecognizable. The gay subculture had retreated from Midtown. Greenwich Village, once wall-to-wall with buoyant, boisterous celebrants, had become a ghost town along the streets of which ailing men dragged their gaunt lesion-maculated bodies, too ill to despair of the precipitous loss of the vigor and appeal of their youth.

In 1986, the reborn Everard was shut down by the City of New York being cited, along with other bath houses, as a venue for promiscuous sex promoting the spread of AIDS.

By the end of the 80s, the majority of beds at Bellevue had come to be dedicated to the care of AIDS patients.