Granddaughter of Camac Baths founder hopes bathhouse memorabilia will be included in the new Midwood condos

Linda Leibowitz was heartbroken when her childhood home was demolished to make way for a new 32-story condominium in the heart of Philadelphia’s Gayborhood in Center City.

Her grandfather, Alexander Lucker, opened the Camac Baths in 1929 and lived at 204 S. 12th St.

The house had been part of a maze of buildings that were interconnected and made up the Camac Baths, and later, the 12th Street Gym. Years later, Leibowitz lived there from the age of 15 months until she was 16 years old.

Leibowitz, 74, loved growing up in the Center City neighborhood. Long after she became an adult, she would drive by the house to say hello to it.

So Leibowitz, a retired elementary school counselor and a semi-retired university administrator, took particular interest in a recent Inquirer article about a public art project planned for the new condo tower that Midwood Investment and Development is completing at the site of her former home.

The firm had been criticized for white-washing the mural of queer Latina activist Gloria Casarez painted on the 12th Street Gym before demolishing much of the block.

“Before the mural was there, we had a huge neon sign there that said, ‘Camac Baths Health Club’ with a huge arrow pointing towards the baths,” Leibowitz told The Inquirer. “I have framed the original flyer that my grandfather put out all those years ago [announcing the baths were opening].”

» READ MORE: Some question whether the new public art approved for Midwood tower keeps the promise to honor Black and LGBTQ history

She has other memorabilia in her Havertown home.

There are signs that say: “Turkish Bath,” and “Personal lockers, $1 per year,” and “Buzzer must ring at end of your soap wash.”

When she read that Midwood had promised to incorporate the site’s history in its new public art, Liebowitz sent an email to The Inquirer to say she would like to talk with the developer about incorporating the signs into the lobby of the new building.

“I thought, what can I do with these pieces to keep some of those memories alive?” Leibowitz said. She and her husband are planning to move into a condo this summer .

Asked for comment, a Midwood representative said the company would reach out to speak to her and asked for Leibowitz’s contact information.

Leibowitz said she is pleased: “It shows that maybe they do care about the history they’re sitting on. And I would be thrilled to know that (the Camac memorabilia) have a home.”

The Camac Baths began as a way for recent Jewish immigrants to continue the health practices they used in Eastern Europe and Russia.

“It started very much more of a Jewish Shvitz (or sweat baths) that people had in the old country as a health ritual,” Leibowitz said. “They would sweat and have the steam bath, or the Turkish bath or the Russian bath with the playtza (oak) leaves.”

Part of that tradition was that fathers would take their sons to the baths as part of a ritual custom. “There are so many people out there who did go to Camac with their grandfathers or fathers and probably have great memories of it.”

“There were so many different cultures that had history in that one building.”

Leibowitz said the Camac was very popular and “a lot of famous people came through its doors.”

“My father used to come home and one day he might say that [the actor] Eddie Fisher came by the baths today,” said Leibowitz. Eddie Fisher, for those who aren’t familiar, was a Philadelphia-born actor who became famous for divorcing the actress Debbie Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor in 1959. Eddie Fisher was also the father of Carrie Fisher, Princess Leia in Star Wars.

On another day, Leibowitz said her father, who would not tell the media about patrons who visited the baths, told his family that Ed McMahon, the television announcer and sidekick to Johnny Carson, had dropped by.

Other family members said they heard that Joey Bishop and Merv Griffin were also bath clients, but Leibowitz doesn’t know that for certain.

When she was young and her family traveled on vacations, they would walk through airports, and people would recognize her father and call out, “‘Hey, Camac,’ My father was pretty well known.”

About 10 years after the baths opened, in the late 1930s, the baths also became a place where gay, white men felt safe to meet, said Oscar Beisert, an architectural historian and founder of The Keeping Society of Philadelphia, who nominated the Camac Baths for historic designation.

But only a portion of the buildings at 204 S. 12th St. were designated historic. The new condos face 12th Street on a block surrounded by the historic alleys of Camac, Chancellor and St. James streets, Beisert said. The only building that was preserved was the building at the corner of Camac and Chancellor, where the original entrance to the Camac Baths was located.

Beisert had also nominated the rowhouse where Leibowitz lived because, a century earlier, it had been the home of Henry Minton, a Black American caterer and restaurant owner. Minton became a wealthy businessman who supported the abolitionist movement against slavery.

Beisert included in his Minton nomination that there were reports that the abolition leader John Brown, who conducted a raid at Harper’s Ferry, had spent a night at the house on his way to the raid.

Leibowitz said she knew nothing about Henry Minton’s connection to the house until Beisert and other preservationists nominated it for historic designation.

“I did not know I lived in a historical building that was tied to the Underground Railroad.”

“When I read everything Oscar wrote, I was just floored,” Leibowitz said. “I did not know I lived in a historical building that was tied to the Underground Railroad.”

Beisert said the Philadelphia Historic Commission agreed to designate a portion of the Camac Baths as historic and one building of the complex of buildings that nearly took up a whole block has been preserved.

The commission accepted the historic significance of the Camac Baths, representing both Jewish and gay white male history, he said, but did not deem the Henry Minton house, which is Black history, as significant.

“There were so many different cultures that had history in that one building, in that one block,” Leibowitz said. “It’s [the new tower] sitting on this legacy of the Minton House, the Camac and the wonderful experience of having the 12th Street Gym here all those years…

“I was supporting the history of the Camac, but now I really feel responsibility to support the history [of Henry Minton] that came before it.”