Frauenbad Stadthausquai

This guide to Frauenbad Stadthausquai in Zurich opens with a question: how did a river once too polluted to touch end up floating a women's bathhouse full of swimmers? It follows the fretsaw-turreted bath back to its opening in eighteen eighty-eight, and then to the twentieth-century reality beneath it, a Limmat so contaminated by raw sewage and factory runoff that swimming was banned outright on health grounds. Stand on the planks and listen to the water rising and falling beneath you, the same motion this floating bath was built to ride.