Chinese Historical Society of America Museum

This guide to the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco traces a building's double life: designed in the late 1920s by Julia Morgan, fresh off Hearst Castle, for a Chinatown YWCA branch that the community funded itself because young Chinese American women were shut out of the city's mainstream clubs and pools, then left cracked and empty after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Look up at the hand-painted coffered ceiling as you listen, raised for the girls who once swam and studied beneath it.