I’m sitting on a patio outside ASCEND climbing gym in Point Breeze with a cool, sopping wet towel draped over my head and shoulders, my feet in buckets of warm water, having a psychedelic experience while stone-cold sober.
String lights twinkle in a zig zag pattern above my head. “Eternal Light” by the Free Nationals, a song too groovy not to move with, pulses from a speaker nearby, as my fellow patrons shyly nod and sway. Around me, people are having quiet conversations, but my altered attention is too absorbed by the sounds of the wet towel crinkling around my ears to eavesdrop. It’s a Tuesday at Bad Sauna, and I am having one of the most vivid sensory experiences of my life.
Not every night at Bad Sauna — “bad” here meaning “bath,” as it does in several European languages — involves mild, temperature-induced psychedelia. (That’s reserved to every other Tuesday, when proprietor Greg Schaffer offers a traditional treatment called venik platza, in which boughs and leaves of birch are used to thwack and buff the body, as well as douse the recipient alternately with cool water and steam, before dunking in a cold plunge and finally vibing out, looking like a wet-towel babuska.) But every night at Bad Sauna is an experience, a combination of powerful sensory input, encountering community, and the deep pleasure of truly feeling rested.
A visit to Bad Sauna might include bouts of steam bathing in a Scandinavian-style sauna, installed by Schaffer in a nondescript black shipping container; bracing dips into one of three cold plunges; chatting up a stranger by the fire pit as you discuss the book you saw them reading; and sipping tea in an anti-gravity chair as a local DJ spins mellow jams. The scheduling includes weekly women’s nights, bi-weekly trans nights, DJs every Thursday, Sunday silent sessions, and occasional special programming for holidays such as Rosh Hashanah.
Schaffer became interested in communal sweat bathing after a friend took him to Archimedes Banya, an iconic Russian bathhouse on the shores of the San Francisco Bay.
“It was a very liberating experience and a different type of third space,” he tells City Paper. “I wasn’t really going to bars anymore and just was kind of interested in finding a space where I could interact with people. Bathhouses are pretty unique in the way in which they strip down pretense and make it a lot easier to connect with people on a genuine level.”
These themes of liberation, facilitating the kinds of connections that community is made of, as well as another key principle — rest — are the pillars upon which Bad Sauna stands. Schaffer, who studied history, has done deep research about sweat bathing traditions, both locally and around the world. In conversation and in his “Bad News” newsletter, you’ll be treated to revelations about local history — did you know Pittsburgh’s first public bath house was operated by the city’s wealthiest Black businessman, John B. Vashon, and served as a station on the Underground Railroad?! — casual references to philosophers, or wisdom from Rimus Kavaliauskas, the president of the International Bath Academy in Lithuania, where Schffer studied.
Quoting him, Schaffer says, “The expression that I love — I think about it constantly when I’m talking about and doing this stuff — is ‘universal human heritage,’” before casually adding, “Right now, I’m researching about the evolution of the sweat gland.”
And indeed, sweat bathing has arisen in different cultures all over the world, from the Americas to Africa to Ireland and so much more. Pick just about any place on the map, and you’ll find a different sweaty regional tradition. The number and variety of different programming offered at Bad Sauna speaks to how much focus Schaffer puts on creating a liberatory environment. There is no dress code in the sauna, a fact which plays a more meaningful role in the communal experience than meets the eye.
“There’s a lot more socially constructed identity carried in clothing,” Schaffer points out. Stripped of the usual identity we wear in our everyday clothes, we may find ourselves striking up a conversation with someone we’d shy away from if we saw them in the street. As Schaffer says, “We’re all equals in the steamer.”
“I could feel the freedom of other people,” sauna patron Griffin Hans says of his first visit to Bad Sauna. “Everyone was there to do the same thing, but free to be themselves. It felt like everyone was at peace.”
For Hans, affordability and access are other factors that contribute to the equalizing and liberating aspects of the sauna. “It’s an important quality of life improvement to have access [to a space like Bad Sauna]. When you can’t afford a fancy athletic club, it’s still important to have a place to rest and relax and be at peace.”
Offering a place of rest, divorced from the optimization culture that has permeated wellness spaces, is a major focus for Schaffer. “Sauna and cold plunge are often described as a form of therapy — contrast therapy — re-defining these activities in terms of self-improvement, thus making them legible to anyone whose chief concern is productivity,” he writes in his “On the Geneaology of a Bad Sauna” series. “Far less is said about how a sauna might simply make you feel good.”
Most of the work that goes into Bad Sauna, Schaffer points out, isn’t seen by the patrons. It’s been traveling around Europe to learn sweat bathing traditions and practices; choosing the right materials for inside the sauna and understanding the mechanics of steam; heck, even researching sweat glands. One thing that is hard to miss, though, is how he cultivates community.
“I try to think of community as a practice, not like a discrete entity. It’s something we do,” he says. Four nights a week, this sauna community is rolling languidly along. Anybody is welcome to join. He just suggests you bring a robe.
