It turns out you don’t have to buy thousand-dollar tickets, endure security and fly more than 12 hours to journey from San Francisco to Moscow—you can simply visit Archimedes Banya in the Bayview. 

The tastefully austere gray palace at 748 Innes Ave. could have been airlifted from Novgorod or Novosibirsk: the apathetic front desk attendants, the socialist-realist murals in shades of gray and yellow, the disorientingly dark-walled tavern full of pelmeni and borscht. 

But the most authentic component is the banya process, one that includes steam rooms so hot they glue contact lenses to eyeballs, a plunge pool so cold it feels like melted ice and bundles of birch branches (venik) with which you can beat your fellow bathers. 

It works like this: You check in at the front desk, where you receive a bathrobe and a bracelet that serves as your locker key, and descend to the only space separated by sex in the sprawling complex. There, you change out of your clothes and retrieve the black plastic sandals and two crisp white towels waiting for you in your locker. 

The majority of bathers don’t choose to wear a swimsuit, so as you move into the banya itself you are greeted by skin—lots and lots of it. 

A man dunks under the waterfall in the cold plunge pool at Archimedes Banya in San Francisco’s Bayview. | Source: Courtesy Archimedes Banya

After showering, you move into the Russian sauna, or parilka, which distinguishes itself by a combination of high temperature with humidity that can be continuously upped by splashing water onto a stove clad with handmade tiles from Russia. A frigid cold plunge beckons sweaty bathers as they emerge glassy-eyed from the saunas, the cycle of alternating hot and cold allegedly a miracle cure (and broken up with breaks for beer and snacks in the upstairs lounge). 

“If you can talk, it’s not hot enough,” said one bather, repeating a saying he learned from Archimedes owner Mikhail Brodsky, whose name is tossed around as if he’s a guru on the top bench thronged with bare bodies. It is a Russian tradition as old as the banya itself to wear a woolen cap to protect your ears from the extreme heat (Russian babushki have also advanced other rationales, such as protecting your hair and not allowing the steam to escape your body).  

The naked arrangement can lead to some awkward moments. Offering a courtesy grin to a man emerging from a pool whose hardware is at eye level leaves you wondering about unintended connotations. A friendly chat with someone new can abruptly have heightened meaning when you recognize you are naked, talking to a stranger who is also naked. 

In a world full of nearly always-clothed bodies, it’s overwhelming to see so many body parts, especially since the men typically outnumber the women 9 to 1—and 9 out of 10 bathers choose to forego clothing. 

Archimedes Banya in San Francisco’s Bayview has a number of soaking pools. | Source: Courtesy Archimedes Banya

But something happens as you move through the banya cycles and your eyes adjust to the steam. Bodies are simply bodies, and the chatter starts to seem like what it is: casual. Plus, you are beginning to feel amazing, more relaxed than you can remember. A condition some have nicknamed “banya brain” has set in.  

There’s a tile in the hallway of steam rooms at Archimedes depicting a kerchiefed woman with plump breasts beating the back of an old man with that bundle of branches. “Banya is the second life,” the image reads in Russian, attesting to the centrality of the bathhouse in Russian culture. 

The banya is where business deals are done, as Viggo Mortensen immortalized for Western audiences in Eastern Promises. There’s nowhere to hide a weapon, and no way to wear a wire. You reveal your tattoos, which in the Russian criminal underworld declare allegiances and even your biography. It’s where the world turns topsy turvy and begins anew, as in the Academy Award-winning film Irony of Fate, which is shown every New Year’s Eve in Russia. In the movie, lovers accidentally exchange partners after a bathhouse visit, thanks to identical-looking communist-bloc buildings.

“It’s the idea that you open up your pores and sweat out all the evilness, all the nastiness,” said Ethan Pollock, author of Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse and a professor of history at Brown University.  

“The banya is a social space that speaks to a Russian sense of leveling, of egalitarianism, and people’s outside identity is stripped bare,” Pollock said. 

A bundle of branches (venik) sits on a plunge pool at Archimedes Banya in San Francisco’s Bayview. | Source: Julie Zigoris/The Standard

In a world where we are constantly distracted, there’s a modern-day magic that happens at the banya, a contemporary parallel to that historic past. Freed from devices and with nothing to do but talk, you shed your props in the same way it’s been done for centuries throughout Russia. You lose your hangups and your concerns, your worries draining out of your oh-so-open pores. 

You’ll find languorous bodies scattered throughout the Archimedes complex that spans four levels and includes a cafe, spa, TV room and roof deck: bathrobed men snoozing on extra-wide easy chairs, beer drinkers stretched out in the café, bodies lounging beside the lukewarm pool. 

