Older Detroit houses without sink in bathroom question...

[carlscomputers]

There are houses in the Michigan Ave./ West Grand Blvd area that don't have a sink in the bathroom? Can any of the architectural members shed any light on this? Is that unique to Detroit? or was it not a requirement way back when to have a sink in the bathroom?

[Detroitnerd]

I read a statistic that something like 40 percent of homes in 1941 had no indoor plumbing.

[laphoque]

I saw this in Europe. I'd reckon it's just an old way of doing things. See water closet.

[carlscomputers]

I read a statistic that something like 40 percent of homes in 1941 had no indoor plumbing.

It has a tub & toilet, but no sink?

[Detroitnerd]

It has a tub & toilet, but no sink?

I likely have the exact percentage wrong, as I'm going from memory, but in his 1947 book "Inside USA," journalist John Gunther ran through some surprising statistics about the United States. One of them was an eyebrow-raising number of homes without ANY INDOOR PLUMBING WHATSOEVER. Of course, Detroit was a mostly modern city, built up largely 1910-1930, so I'm going to say that most Detroit homes had indoor plumbing. But it was still a precious commodity, and early designs for living might not have had such amenities as a huge double-sink in a bathroom, especially in a working-class neighborhood. There's a sink in the kitchen, ferchrissakes.

[jjw]

I had a half-bath in a home with shower and toilet-no sink. My dad used to use it and then sit down to eat dinner. I always wondered if he washed his hands in the shower or just didn't bother.

[EastsideAl]

A lot of older houses were built this way, and it's quite common in east coast cities and outside of the U.S. A sink wasn't thought of as a necessary part of a bathroom, but something for more general use. Having a big one in the kitchen is enough. Such an arrangement was also convenient in that it allowed others in the home to use the sink for whatever they needed to do while the toilet and/or tub is in use, particularly so in dwellings that only had one sink that was used for all purposes.

[Zacha341]

Yikes! I am an avid hand-washer, doing so as soon as I come into the house and must have a sink in the bathroom. I've seen some older homes with a very tiny sink with a toilet but never one without a sink...

I had a half-bath in a home with shower and toilet-no sink. My dad used to use it and then sit down to eat dinner. I always wondered if he washed his hands in the shower or just didn't bother.

[Jimaz]

My grandparents had no indoor plumbing in their Nebraska farmhouse. Instead of a sink they'd use a rather ornate portable porcelain basin with a matching pitcher for the water. It was usually kept in the bedroom. My understanding was that that was the standard in the old days.

[SWMAP]

My house built in 1900 had no bathroom originally so I was told. Somehow you can tell from the pipe outside. Lot's of time people had a bucket of water, soap and towel on the back porch.

Unsure why a toilet & bath would be added but no sink. Maybe it just made more sense then.

[lalynch]

My Dad was born in a Philadelphia row house in 1918. The home had indoor plumbing at the time but the outhouse was still in the backyard. It was in the North Philadelphia neighborhood of Nicetown.

[East Detroit]

I would say that less than 40% of men using public bathrooms actually wash their hands, and less than 25% wash their hands for more than 2 seconds. So, sure, probably don't need a sink in the bathroom.

[JBMcB]

My parent's house in Grosse Pointe Woods was built in the 30's [[or possibly 20's). The original first floor bathroom only had a toilet and a bathtub, no sink. They had to knock a wall down into a neighboring closet to make room for one. The upstairs bathroom had a sink, though. I think the logic was that the kitchen was just down the hall - if you needed to wash your hands you'd just do it in the kitchen.

[hamtown mike]

Many older homes that I have been in, including my own [[hamtramck 1930's) have a corner sink in the bathroom. They've always seemed odd as if they were stuck in later as an after thought.

[Danny]

Most homes in Detroit and other areas before 1935 just have a 'water closet' a tub and toilet no sink. But sinks were in place in bathrooms in most Detroit homes between 1915 to 1935 in family flats, gable styled bungalows, colonials, luxury styled colonials, ranches, apts, luxury apts, studios, Dutch colonials, bungalows, tudors and money more.

My step mother's old home in Roselawn St had a water closet upstairs, never been use in over 20 years still intact and well preserved.

[pffft]

My grandparents had no indoor plumbing in their Nebraska farmhouse. Instead of a sink they'd use a rather ornate portable porcelain basin with a matching pitcher for the water. It was usually kept in the bedroom. My understanding was that that was the standard in the old days.

This is exactly it...everybody washed hands in the basin in their bedrooms.
The practice of the dresser top basin died out once everybody had sinks in their bathrooms.

[pffft]

p.s. Think about it, in the outhouse days, there was no sink out there...you had to go inside to the kitchen sink or to your bathroom basin to wash, so the two activities were separate...

