Sutro Baths

This guide to Sutro Baths in San Francisco opens on the night of June 26, 1966, as flames swept through the site mid-demolition, and works back to Adolph Sutro, the self-made silver millionaire and former mayor who spent nearly a decade planning the largest indoor swimming complex on earth. It traces the baths' 1896 opening, seven pools beneath a glass roof of a hundred thousand panes, galleries of Egyptian mummies and stuffed animals, and ten thousand bathers swimming at once. A listening tip: look down at the concrete pools now flooded by the tide.