Notes on building an outdoor community sauna in a community garden in the East Village, NYC
Hi r/sauna ~
I'm Gabe, founder of CUL DE SAC, a small nonprofit sauna project in New York.
Since last November, we've hosted 12 proof-of-concept pop-ups transforming NYC's parks and plazas into open-air bathhouses while we work towards our permanent space. Over ten months, we've had 3,500+ guests, 1,500+ sauna sessions, and 4 free community nights offered in partnership with some of the city's community organizations and resource centers.
We have two saunas: both are red cedar lined with layers of UV-stabilized polymer, so they're translucent and take in the sun on top of what our two Harvia wood stoves put out. They runs around 190°F (88°C), and we burn white oak, ash, hickory, and sugar maple 12" split firewood. We use eucalyptus and some select essential oils for infusions every hour during operating hours.
A few things I've learned from trying to make an outdoor community sauna work in one of the hardest real-estate and permitting environments in the country:
- NEW YORK CITY HAS AN ABUNDANCE OF SPACE BUT LITTLE MEANS TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT
NYC's outdoor space comes in a lot of flavors: parks, privately owned public plazas, open streets, community gardens, business improvement districts. Each has its own gatekeepers and layers of bureacracy. A parks permit would have cost thousands we didn't have for an untested idea. Open streets had vendor rules and, for reasons I still don't entirely understand, didn't want people in swimsuits. After two months of pitching every venue with outdoor space that would listen to me, I finally found my way to a community garden that said yes. La Plaza was a rubble lot until LatinX activists and neighbors cleared it in 1976, turning it into a haven for gardening, community, and performance. A sauna made sense to them - for reasons that are now clear - and they've been an invaluable partner in bringing our vision to life.
- THE NORDICS OPENED THE DOORS
When I initially pitched this around the city, reactions were split. Some people told me the permitting would kill us. Others said some version of "my family is from Finland, the sauna was how you saw your neighbors, let me introduce you to someone who might be able to help." Almost every door that opened came through that second group, and it's how we found our way to La Plaza, and later others that opened their doors to us.
- NEW YORK USED TO BE A BATHING CITY
As I did more research and talked to people, I learned that New York City actually has a rich bathing history. The Lenape built sweat lodges on stream banks so they could plunge after, and threw hemlock and horsemint on the stones. In the 1920s, the city's public baths delivered 7.5 million baths a year. For scale, Oslo Badstuforening had 340K visitors last year. Those municipal baths were built for throughput, with 20-minute limits and no socializing, so immigrant neighborhoods started building their own. Finnish immigrants in Sunset Park put saunas in alongside the first cooperative housing in the US. In the LES, men spent whole days at the schvitz playing cards and settling disputes. Today the city runs zero public bathhouses, and most private ones charge $60 to $100.
- HEAT TRULY IS THE GREAT STATUS LEVELER
Perhaps nowhere is social stratification more apparent than New York City. And yet, on an average Saturday at CUL DES SAC, the bench might have a woman who's lived on Avenue C since the Ford administration sweating next to a recent grad with last night's warehouse stamp still on his wrist. At 190 degrees F, no one has the energy to perform. At a night we hosted at Domino Park in February, 50+ people packed into one sauna for a guided sound and meditation performance and I looked around and couldn't find a single person on their phone. Martha Newson and Rachael McGrath recently published a study linking group sauna use to measurable gains in social bonding, and it corroborates what we see on the ground.
- NEW YORKERS DO, IN FACT, GO OUTSIDE IN THE WINTER
The question i got most early on was whether New Yorkers would sit outside in the dead of Winter, especially when they have so many options to choose from that keep them cozy inside. The February night sold out hours ahead, 350+ people. And snowy weekends were some of our busiest days of operation.
WHAT'S NEXT:
We're trying to keep the sauna going all winter with a 4-month residency. 6 days and 42+ hours per week. So a question for anyone running an outdoor public or community sauna in a city: what does permitting look like where you are, and how did you navigate it? Any tips or best practices for keeping the sauna warm during the cold months?
Happy to answer anything about our build or operation.
Posted Sep 25, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC