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“I didn’t need to go jjimjilbang to wash, but I remember going with my sister when we were young.

“I had the freedom to shower in private, but not the freedom to do much else,” she said. Hahn grew up in Seoul in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, in a household with “oppressively conservative” parents, myriad rules, and a bathroom.

“Is the rest of the building rentals? How many floors are there? Are they all condos?” Hahn paused. “Does Spa Castle own this building?” she asked. The five-story pool and sauna parlor is usually not full of members of the nearby Korean community, but is regularly thronged by bathroom-owning families from all five boroughs, looking to soak, bake, and splash around in this hybrid of a hammam and a water park.Īs the tour progressed round the new premises, Hahn admired various amenities-a swim-up bar, a foot-reflexology station-and inquired about the logistics opening the new location. When Spa Castle opened its first New York location, in College Point, Queens, in 2008, however, the focus turned from bathhouse to funhouse. Korea’s Japanese occupiers, who placed a high premium on hygiene, took the concept home with them and popularized the jjimjilbang there in the early twentieth century, when most homes lacked private bathrooms. Spa Castle is modelled, at least notionally, on the idea of the jjimjilbang, a traditional Korean public bathhouse.

Spa Castle bills itself as an “East meets West country club,” but its aesthetic might be better characterized as the East reinvented in the West. Cheerfully, she added, “Clothes would be stored in a different, larger locker.” “All of it?” Hahn said incredulously, clutching her fitted charcoal jacket adorned with a gem-encrusted American-flag lapel pin. It was indeed, confirmed Stephanie, who wore shimmery eye shadow and a mohair cardigan. “Is this where we take off our shoes?” she asked a young woman named Stephanie-the company’s chief operating officer-who was leading a tour of the premises. The other day, Sunny Hahn, a longtime Queens resident and a leader in the Korean community, stood amid the sawhorses, tool belts, and buckets of ceramic-tile adhesive that littered the dusty floor of the unfinished castle. There is no moat other than the monetary one-sixty-five dollars per head-but there is a chamber, reserved for deep-pocketed kings and queens, that is entirely gilded in gold. Spa Castle’s Premier 57, a luxury relaxation complex due to open next month, delivers only three edicts: no shoes, no shirt, no kids under the age of sixteen. On an unremarkable stretch of concrete on East Fifty-seventh Street, roughly halfway between the Central Synagogue and a Victoria’s Secret, there is a castle in the sky.