Somewhere beneath Franklin Street, two and a half levels below the sidewalk, there is a room with dark pink marble floors and a hand-painted ceiling that its owner calls the Schwestine Chapel. This month, if the schedule holds, its first congregants will descend into it in swimsuits, check their phones at the door and sweat beside strangers in a deliberately narrow Russian banya. Then they will go upstairs and eat vareniki in a robe.
Welcome to the new Tribeca, where the status amenity is no longer a parking spot or a private chef but a cold plunge you can share with three of your more interesting acquaintances.
Get SCHWET
SCHWET, the bathhouse and social club that hospitality operator Mauri Waneka is building at 78 Franklin Street, is opening to members and friends in October and to the public in November, Ms. Waneka told Robert Hammond in an interview for the bathing newsletter Culture of Bathe-ing, as reported by the trade site SaunaNews. That is several months behind the spring 2026 opening the project had been listing, SaunaNews notes, which in New York construction terms is practically early.
The circuit, as described: lockers on the way down, then the main bathing room with a mineral hot pool, a cold plunge sized for three or four, and the banya. “It’s almost like you’re in a booth across from someone, close enough that you might have to say hi,” Ms. Waneka said. “We’re forcing it a little.” Then back up to a ground-floor “skin suite” with steam, a Japanese scrub room and infrared, and from there into the lounge for a Slavic menu with Japanese accents: borscht, pickles, tinned fish. The design reference is Budapest’s Gellért Baths. The motto is less Budapest. “You don’t go to sweat, you SCHWET,” Ms. Waneka said.
What’s notable is the business model. SaunaNews observes that the interview “spends as much time on the lounge, the menu and the parties as on the hot rooms,” and concludes that’s where SCHWET expects to make its money. Ms. Waneka, who per her speaker bio built a boutique hotel and members’ club she later sold to Soho House, is explicit that this is not a temple of abstinence. “I want a place where you can have a green juice one day and a great glass of wine the next,” she told Hotel Online, per SaunaNews. Last winter’s listed price was $150 for two and a half hours; current pricing hasn’t been published. Membership, she says, will not be required. “It might be harder to get a reservation,” she allowed, “but it’s important to me that everybody can come.”
The private suite, as franchise
A few blocks south, the sauna is being sold as solitude. SweatHouz, a contrast-therapy chain with more than 100 studios nationally, is opening an 8,000-square-foot Tribeca flagship at 30 Warren Street this month, according to Spa Business, with eight private suites, each pairing an infrared sauna, a cold plunge and a “vitamin C shower.” It is the first of at least 12 planned across Manhattan and Brooklyn, developed with the franchisee Wasi Family Group, with an East Village lease already signed.
“In the city that never sleeps, SweatHouz is where New York finally gets to rest and recover,” the company’s chief executive, Nico Varano Jr., said in the announcement. There is also something called the PentHouz, a private group suite for four to six. The name alone tells you everything about the target customer.
The contrast with SCHWET could not be sharper. One is selling you the company of strangers, the other is selling you sixty minutes away from them. Both are selling heat and cold, which is to say, both are selling the same thing at very different volumes.
Meanwhile, across the river
Brooklyn has not been idle. Bathhouse, the operator that helped start all this in Williamsburg, opened the backyard at its Atlantic Avenue location in Downtown Brooklyn on Oct. 3, adding a heated outdoor pool and a 175°F outdoor sauna, both listed for year-round use, SaunaNews reported. Day passes start at $29, per the company. In a market where SCHWET listed $150, that is the bathhouse equivalent of a slice joint across the street from Per Se.
And Othership, the Toronto-born “social bathhouse” known for sober, guided sauna sessions that function as nightlife, has signed a 14,000-square-foot lease at 201 East 86th Street for a 2027 opening, according to Commercial Observer. The Upper East Side, which spent a century perfecting the art of being seen at lunch, is about to learn to be seen in a towel.
The sauna wars, a status report
Vanity Fair called it the “sauna wars” back in January, and the term has stuck because it is accurate. What began as a wellness fad has turned into a real estate category. Operators are signing long leases on big subterranean boxes, the kind of space that offices and nightclubs used to want, and building elaborate water systems inside them. SCHWET says it runs all its water through reverse osmosis, per SaunaNews. Even Soho House has joined in: its planned NoMad club, announced this week, will include saunas, ice baths and a hammam, per the New York Post.
There are reasonable questions. How many $150 soaks can one ZIP code support? What happens to all these plunge pools when the fashion turns, as fashions do? And is “contrast therapy” medicine, or just a very expensive way to feel your heart rate? We will leave the clinical claims to the clinicians. None of these operators, it should be said, promise to cure anything.
But the social logic is impeccable. New York has always needed rooms where people of different ranks can be undressed together. The Russian and Turkish Baths on East 10th Street have been doing it since 1892. The new places just have better lighting, more expensive scrubs and, in SCHWET’s case, a lounge where you can order a glass of wine in your robe. That is not decadence. That is civilization, with a cold plunge.
The City Politic has reached out to SCHWET, SweatHouz, Bathhouse and Othership for comment and will update this story with any response.
Photo: The pool hall at Budapest’s Gellért Baths, SCHWET’s design reference. Christo / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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