The Ruins Of The Sutro Baths
I know that people from San Francisco must be habituated to it, but I was shocked by how beautiful the coastline is in the Bay Area. The last (and only other) time I visited the city, I was with Blara, and we spent the entire time smoking jazz cigarettes, feeling paranoid, and eating Nerd ropes. One night, we went to a birthday party, and each consumed 15 cupcakes. That is my most vivid memory from the trip.
Otherwise, I have vague recollections of being impressed by the redwoods, and the deep cliffs on the beach where we drove one afternoon in my friend’s cherry-red Mustang convertible. But I was 20, and I hadn’t traveled much. My priorities revolved around boys and eating junk food and escaping my parents for a week. I thought that everywhere in the United States must look similar to San Francisco, and that the rest of the world was much more beautiful.
Returning now that I’m 29 and an adult, I was impressed first by the lawlessness of the city—the lack of police officers, the people with dreadlocks openly selling weed in Golden Gate Park, the fact that we parked for 2 hours in a tow-away-zone without getting ticketed—and second by the immense power of the bodies of water that shape the city. In New York, we weather seasons. In San Francisco, they weather the moods of the Pacific Ocean.
The first thing Caleb and I did when we arrived was rent a car, and start driving around the city. Caleb swooped me from vantage point to vantage point, up impossibly steep hills that buckled thoroughfares. He took me down a concrete slide on a piece of cardboard, ignoring signs that said that all but children were forbidden from using them.
He drove me to North Ocean Beach, and we got out to take pictures of the surf, and the surfers, and, of course, me posing like I don’t know that Caleb is taking my picture.
Driving is one of the few activities that actually relaxes my mind. In San Francisco, all I wanted was to be wrapped in a shawl and driven around the city like an invalid, dreaming Victorian things, lulled by forward motion. Every time we stopped, I was loathe to leave my seat.
But the Sutro baths were the last place that Caleb wanted to take me for the day, and he insisted that we at least peek at them from a vantage point. Then, he promised, he would take me back to the inn where we were staying, where a gigantic bathtub next to a set of bay windows awaited me.
We arrived in late afternoon. As soon as we stepped to the edge of the basin where the ruins are located, I knew that no matter how fatigued I was, I was going to climb down to them. The incessant pounding of the ocean, which raged against the side of the cliff, had worn the concrete remnants into ancient ruins. They were otherwordly.
The Sutro Baths were built at the end of the 19th century, by Aldoph Sutro, a wealthy entrepreneur and former mayor of San Francisco.
They filled a small beach inlet next to the Cliff House, a mansion that was built to entertain Sunday travelers in 1858. Sutro’s Cliff House was the second incarnation of the building, which had been destroyed previously by a dynamite explosion on “Parallel,” a schooner that had run aground next to the structure. On Christmas night, in 1894, it was destroyed again, this time by a defective flue. The only thing that Sutro was able to save from the wreckage was the guest register, which included the names of three former American presidents.
In 1986, Sutro re-built the house again, this time in conjunction with the baths, which opened in the same year.
There were Belle Epoque marvels, constructed out of reinforced concrete, glass, iron and wood.
Today, the Cliff House still exists, in its fifth iteration, and houses two restaurants that overlook the ruins.
When the Sutro Baths first opened, they were far more than wading pools. Not only could visitors bathe in seven different pools—one freshwater and six saltwater varying in temperature, in the manner of a Roman thermae—they could also view Sutro’s private collection of artifacts from his travels, visit the concert hall, and eventually, go ice skating on a rink inside of the complex.
During high tide, water would flow directly into the pools from the ocean at a rate of two million gallons per hour. During low tide, pumps hidden in caves recycled the water.
At first, the pools were extraordinarily popular. The photograph above, for instance, was taken during Mayday of 1897, and the one below, sometime between 1894-1896.
Eventually, people moved on to the next big thing. Attendance waned, and the Baths had trouble staying open due to high maintenance costs. Right after they formally closed, there was a fire that destroyed the structure, and created the ruins as they are today.
Visiting the Sutro baths today, surrounded by crumbling cliffs, it’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone ever felt safe swimming, even within such a complex. At any minute, the ocean threatens to encroach upon the plateaus of the cliffs.
It’s wild, and windy, and untethered. It’s about as Romantic a place as I’ve been in quite a long while. And I mean that Romantic with a capital R, a la Gericault and Deleuze.
You think that ruins can only carry weight if they’re from some ancient era. The Romans, the Greeks, the Han, the Aztecs. The Mesopotamians. But to think that something that was destroyed less than 100 years ago bear the patina of time passing is kind of amazing.
We’re in the 21st century, and the 19th, which twelve years ago seemed kind of close, is in the distant past. Or at least it is at the Sutro ruins.
When I think of a desolate America, especially out West, I think of abandoned gas stations and strip malls and lonely highways. The detritus of our consumer culture, the symbols of excess and decline.
So rarely do I think of crystal palaces for bathing, sitting on cliffs overlooking the storming ocean, left to the elements. Unrestored, unprotected, unrestrained. Anyone on earth can drive up to the Sutro Baths. They can walk all over them. They can pick up pieces of them and cart them out in their pockets.
There is nothing but a single sign warning that by climbing on their narrow foundations, you might be swept out to sea and drowned.
There is nothing sacred about their preservation, even though they’re some of the most beautiful ruins I’ve seen in years.
We spent a while climbing all over the foundations. My heart pounded as I made my way across the uneven concrete beams, my heel half over the salt water, the dark depths of the pools inches from my feet. It was windy and cold. My glasses fogged when I took deep breaths. Looking out, I felt something akin to the way I felt in Patagonia, when the wilderness almost swept me off of my feet. It was terrifying.
“I am modern wo-man!” I shouted at the ocean, re-routing a group of fellow tourists who had been heading in my direction.
The last path led us into a deep tunnel, with a floor of coarse, thick sand. I followed it with my iPhone in front of me, quelling memories of being in a similar cave in Borneo.
In that dark lair, the floor had been crawling with cockroaches. In this one, there was only mud and the occasional concrete slab.
As the light grew stronger, and the tunnel opened, we came upon a slender chain, halting us from tumbling over the cliff over which we stood. Beyond, the San Francisco bay gleamed sapphire, the Golden Gate Bridge, a functioning relic, just beyond our view.
Humans really can be cowed by nature. There was nothing that I could not imagine the waves doing, standing in the ruins of the Sutro Baths.
But yet, I still yearned to be back in my car seat, warm and sedated, fountain soda from the drive-thru in hand, watching the world pass by me at steady speeds that not even the Pacific could fathom, not even at it’s stormiest moments.
