Sutro Bath Ruins (8 photos + 1 video)

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area, located north of Ocean Beach in San Francisco, still contains the ruins of what was once the world's largest indoor swimming pool, the magnificent Sutro Baths.





The baths were built by wealthy entrepreneur and San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro as an addition to his Cliff House, located on the edge of a cliff overlooking Ocean Beach.



The Baths in 1896

The facility was located in a small beach cove below the Cliff House. There, Sutro constructed a massive glass-roofed building that housed a freshwater pool and six saltwater pools, each at a different temperature. They were 500 feet long, 250 feet wide, and held 1.8 million gallons of water. At high tide, water was pumped directly into the pools from the ocean, recycling nearly two million gallons of water in about an hour. At low tide, a powerful turbine-powered water pump filled the tanks in about five hours.





The baths had more than 500 private changing rooms, with space for 20,000 bathers. They had slides, trapezes, and diving boards. The complex also housed a museum with an extensive collection of oddities collected by Sutro during his travels, including Egyptian mummies, stuffed polar bears and monkeys, totem poles from Alaska, paintings, tapestries, and artifacts from Mexico, China, Asia, and the Middle East.



Interior of the Sutro Baths, circa 1910, with some of the exhibits

The Sutro Baths were extremely popular, but they were never profitable, and over the years they became increasingly expensive to run. The baths also declined in popularity over time, especially after the Great Depression.



The ruins in 2016

In an attempt to make the facility profitable, the owners converted the baths into an ice skating rink, but Sutro Baths' popularity never recovered, and the skating revenue was not enough to support the enormous building. Eventually, the baths were sold to a developer, who began tearing down the tanks to build high-rise apartments. In 1966, a freak fire destroyed the rest of the building, and the city did not proceed with the high-rise. All that remains of the site today is a series of low-rise concrete walls, blocked stairways and passageways, and a tunnel with a deep crevice down the middle.



Ruins in 2017



Ruins in 2021