Before San Francisco became a city that loves to congratulate itself on progressivism, it actually did something progressive — and the ruins sitting out at Land's End are a quiet monument to it.

Sutro Baths, the sprawling Victorian-era swimming complex that opened in 1896 at the edge of the Pacific, wasn't just an engineering marvel. It opened the same year California passed one of the country's earliest state-level anti-discrimination laws — legislation that, in a era when Jim Crow was tightening its grip across the South, gave Californians a legal tool to push back against segregated public accommodations.

The timing matters. While the U.S. Supreme Court was busy gutting federal civil rights protections, California was moving — imperfectly, inconsistently, but meaningfully — in the opposite direction. That 1896 law gave individuals the right to sue businesses that turned them away based on race. It wasn't always enforced. Courts didn't always care. But it existed, and people used it.

Sutro Baths itself welcomed massive, diverse crowds into its seven pools and 1.7 million gallons of seawater. For a brief, strange moment in Gilded Age America, a commercial pleasure palace on the California coast was genuinely open to the public in a way that most of the country wasn't.

The baths burned down in 1966. The ruins are now a free attraction managed by the National Park Service — ironic, given that Adolph Sutro built the place as a for-profit venture and probably would have found federal stewardship a bit rich.

But here's what actually deserves attention: this city has a real, complicated, sometimes genuinely admirable civil rights history that doesn't get told because it doesn't fit neatly into either the left's mythology or the right's counternarrative. A 19th-century entrepreneur built a public space. A legislature passed a law with teeth. Ordinary people showed up.

Government accountability and individual freedom aren't new San Francisco values. Sometimes, a long time ago, this city actually lived them.