Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

If the money, resources / equipment, and work-crew provided for the job ever got scarce, I'd hate to have responsibility for maintaining the clarity, sanitation and debris-free purity of those particular pools that are the size of small lakes.

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Not to mention pouring in that chemical that makes red rings appear on bathing suits that peed in the pool.

My heart is still with old Sutro Baths in San Francisco. I used to visit it as a boy, before it burned down in 1966. It was a sight to behold.

Built in the late 1800's, it was totally Victorian and had that whole 'steampunk' thing really going. (Literally steam, I still remember the ocean smell and the humidity.) Strange and otherworldly. When it opened it was a very big deal, and originally had its own light rail line to serve it. (Electric! We are only just returning full circle to that.)

The thing I liked about it the most wasn't the giant swimming pools, but rather the museum that occupied the same complex. It would have been a paradise for MR, a musty and dimly lit wooden maze that a kid could get lost in (up, down, left, right) every inch filled with strange things, 'curiosities' as the Victorians would have called them. Odd art, religious ritual objects, stuffed animals, mineral specimens, archaeological relics... anything to create a sense of weirdness and wonder.

It was so... alternative. It offered a a doorway to a different world and a different sensibility, very different from my normal life in early 1960's America.

It was also a firetrap.

I loved that place then. Today I see it as a relic of a lost era that just overlapped my life a little. A different world in a sense. But it was very real in its day, even if we have turned our backs on that day today in our pursuit of new and sometimes less attractive obsessions.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutro_Baths

Wow..What a place. An artistic rendition of the archetypal dream space. Water and sibilant steam and tunnels and overarching structures. I dream of places like that---vast dark warehouses full of people doing mysterious things.

Inside guide to the Sutro Baths
 
Wow!  Very cool!  I thought that I’ve seen all there is to see in San Francisco.  There’s also the new San Francisco Dungeon. It might be a little cheesy, though.

One of my favorite swimming pools is this one that was built in an old limestone rock quarry.