Bathhouse Park - from scrub and steamer to ice bath and sunshine

The name is deceptive. There is no bathhouse in Badhusparken. Not anymore, anyway. But behind the manicured lawns, laughing children's playgrounds and wintertime snow couches lies a piece of bathtub-warm history.

Once upon a time, the shoreline was far up, roughly where Strandgatan draws its border today. There was a bay called Sjötorget - and by it a laundry, where people from Östersund both scrubbed their clothes and took a refreshing dip. When the railroad came rolling into town in the 1870s, everything changed. The ground was excavated, baths and washhouses were demolished and people began to fill in the lake with earth, rubbish and, after a city fire, the burning remains of entire neighborhoods. A somewhat drastic form of urban planning, but effective.

The new land required content - and what did the people of Östersund want? A bathhouse, of course. In 1881, a magnificent cold and hot bathhouse rose on stilts in the lake. Two floors, a café, sauna, changing rooms, wooden tubs with 55-degree water and a laundress who scrubbed you cleaner than you might have wished. A blue flag on the roof signaled that it was the men's turn, a white one that the ladies could enter. And the swimming school? It was held in the summer in a fenced-in cove - a kind of watery child-rearing with educational overtones.

But nothing lasts forever. The water of Lake Storsjön got worse, the bathhouse got older, and Östersund got more modern. In 1938, a new bathhouse was opened on Rådhusgatan, and the old one was demolished. What remained was a park, and a name that clung to it - as if the ground itself remembered how it once smelled of soap and sauna heat.

And Badhusparken found a new role. It became the city's breathing space. In 1903, it was given a music pavilion where military bands blew happily on Sundays. Fountains were built. Steamboats were moored below the quay, ready to take sun-soaked residents of Östersund to Frösön or further out into the lake system. The park bustled with life, conversation and footsteps on gravel paths. In 1921, the somewhat scandalous sculpture Father and Son by Olof Ahlberg stood in the center - a naked man lifting his child, prompting more prudish souls to suggest "sewing on a pair of pants". That suggestion, thankfully, remained sewn in sand.

Today, Badhusparken is something completely different - and yet exactly the same. A place for people. In summer, people stroll with ice cream in hand, children climb on wooden sculptures depicting the Storsjöodjuret and the view of Frösön has not lost its charm. And when winter comes? Then the park is transformed into Vinterparken - an ice adventure in the middle of town. Ice skating rinks are plowed on the ice of Lake Storsjön, barbecue areas are lit, deck chairs are set out in the snow and brave souls jump into an ice pool. It's Östersund at its best: cold, beautiful, crazy - and very much alive.

Badhusparken is more than just a park. It's a place where history is underfoot, where bathhouses have become lawns, where steamboat whistles have been replaced by children's voices - and where the sun, when it comes out, brings the whole city together by the water.

Photos provided by Föreningen Gamla Östersund