But the banya can also be brutal. 

“Bend over and brace your legs,” the bathhouse assistant said while preparing for an aromatherapy treatment on a recent Friday. She clutched bundles of birch and oak branches meant to improve circulation and increase heat. The bodies on the top bench instantly complied, and the woman—in a black midriff top and short shorts—walked down the row, beating the bare back of each bather. 

A bundle of branches (venik) soak in water at Archimedes Banya. | Source: Courtesy Archimedes Banya

She alternated between three scents—peppermint, bergamot and beer citrus—flexing her abs as she stood on the top and hottest bench to whip a towel through the air (a move that ups the temperature and steam even further that another bather nicknamed the “Misha-copter” in honor of the bathhouse owner).

“Happy Friday!” she called out, and the sweaty bathers burst into applause. 

The sauna can be an endurance competition. 

“Good ideas come to you when you’re sitting naked in a bathtub,” said Brodsky, the owner and founder of Archimedes, referring to the bathhouse’s namesake, a Greek mathematician who discovered the law of buoyancy while in his soaking tub. 

Brodsky himself received the nickname Archimedes at the famed Sanduny Baths in Moscow as a banya-obsessed Ph.D. student. Brodsky had first tried the banya when he was 19 years old in Western Siberia and was immediately hooked. 

“I am the Archimedes of the 21st century,” Brodsky said, noting they are both applied mathematicians. To most people in the bathhouse, Brodsky is simply “Misha,” the ruler of his bathhouse kingdom. In case there is any doubt, he sports a gray bathing cap that says “Boss.”

Mikhail Brodsky, owner and founder of Archimedes Banya in the Bayview, smiles at his bathhouse. | Source: Julie Zigoris/The Standard

He came to California in 1989 to work as a research professor at the University of California Berkeley and spent 11 years there before opening his bathhouse on New Year’s Eve in 2011 after more than a decade of work to realize his dream. He moved on from Berkeley to become the president of Oakland’s Lincoln University, where he still works today—while also visiting the banya twice a week. 

“The steam gives you energy and invigorates you,” he said, pointing out that at 72, he had just played a soccer game. He has become a student of world bathhouse cultures, and Archimedes represents not only the Russian tradition but a blend with Turkish and Finnish styles (there is a dry sauna and a traditional steam room on-site). 

The terrace at Archimedes Banya in the Bayview has a view of San Francisco. | Source: Julie Zigoris/The Standard

Archimedes continues to expand its offerings, with comedy nights and brunches, clothing optional rooftop yoga and international bathhouse tours. Most importantly, the banya is a social place, Brodsky said. 

It’s also the only co-ed clothing optional bathhouse in the world, according to him. 

“Everyone said it was crazy, that there was no way we could do it,” Brodsky said. “But San Francisco allowed it.” It’s one of the few differences from the Russian banya, where women are always separated from men. 

“You need to shock with a marketing tool,” he said. “And it’s worked.” 

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San Francisco could see the return of a gay sex venue as soon as June now that the Board of Supervisors has thrown its support behind removing prohibitions that have kept such establishments from opening their doors in the city’s historic LGBTQ neighborhoods. The decision also paves the way for a traditional gay bathhouse to once again operate in the City-by-the-Bay.

At its April 26 meeting the board voted 11-0 in support of a zoning change that allows gay bathhouses and other adult sex venues to operate in the Castro, Tenderloin, and most of South of Market. It needs to vote a second time at its May 3 meeting before the city code update is sent to the desk of Mayor London Breed, who is not expected to veto it.

The changes should become effective in Pride Month. Once they do Eros, the sex club for queer and trans men, will reopen its doors at 132 Turk Street. After vacating its upper Market Street location in December, Eros began remodeling and moving into its new space, where the gay Bulldog Baths had operated in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman has led the legislative push to allow for the return of gay bathhouses in the city. His efforts saw the lifting in early 2021 of a rule that prevented adult sex venues from having rooms with locked doors, a feature common in gay bathhouses around the globe. The only such venue left in the Bay Area is Steamworks Baths in Berkeley.

Put in place during the AIDS epidemic, the restriction no longer was needed due to HIV becoming a manageable disease and new infections in San Francisco precipitously dropping in recent years, argued Mandelman and LGBTQ health officials. But a decision by Zoning Administrator Corey Teague in December 2020 to define adult sex venues in the city’s health code as being a type of adult business meant they were still broadly banned in the city, including in the three LGBTQ cultural districts.

Thus, Mandelman came back to his colleagues with a second code amendment to define adult sex venues as businesses that include retail sales and service uses. It also specifies that they “may include bathhouse facilities such as pools, tubs, or steam rooms, and are eligible for a Limited Live Performance permit.”

