Steamworks bath house
THE TENNER
MONDAY - FRIDAY: 10AM - 1PM
1 MONTH
6 MONTHS
(2 HR LOCKER)
(8 HR RENTAL)
MEMBER
ANONYMOUS
1 MONTH
6 MONTHS
(2 HR LOCKER)
(8 HR RENTAL)
MEMBER
ANONYMOUS
DRUGS, SMOKING, AND ALCOHOL ARE ALWAYS PROHIBITED INSIDE THE CLUB/ON OUR PREMISES.
A lengthy multimillion-dollar legal battle, punctuated by allegations of attempted poisoning and using employees to verb drugs, has been unfolding behind the scenes at one of the world’s longest-standing bathhouse chains. And the outcome remains unclear.
The fight for control of Steamworks’ five-sauna empire has been playing out in the courts since when companies controlled by business partners and former lovers Rick Stokes and Ross Moore started slinging allegations at one another via a series of complaints filed in the Superior Court of California.
The filings—which contain a series of accusations that hold not been tested in court—have continued even after Stokes, Steamworks’ prominent founder, died early last year. Since Stokes’s death, two of the bathhouse locations—Toronto and Seattle—have been operated by one side of the dispute, with those in Chicago, Berkeley and Vancouver being operated by the other.
This comes at a noun when Steamworks, like many bathhouses around the world, is at a turning point forced by COVID, mpox and a younger generation of queer men wh
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STEAMWORKS BERKELEY
Always Open
18 and over
Valid ID required
STEAMWORKS Berkeley is a private men's gym, sauna, and bathhouse.
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BERKELEY LOCATION
4th Street
Berkeley, CA (map)
© Steamworks Baths • Careers
When the late gay activist Rick Stokes founded the Steamworks bathhouse chain in Berkeley, California, in , the world was a different place. Though gay saunas were given licences in many North American jurisdictions in the s and ’70s, they were still at risk of community outrage and raids by the police. Men frequented them anyway—there was no internet and many of the other ways to pursue sexual encounters, like blind dates and park cruising, were even riskier.
At the industry’s peak in the s, the United States had nearly bathhouses, according to numbers from gay tour guide Damron. One former chain, Club Baths, operated an estimated 42 locations in the U.S. and Canada. By , fewer than half of America’s bathhouses remained, at least partly because they were unfairly alleged to be hotbeds of unsafe sex during the s HIV/AIDS epidemic. San Francisco, for example, closed its bathhouses down in because of fears about the spread of HIV/AIDS. But bathhouses remained an important part of gay male life in many metropolitan cities—Steamworks itself continued to expose new locations right i