Rally To Reopen Downtown Bathhouse

Manhattan residents attended a rally yesterday urging the city to renovate the LaGuardia Bathhouse on the Lower East Side so it can reopen as a recreation and senior center.

The building was turned into a recreation center in the 1930s, with a swimming pool, locker rooms, and a gym, but it has been closed since the early 1970s and in poor condition, officials said.

"This building has been a blight on this neighborhood for three decades," a City Council Member of Lower Manhattan, Alan Gerson, said yesterday.

He urged the city to turn the downtown building, which he called an eyesore, into a recreational facility.