Evidently people building houses in the brownstone era weren’t so vulgar as to discuss the bath with an architect, and felt that the less said about that embarrassing room the better. Naturally, very little was done about it, and it was not strange, therefore, that our brownstone house had two dining rooms, a huge kitchen, a parlor, a sitting room, three bedrooms, a maid’s room, a cook’s room, butler’s pantry, and only one bath.
The ideal spot to put this unfortunate room was somewhere out of sight, and a place was found for it on the top floor of a peculiar excrescence of the house called the “extension.” Every other house on our block had an “extension.” They ran up three stories in back of the houses and were considered quite tony because they harbored all the more deplorable portions of the house in one restricted sector. The first floor held the laundry, where the lowest caste of female servant, the laundress, worked; the second floor housed the butler’s pantry, where the waitress hid while the family ate; and the third floor held the bath, out of sight and difficult of access.
This stepchild of rooms was, however, anything but small and dingy. The bedroom I inhabit today would fit into our old bathroom and rattle around. There was a toilet, a marble washbasin, and a bathtub on one side of the room. A small section of the other side was taken up by the dumbwaiter shaft, and the vast remainder was consecrated to absolutely nothing at all. We tried in various ways to fill up this desert. A bathroom scale was installed—not one of your piddling spring devices, that you can kick under the basin, but a large, white affair patterned after those you see in freight offices. It would also measure your height. You had to stand absolutely still, without breathing, while you were being weighed, otherwise it wouldn’t work. A wash hamper, an old chair painted white, and an exasperating article, most unsteady on its pins, called a shoe-shining chair, became oases in this desert of white tile. With all these things there still would have been room for an upright piano. The entire floor and half the walls were done in white tile. This, while very appropriate, had its disadvantages, since the extension was unheated, and in the winter the considerable area of tiling sopped up cold and the luckless entrant found himself in what to all intents and purposes was a meat safe.
Our house had scattered about it eleven sinks, tubs, and washstands, but there was only one bathtub, although that could have taken care of the Cardiff Giant. We never felt the lack, though. One tub was ample. We did less bathing those days than we do today.