The Nonsensical Arrests For Bathing
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The Nonsensical Arrests For Bathing
During the current hot weather, while it is one of the most necessary luxuries to have a daily swim in the flowing salt water that offers itself at hand to any Brooklynite or New Yorker, we cannot at all commend the mock-vigilance of the Policemen, who pounce down upon parties of young men and boys—arresting them, and carrying them to the station-houses, for the frightful crime of bathing!
Those who bathe, almost invariably select some part of our shores (of which parts there are plenty, in every direction,) where there is no frequented thoroughfare, and where male and female persons who are so very modest, need not see the said bathers unless they take some pains to do so. We have known cases of youths arrested away down beyond Greenwood, where no dwelling was in sight, and nobody to be shocked but the policeman who nabbed them.
There should perhaps be an ordinance to prevent bathing in certain spots, specially named—as close to the ferries, for example; but not on any account the sweeping ordinance, now among the city regulations, which goes against all bathing between sun rise and sun set. But the ordinance being there, should it not be rigidly carried out? Verdant friend! What proportion of the city ordinances do you suppose to be rigidly carried out? One in ten? Or one in twenty?
For our part, we would encourage boys and men, for both physical and moral reasons, to habituate themselves to practise swimming, and daily ablutions.
Is it not a most filthy modesty that objects and is so terrified at the neighborhood of a few people at their agreeable and wholesome sports in the water? Such objections argue anything else than an accomplished and pure mind.