The new zoning outright allows adult sex venues to operate 24/7 in the Castro and on upper Market Street between Octavia Boulevard and Castro Street. The change also makes way for such businesses to operate in much of SOMA and the Tenderloin.

The businesses can seek approval from the planning commission to operate in the eastern SOMA, the Mission, Dogpatch, and Bayview, and if they want to operate between 2 and 6 am in those locations. Adult businesses remain banned in the Chinatown Community Business District.

After the supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee voted April 25 a second time in support of the zoning change, Chair District 7 Supervisor Myrna Melgar expedited having the full board vote on it Tuesday. The decision sets up the supervisors to cast a final vote next week.

“I hope this is it,” Mandelman told the Bay Area Reporter of having to update the city’s rules for gay bathhouses and adult sex venues. “I hope this opens the door for some entrepreneurs and some really great establishments to open up. In short time it will allow for Eros to open.”

Eros co-owner Ken Rowe noted during the April 11 land use committee hearing that the gay- and trans-owned business operates similar to a “day spa” with daytime and evening hours and not as a 24-hour venue. Since it opened in 1992, the business has worked “to exceed,” Rowe noted, the requirements the city has placed on commercial sex venues.

“We have been able to weather the crises of AIDS and STIs, the drug crisis, and we find ourselves the only gay commercial sex venue to remain in business post the COVID closures imposed,” said Rowe, referring to the closure in 2020 of SOMA sex club Blow Buddies.

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After 30 years, Castro Gay Sex Club and Sauna Eros (2051 Market St.) has announced that it will move to a new, unknown location.

Eros owner Ken Rowe told BrokeAss Stuart this week that the club is closing and they have signed a new lease “closer to downtown”.

It is currently unclear when Eros will officially close its doors on Market Street, but a moving celebration is scheduled for Sunday, December 12th.

Eros is from 2051 Market St. | Image: Google

“We’re moving, but we want you to take a look around, celebrate with us again,” Rowe said on Facebook. “[A]and find out more about our exciting new opening in 2022. “

Hoodline asked Eros for comment but received no response.

Eros opened on Market Street in 1992 at the height of the AIDS epidemic for at least three decades.

A now removed real estate listing from last year indicated the two-story, roughly 7,040-square-foot building was up for sale at an undisclosed price.

“We don’t want to say too much about the new location because we’re working with the town hall and stakeholders to get the development approved in the near future,” Rowe told BrokeAss Stuart Has a firm grip on the status quo. Hopefully changes will be proposed very soon. “

“Eros is the only gay sex club in town right now, so SF will have a few months without a legal sex club,” added Rowe.

Photo: Ken Rowe / Instagram

In February 2020, before the COVID-19 outbreak began, District 8 supervisor Rafael Mandelman introduced law that would lift the city’s bathhouse ban, which has been in place since 1984.

The law passed the Board of Directors in July 2020 and was passed by the Ministry of Health in January 2021. However, the opening of a new bathhouse was blocked by zoning issues with the SF planning department.

Hoodline readers will recall that SoMa’s Blow Buddies closed after 32 years in business last year, as did the Watergarden bathhouse in San Jose, which had been in operation since 1977. Berkeley’s Steamworks at 2107 4th St. will remain open.

While many companies struggled to stay open during the pandemic, Rowe said in an interview with Hoodline last year, “We assume we will roll with this pandemic as we did with HIV.”

Update, 4 p.m.: Ken Rowe announced to Hoodline that Eros will officially close its doors at its Market St. location on Wednesday, December 15th.

“Our lease expired in the summer and we were able to get an extension through the end of the year,” said Rowe. “Our rent would go up.”

“The landlords here have been great and they only bought the building a little over a year ago,” added Rowe. “They look at their own investments and we understand that.”

Rowe currently declined to indicate Eros’ new location due to ongoing problems with the planning code.

Rowe tells Hoodline that if the city doesn’t make the changes to the planning code, Eros can terminate the lease. “It might or may not all come together,” Rowe said.

Rowe says he is disappointed that Eros will leave the Castro after three decades. “When the founders started Eros, they wanted to be right on Main Street, not hidden in a remote part of town,” Rowe said.

Rowe says they spent a lot of time looking for a new location at the Castro but were unsuccessful. “The people we spoke to weren’t interested in contacting us,” Rowe said.

Rowe tells Hoodline that they worked with both the Office of District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman and the Castro / Upper Market Community Benefit District to find a new location.

Although they couldn’t stay at Castro, Rowe is hoping Eros will reopen in one of the queer cultural districts like the Transgender District or the Leather & LGBTQ District.

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