[One Shot]

Washing your hands in the kitchen sink just seems gross to me due to the fact it's a food prep area.

[SWMAP]

Now we know - but then they didn't know.

I keep a solution of diluted bleach in a spray bottle near my fine old cast-iron kitchen sink on porcelain legs. I spray the bottom and sides every day. I do come in from working outside in the dirt and wash my hands there - and that's something you are not supposed to do.

[DetroitTeacher]

My 1920 built farmhouse had no bathroom at all! The bathroom that is now here used to be a jelly closet [[right off the dining room...yuk). When gutting my bathroom, I got it down to the original wallpaper behind the tub walls. It was pretty amazing to see that, really. I left the wallpaper up and put the "waterproof board stuff" up over it. I really wish I had a bigger bathroom, located anywhere else except off the dining room!

[13074Glenfield]

I grew up in an East Side neighborhood of homes built in the 1910s- 20s. We had a sink in the bathroom and I'm pretty sure all my friends did, too. This is the first I've ever heard of bathrooms without sinks. Pretty interesting.

[gazhekwe]

We have been in many houses, some with plumbing and some without. The ones without had the basin and pitcher in the kitchen, AND a kitchen sink that drained straight outside. So you washed in the basin, not in the kitchen sink. One had a bucket of water on a bench outside the door in the summer, with a towel on a nail above. In winter, that bucket would be brought inside and put in a kind of catchall room that was later made into a bathroom. You used that bucket to wash up after working outside, cleaning fish or game, going to the outhouse, whatever.

Two of our Detroit houses had a bathroom on the second floor and a water closet in the basement [[toilet only, in a little wood closet).

[Jimaz]

My grandparents had no indoor plumbing in their Nebraska farmhouse. Instead of a sink they'd use a rather ornate portable porcelain basin with a matching pitcher for the water. It was usually kept in the bedroom. My understanding was that that was the standard in the old days.

This is exactly it...everybody washed hands in the basin in their bedrooms.
The practice of the dresser top basin died out once everybody had sinks in their bathrooms.

Yes, come to think of it, it was on top of the dresser. Of course! Where else would you put it in the bedroom? This brings back so many memories.

They actually did have indoor plumbing—but just barely. The kitchen was the room closest to the waterwell-pumping windmill [[one of those iconic metal windmills that dotted the landscape of the plains). There was a pipe running from the windmill's waterbarrel to the kitchen sink's hand-operated pump. [[They should have elevated the barrel using gravity instead.) Their big woodburning stove had a compartment designed to heat water. For kindling, they'd use corncobs. Ahh! The smell of bacon comes to mind.

The house was ordered from Sears. Sans bathroom.

I spent many hours marveling over the ingenuity of that windmill. If the wind stopped, you could pump it manually. But it never stopped enough to matter. It was as green as you could get, way back then.

[ron]

I guess I grew up in a "transitional" era. I lived on Lillibridge [[St. Jean & Kercheval area) in the 1950's and early 60's. We had a sink in the bathroom, and we used it after we used the toilet; but in the 50's there was no urgent need for daily bathing or showers. People were still in the Saturday night bath tradition, and that involved manually turning on and lighting the water heater. If you forgot to turn it off, you would be extremely sorry.

That changed for us in the 60's. Our house was condemned to make way for the expansion of the Lillibridge school [[I guess that didn't really happen for a while), and we moved to a more modern setting with a new-fangled thermostatically controlled water heater. At the same time, Right Guard had come out and was being heavily advertised.

In any case, around this time, people began to obsess over BO and hand-washing. Unfortunately, this wasn't universally observed. I used used to go down for a cup of coffee every morning when I worked at the Murphy Telegraph Building in the 90's. There was a self-serve area where you had to get your lid and whatever sissy extras you wanted. On bad days, I got stuck behind a guy that probably hadn't showered since the Korean War. He wasn't a lot older than me, but he had significantly different ideas about BO.

The main thing that I got out of all of this is that people with just a few years' difference in traditions and habits can be completely different from each other [[and perhaps some can be completely intolerant). Think about those pictures of Tigers games from the era where everyone in the stands is a man dressed in a woolen suit. Wouldn't want to be there in August would you? Yet these were apparently those who could afford to be attending a ball game rather than skinning mules.

I'm not suggesting that poor hygiene is acceptable. However, I would wonder how most of us would like living with the overwhelming majority of humanity. We're not very far removed, so it might be a mistake to be overly-indignant about bad smells.

Alas, I will probably continue to make that mistake anyways.

Ron

[ron]

By the way, carlscomputers, I apologize for babbling on in a way that didn't address the basic question that you asked.