12 amazing old indoor swimming pools that will make you want to dive right in

Boston’s Cabot Street Bath, which opened in 1868 with separate pools for men and women, is generally credited as the country’s first public bathing pool. It set off a trend that turned the indoor swimming pool into a genuine American institution over the next hundred years. Before pools like this existed, swimming meant lakes, rivers or the ocean, and a heated pool under a roof was a real novelty.

Early public pools were built mostly in working class neighborhoods and framed as a health measure, not a form of fun. City leaders worried about disease spreading through crowded tenements without running water, so a pool doubled as a place to get clean. Once bathers started splashing around instead of just scrubbing off, cities noticed people wanted to swim, not just wash.

By the turn of the century, indoor pools had grown into architectural showpieces. The Alcazar Hotel in St Augustine, Florida built what was billed as the largest indoor pool in the world when it opened in the 1880s, and the space is now a restaurant, its floor still intact minus the water. In San Francisco, the Sutro Baths held several enormous pools filled with pumped in seawater from the Pacific, with balconies packed with people who came just to watch.

Watching was as much a part of the experience as swimming. Many of these venues built galleries and balconies specifically for spectators, who came to socialize with friends while others took to the water. The 1920s brought a further boom, with resort hotels adding grand pools of their own, including the Vanderbilts’ 70,000 gallon heated pool at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

Not every pool welcomed every swimmer. Many public and private pools across the country excluded Black Americans for decades, either barring them outright or restricting their hours, a practice that persisted in various forms well into the mid 20th century. YMCAs, schools and municipalities kept building indoor pools through the early 1900s, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast, where cold winters made a heated indoor option worth the cost.

After World War II, above ground and in ground backyard pools became affordable enough for regular families, and the pull of a shared public plunge started to fade. Many of the grand old natatoriums were torn down, converted to other uses or simply closed as swimming shifted from a communal outing to a private one. Below, take a look at 12 beautiful old indoor swimming pools from days gone by!