In one of the most economically depressed neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., on a warm fall afternoon, woodsmoke rises from a vacant lot. That tells me I am headed in the right direction. Exiting the Anacostia Metro station, on a bright afternoon, I chart a course toward the smoke. In less than five minutes, I arrive at an unlikely scene for this part of town: a bustling pop-up village consisting of six mobile saunas arranged in a loose circle around a patch of astroturf.
Dozens of people wait for their turn in the saunas; in the biggest one, a refitted shipping container with one side entirely made of glass, a lithe blonde woman runs a sound bath class for a full house of about 25 people. In the smaller sauna next door, a friendly yoga instructor from Tampa leads the quirkiest breathwork class I’ve ever experienced: first she asks us to quack like ducks, then buzz like bees. We comply until our buzzing bursts into laughter. “Laughing is breath work!” insists the instructor, Annette Scott.
Over to one side of the village, well-steamed saunagoers line up to dip in a large, wood-sided tub of clear, cold water. Just past that, in a big white tent, more bodies are bending, twisting, and sweating on stretchy mats; the yoga and Pilates classes are packed all day long. There’s also locally-blended herbal tea on tap, a stocked bar, and a barbecue truck offering half-smokes, a D.C. delicacy that is like a chili dog but indescribably better. (If you know, you know.)
A pop-up sauna village is a common sight in hipster havens like Minneapolis, Seattle, and Burning Man. A large and splashy sauna festival, with 16 wood-burning saunas in a park beside the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, wrapped up in March. The one in D.C., held last October, took place in a far less hipster-friendly spot: Anacostia, the historically poorest part of town, across the Anacostia River (a tributary of the Potomac) and worlds away from the monuments and government buildings that we see on the news.
Every afternoon, commuters zoom right past this spot without stopping, on freeways whisking them to greener suburbs. They’re missing out: Anacostia is also known for Cedar Hill, the historic home of Frederick Douglass, as well as the former St. Elizabeth’s mental institution, acres of forested parklands, and the occasional pair of nesting bald eagles.
Today, however, this little corner of Anacostia is jammed—with neighborhood residents, who make up about 30 percent of the attendees, but also with people from the suburbs. I sit next to one father-son duo who drove 45 minutes from Virginia.
Most people are in shorts or bathing suits—which are available to rent—but not everyone is dressed for the occasion. I pop into one of the smaller saunas to find a tall, elegant-looking woman, dressed in voluminous linen pants and a tailored top, both of which are completely soaked—from sweat, or from a trip to the cold plunge, I can’t tell. Maybe both. She hopped into the sauna village on the spur of the moment, as she was headed somewhere else, and now she seems in no hurry at all to leave. Leaning back, eyes closed, she murmurs, “We need this all the time.”
Her wish might come true.
This two-day event—along with this winter’s better-publicized sauna pop-up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—is a kind of stalking horse for a much bigger project. Both events were staged by a mysterious European company called the Therme Group, which recently announced plans to build a massive bathing complex—with multiple saunas, huge soaking pools, several waterslides, and an indoor botanical garden—just a few yards away, on a vacant tract of federal parkland beside the Anacostia River. The approximate price tag of the project: $500 million.
Therme DC is just one of seven such projects that the Therme Group is planning for cities around the world, including Manchester, UK (which just began construction), Toronto, Singapore, Frankfurt, Incheon (near Seoul), Dallas, and right here in Anacostia. That’s only a beginning: the company says it eventually plans to build no fewer than ten Thermes in North America alone.
While most Americans have never heard of Therme, it is better known in Europe, where the company owns and operates five massive and popular bathing parks. Four are in Germany, but the newest one—and the template for future expansion—is located just outside Bucharest, Romania.
Despite its out-of-the-way location, Therme Bucharest has grown into a global tourist destination and Instagram hotspot, a sprawling 470,000-square-foot structure with ten soaking pools, 16 water slides, and 16 saunas under its vast roof—plenty to entertain its 1.7 million annual visitors.
Therme Manchester, set to open in 2028, will be twice the size of Therme Bucharest. Therme DC will rival the scale of Nationals Park, the baseball stadium just across the river. When finished, it will dwarf the three shiny new ten-story apartment buildings that have sprung up just across the road from the vacant lot where the sauna village sits, the vanguard of the neighborhood’s redevelopment.
Plans are not yet final, but Therme DC will occupy 17 acres of former federal land beside the Anacostia River, with a soaring steel and glass roof that will be visible for miles around, including from planes landing at Reagan National Airport, just across the Potomac. Therme and the city of Washington D.C. estimate that the project will employ 5,000 construction workers and more than 700 permanent employees.
These grand plans make the head spin. But while Therme and similar spa complexes are familiar in Europe, especially Germany, they are definitely not a thing in North America. After Therme DC was announced last spring, I had a difficult time grasping what, exactly, it might look like, let alone how to describe it to people. Other North Americans seem similarly confused. In Toronto, opposition to the Therme construction has been particularly sharp, as locals protested the decision to award Therme development rights to part of a treasured yet neglected lakefront park.
The skeptical Conspirituality health podcast slagged the project as a “MAHA wellness scam.”
What actually was this thing? Nobody seemed to know for sure.
So I flew to Bucharest to see for myself.
Moments after stumbling off my stuffy Romanian Airlines flight, I run into the president of Therme U.S., Robbie Hammond. He is easy to spot, in his custom-tailored pink button-down shirt with the letters SOAK stitched across the middle. Also, he is the only person in the Bucharest airport who is smiling.
As a young advertising executive in the late nineties, Hammond had co-founded Friends of the High Line, the fundraising and advocacy group that transformed an abandoned elevated railway line on the fringes of Manhattan’s west side into a thriving neighborhood park and global tourist attraction. That blockbuster success is why Therme Group hired him to help realize its two U.S. projects, the one in Washington D.C. and the other in Dallas.
Despite his outsized ambition, Hammond is friendly and easygoing in person, which makes sense. Therme’s primary product is relaxation, as I’m about to learn. An hour after landing, we are floating in an enormous warm pool, gazing up at palm trees, a glass roof, and the late-afternoon sky above as our jet lag melts away.
Therme Bucharest styles itself as a wellness oasis, a place where guests can do healthyish things like
Written by: The Logfather | The Citizen Edition
“Get me outta here.”