Sutro Baths Ruins

These concrete ruins clinging to the cliff were once the largest indoor swimming facility in the world, and the man who built them owned one-twelfth of San Francisco.

Adolph Sutro was a mining engineer who made his fortune building the Sutro Tunnel in the Comstock Lode silver mines of Nevada. He then bought an absurd amount of San Francisco real estate — one-twelfth of the entire city's land area. In eighteen ninety-four, he built this place: the Sutro Baths. Picture it. A massive glass-enclosed structure — bigger than a football field — containing seven swimming pools at different temperatures, from ice cold ocean water to heated fresh water. It could hold twenty-five thousand swimmers at once. There were one thousand six hundred private dressing rooms. The building also housed museums, restaurants, a skating rink, and galleries filled with Sutro's collection of Egyptian mummies and stuffed animals.

Here's a story that doesn't get told enough. A Black man named John Harris visited the Sutro Baths and was refused entry because of his race. He sued — and he won. It was one of the early civil rights victories in California, a legal challenge against racial discrimination in a public accommodation, decided long before the civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties.

The Baths operated for decades but never turned a real profit. The upkeep on a glass palace perched on an ocean cliff was staggering. By the nineteen sixties, the building was in decline and slated for demolition to make way for apartments. Then, in nineteen sixty-six, before demolition could begin, a suspicious fire broke out and burned the whole thing to the ground. Arson. The ruins you see today — the concrete foundations, the tunnel, the pools filling and draining with the tides — are all that's left of Sutro's impossible dream.