Orchard Beach Bathhouse
14 Park Drive | also 8 Park Drive, 6 Park Drive, 1 Orchard Beach | Pelham Bay Park | built 1935
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The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.
Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.
- 1934
Robert Moses calls the old Orchard Beach a monstrosity and moves to clear its bungalow colony
Before the bathhouse, this shore held a private bungalow colony and a set of newly finished beach improvements, including a seawall and bathhouses. Park Commissioner Robert Moses unveiled his replacement plan on February 27, 1934, calling the existing beach a "monstrosity," faulting the design of its new seawall and bathhouses, and accusing campers with Tammany ties of "monopolizing" it. After courts ruled in mid-May 1934 that the city could break the campers' leases, the bungalow colony was demolished.
- 1935
Aymar Embury II's team gives the bathhouse a concave plan with twin curving colonnades
The final design, released to the public in July 1935, showed two curving colonnades meeting at a raised central terrace. Between spring 1934 and summer 1935 the plan had flipped from convex to concave, and the Landmarks Preservation Commission notes that it closely resembles the winning 1930s scheme by Carlu, Boileau and Azema for rebuilding the Trocadero in Paris. Robert A. Caro credits Moses with proposing the colonnade itself.
“…the plan of the bath house was revised from convex to concave between Spring 1934 and Summer 1935…”
- 1936
Orchard Beach opens before 10,000 people with fireworks spelling out its name
Only part of the south section of the bathhouse was finished, with showers and lockers for about 2,300 people; the colonnade was still a bare steel frame. Some 4,000 WPA relief workers had worked around the clock in three shifts to get this far. Mayor LaGuardia and Robert Moses attended, George Mand of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce won cheers by calling it the Riviera of New York City, and fireworks spelled out "Orchard Beach" in fiery letters.
“On July 25, 1936, the partially built facility was opened with much fanfare.”
- 1938
A hurricane does $10,000 in damage to the bathhouse a year after its completion
A hurricane in 1938 did $50,000 in damage to Orchard Beach, $10,000 of it to the bathhouse, which had been finished only the year before. The storm was one of several early troubles for the new beach, along with rowdy crowds and operating costs that ran above the original estimates.
- 1980
Parks plans a rehabilitation of the run-down bathhouse for its fiftieth anniversary
After neglect through the 1970s, including a 1974 proposal, later rejected, to put a theater where the north locker room stood, Orchard Beach had a reputation by 1980 as unsanitary and unsafe. That year the Parks Department began planning a rehabilitation to coincide with the beach's fiftieth anniversary in 1986, and over $1,000,000 was spent; the most visible change was new aluminum doors on the cafeteria. The landmark report notes that the work was never completed, leaving parts of the bathhouse, including the north locker room, closed to the public.
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