The Lower East Side’s Synagogue, Tenement, and Russian Bathhouse: Mikva’ot and the Excavation of a Mikvah at 5 Allen Street

"Nobody ever had a mikvah in a Russian Turkish bath" claimed one woman, whose family ran bathhouses on the Lower East Side during the 1920s.4 In fact, the separation of the mikvah from the bathhouse in favor of private bathrooms at home, and individual mikvah cubicles in specially purposed facilities, are twentieth century phenomena linked, in New York City, to demographics and developments in tenement house legislation. Arguably, the decline of the mikvah, described in the 1920s as a "Cinderella among religious institutions," occurred largely because of these factors, along with a rejection of some of the Lower East Side's less appetizing ritual loci, and it need not be attributed to a general fall in orthodoxy per se.5 The archaeological excavation of a mikvah in the 5 Allen Street Russian baths and its interpretation in light of contemporary records and oral histories provides important new data regarding the social and architectural context of ritual immersion at a key point in American Jewish history. Established in 1986, the Eldridge Street Project aimed to restore the Eldridge Street Synagogue, the Ashkenazi community's first purpose-built temple in New York City, erected in 1887 at great cost, and on a grand scale. The Eldridge Street Project purchased the vacant lot at 5 Allen Street behind and adjacent to the synagogue as a staging area for construction equipment and, potentially, for additional exhibition and office space (Figure 1). Intrigued by the unfamiliar idea of a mikvah in a bathhouse, the board decided to hire this...