Free Naked at Lunch by Mark Haskell Smith Page A

Amis de Vivre was an easygoing bunch. Nudity wasn’t required unless members were in the “nudarium” area. Louis-Charles Royer, a writer and member of the Amis, wrote a serialized fiction about the group called Au Pays des Hommes Nus (In the Land of Nude Men), which became a bestseller and led to other branches of the club springing up in Lyon, Perpignan, Marseilles, and other French cities.
    Meanwhile the Durville brothers had become frustrated with the restrictions imposed on them at Villennes and set out to find a place where they could build a true naturist paradise. In 1931 they settled on the small island of Levant off the French coast in the Mediterranean where they built a rustic retreat they called Heliopolis. It was undeveloped, close to nature, and bursting with fresh air and abundant sunlight. Better still, it was a private island where everyone could be totally naked all the time. A nudist utopia, if you will.
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    There have always been pockets of nakedness scattered around the United States—wacky religious sects, anarchist personality cults, utopian communities, and dudes that just liked to be naked on the farm—but none of these was organized in the manner of the German nudist clubs. However, it didn’t take long for the siren song of clothes-free frolic to spread from Germany to New York City, where, in 1929, an enterprising young German named Kurt Barthel placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for kindred spirits interested in bringing Nacktkultur to the United States. Barthel had organized a few nude sojourns out in the Hudson Highlands, mostly with German expats and a few curious Americans, but now he wanted to do something a little more serious. A small group met at the Michelob Café on Twenty-Eighth Street in Manhattan on December 5, 1929, and formed the American League for Physical Culture (ALPC). It was a strange time to be planning a nudist club. Wall Street had crashed just two months earlier, Prohibition was in full swing, and according to the National Weather Service records, it was 32 degrees Fahrenheit outside. But then again, now that I think of it, if I were broke, sober, and freezing, I might look for something fun to do.
    The ALPC started out simply enough. The group rented a gym with a swimming pool and held weekly meetings. A Miami Daily News article from 1933 describes one of these meetings, reporting that the basement gymnasium was “more than faintly redolent of perspiration and disinfectants.” A typical session would go like this: members would perform calisthenics to warm up, maybe play a little volleyball or generally exercise, and then relax with a swim in the pool. Surprisingly—and unlike many of the clubs in Europe—the league had almost equal numbers of men and women from the beginning. The American nudists took a more pragmatic approach to being in the buff. They ignored the bans on coffee and tobacco and didn’t require strict vegetarianism, and they weren’t writing books and pamphlets about a return to a romantic idealized kind of naturism. They just liked to take off their clothes and hang out.
    Membership in the ALPC grew rapidly, that is until someone dropped a dime on them and the police raided one of the gatherings, arresting seventeen men and seven women for public indecency. Fortunately they found a sympathetic judge and the charges were dropped. But Barthel knew he needed to find a location where he and his friends could practice nonsexual social nudism without threat from overzealous law enforcement or religious prudes. Besides, with more and more people coming, they were quickly outgrowing the gymnasium. The ALPC eventually leased some land in Ironia, New Jersey, and dubbed it Sky Farm.
    Like many of the other nudist or naturist retreats founded in the early days of the movement, Sky Farm continues to operate in the same location as a “members only” nudist club.
    Sky Farm set the template for American nudist clubs and, as more and more people