Events

Join the L Street Brownies for their annual Polar Plunge

Join them if you dare.

The L Street Brownies New Year’s swim in South Boston in 2017. Jessica Rinaldi / The Boston Globe, File

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On New Year’s Day, one of the oldest polar bear clubs in the country splashes into Dorchester Bay at 9 a.m.

Since 1904, the L Street Brownies in South Boston have held the annual Polar Plunge on the first day of the new year. In front of the Curley Community Center on Southie’s Carson Beach, hundreds of people run into the chilly cold water on the morning of January 1 in nothing but bathing suits.

The L Street Brownies are one of the country’s oldest polar bear clubs, founded in 1902 and based at the L Street Bathhouse, where South Boston’s immigrants, living in tenements without plumbing, used to bathe. Today, the bathhouse is now the Boston Center for Youth & Families Curley community center, which is currently closed for renovations.

The Brownies began taking polar plunges following a practice likely brought over by European immigrants who believed that cold water plunges, hot water baths, steams, saunas, and sun exposure were all good for one’s health. Many of today’s Brownies still swim at the beach year-round, citing the immune system benefits of regular cold water plunges. The traditional New Year’s plunge — now well over a hundred years old — isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.