"By the time you got up to the bathhouse it burned," she added.
Alycia Bennett of Hampstead, N.H., who was stung while wading with her 10-year-old daughter, Emma, said, "When we got to the bathhouse it was complete chaos, mayhem".
That America Online chat room, WestchesterNYm4m, is reminiscent of pre-AIDS bathhouses: it is anonymous, it is local and it is largely about arranging in-person sexual encounters.
When the virus first enters a high-risk group like heroin users, urban prostitutes or habitués of gay bathhouses, it usually infects 30 to 60 percent of the cohort within a few years, studies have shown.
While some men may wear underwear or fetish-wear, in most bathhouses it is unusual for customers to remain fully or even partially dressed in street clothes.
Its glowing neon sign has lit up the city's south-east quadrant for nearly a century (no, it's not a bathhouse – wait, it might have been at one time, Portland has a downright filthy history).
Before it was buried under silt, dust and its own collapsing buildings, it was a prosperous hard-working town, the kind where the mule drivers' union would have its own bathhouse (as it apparently did) with steam rooms, a pool and a gym.
It was originally a hotel, then a gay bathhouse, and it has retained a lot of the historic features and photographs of the original building.
In a luscious converted Turkish bathhouse setting, it's half flirtatious, gin-cocktail mingling spot and half modern American restaurant with an inquisitively playful dinner menu.
A section of the beach from the bathhouse south, it was finally decided, would be cordoned off from fall to spring to accommodate dogs yearning to run free.
The hammam, a vitality pool with a waterfall, and steam and sauna are in the same spacious bathhouse, making it easy to go from one to the next and maintain a relaxed state.
