San Francisco, CA - Taking a Bath, 30's Style

Along the Coastal Trail in San Francisco is an intriguing old ruins. You round a corner on a high cliff and look down towards the coastline and there it is, the Sutro Baths. Or rather, the ruins of the Sutro Baths. It looks like the Roman Colisseum, crumbling stone walls with grass growing in them. Holy Cow, what is this?


Above is what the site looks like today. Here is what it looked at the turn of the 20th century.

Pretty different view, isn’t it. It’s certainly not your usual trail sight. Well, it’s the ruins of probably one of the fanciest swimming pools in the world. It began as the dream of Adolph Sutro, a self-made millionaire who built a spectacular restaurant/meeting room complex called the Cliff House (pictured below from the south), an aquarium and a massive 34-acre public bathhouse along the cliffs of San Francisco overlooking the Pacific Ocean. A place for San Franciscans to meet, eat and play along the shore.

First came the Cliff House built to resemble a Victorian Chateau in 1896, perched on rock outcroppings with the sea crashing on the rocks below. Some called it beautiful, some called it a monstrosity.

Next came the Sutro Baths: the goal was to provide the citizens of San Francisco a healthy, recreational and inexpensive swimming facility. Because he wanted to educate and not just entertain he filled the Baths with natural history exhibits like stuffed birds, stuffed snakes fighting stuffed jaguars, totem poles, tropical plants, pinned insects, coin collections, photograph collections, galleries of sculptures, paintings, tapestries and artifacts from Mexico, China, Asia and the Middle East - including, get this, an Egyptian mummy. The baths themselves contained 7 swimming pools at various temperatures, slides trapezes, springboards and a high dive. It could hold 10,000 people at one time and rented 20,000 swimming suits and 40,000 towels. Enough? Nope, not for Sutro.

He also offered band concerts, talent shows, swimming meets and a restaurant. When the railroad provided transportation to the area by the late 1890’s, it became an all-day excursion for families to visit.

Here’s a picture of a swim meet with spectators in the balconies.

Here are the Bath houses with the Cliff House in the rear pictured from the north.

I am partial to old postcards with their color tones and feel. Note Cliff House in the background and circular pool in the front which began as an aquarium but then changed into the pool where bathers could clean the sand off their feet when they came out of the ocean and before they entered the Baths.

Here the complex is from the air. Note that the Cliff House is gone. It burned in 1907

and a smaller block style restaurant took its place.

What was the most spectacular part of the baths was the hydraulics that he devised to fill the pools. With the ocean nearby, he devised a series of pumps and piping to harness the power of the incoming tide to fill the pools. And then he covered the whole thing with 100,000 panes of glazed glass to allow in the light and warmth of the sun. Unheated seawater filled the largest of the tanks. The rest were heated to varying temperatures, as Jerry Flamm relates in his book, "Good Life in Hard Times":

"They ranged, with ten-degree gaps, from ice-cold to a steaming warm eighty degrees. A favorite 'let's see you do this' dare among the hordes of kids scampering around the pools was to dive into the 'hot' pool, climb out, race down to the small ice-cold pool, and dive in there. An almost cutting sensation was experienced as the ice water covered your warm skin. I sometimes wonder how many of our gang died before their time, due to early heart attacks stemming from this mad folly."

In the end it became a very expensive white elephant to operate and, when Sutro himself died, it passed through the hands of various family members who couldn’t operate it to a rich buyer who also failed. In 1964 several developers had planned to build an high-rise apartment complex and began demolishing the baths but a ‘mysterious’ fire raged through the baths and ruins were left. Finally, in 1973, the National Park Service bought the land to add to its Golden Gate National Recreation Area and uses it as a historical artifact.

The baths opened in March 14, 1896 and burned June 26, 1966. A marvelous engineering feat, a great entertainment center for thousands but in the end a ruin which spectacularly graces the cliffs at the end of the Coastal Trail.

OK, so what would you wear to the Baths? Sutro actually rented Bathing suits, maybe because he was afraid of what people might wear on their own. And, here are some of hte suits that people could wear.

The suits were invariably black and/or grey with decorative white stripes along the bottom. They were floppy looking and had skirts - even the mens suits had half skirts until the mid-30’s (check out the picture in the middle here.)

But these ‘skimpy’ things were a huge improvement over the ‘bathing’ suits that first appeared. Modesty was the first word in style back in the mid-1800’s. Then, women wore full dresses with black stockings and bloomers. Sometimes they even sewed weights into the bottom hems so that they wouldn’t fly up and expose too much. But these were heavy - who could swim in them. So, gradually they became more revealing as the picture above shows. At Sutro Baths, both men and women were issued one-piece wool suits (yes, you read that correctly - wool) with a short skirt that covered short trunks. The policy changed in the mid-1930’s when bathers were allowed to wear their own suits.

But, now the Sutro Baths are just a memory of a different time and we can only imagine the fun people used to have here. Luckily the National Park Service has preserved them.