The Sutro Baths: The World's Largest Pool Nobody Remembers

The concrete foundations below you fill with seawater twice a day. At high tide the Pacific pushes through the old tidal gate and the ruins look almost like what they were. At low tide the pools empty and you can see the scale of what Adolph Sutro built here in eighteen ninety-six: a glass-enclosed bathing complex that held seven pools and was capable of receiving ten thousand people on a single day. It was the largest indoor swimming pool complex in the world.

Sutro was a Prussian-born mining engineer who made his first fortune from a tunnel he drilled under Nevada's Comstock Lode to drain the flooded lower shafts. The tunnel took nine years and bankrupted him twice, but when it worked it made him one of the richest men in the West. He spent his money on San Francisco. He bought five percent of the city's land. He built the Cliff House above you. He donated Sutro Heights park to the city. And in eighteen ninety-four he blasted through the rock at Lands End to create the tidal intake for these baths. He opened them on March fourteenth, eighteen ninety-six, with an admission of ten cents, specifically set low enough that a working-class family could afford to come.

The pools were not equal. There was one freshwater pool and six saltwater pools, each maintained at a different temperature, ranging from cold to what the advertisements called a Turkish bath. On a single flood tide, the Pacific could fill all seven pools, nearly two million gallons of water, in about an hour. There were slides and trapezes and springboards. There was a natural history museum on the upper level, with Egyptian mummies and artifacts from Mexico and China and the Middle East.

The Baths operated for fifty-six years, closed in nineteen fifty-two, became an ice rink, and burned during demolition in nineteen sixty-six. What remains is what you see.