99% Invisible - 112- Young Ruin

Episode Date: April 29, 2014

If you’ve wandered around Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum, or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you know the power in a piece of decrepit architecture. And even if you don’t want to … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you've wandered at Machu Picchu or Stonehenge or the Colosseum or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you know the power and a piece of decrepit architecture. Even if you haven't been to these places, they've been photographed and filmed for you. Abandoned Soviet bus stops, deserted old movie theaters, decaying residential streets, they're fascinating in this like planet of the apes kind of way. So of course, there's a German word for it. Ruinenlust, the longstanding aesthetic obsession with decay. Resident Germainophile and producer Avery Trouffelman. It might actually be one of those made up German words, it probably is. But the concept itself is totally a real thing. Ruins inspire wonder.

They give the mind this task of reconciling what's there and what's not. What once was and what now is. People flock to remainders of ancient civilizations. Romans, the Mayans, the Egyptians, but people also flock to things that just look like they're ancient too. That combination of decomposition and romance makes a perfect cocktail of repulsion and allure. And for San Francisco's, this place is Sutro Baths.

My friend Austin brought me there one night. So how do you get in? Does the trail just lead right to it? Yeah, yeah yeah yeah there's steps there's a parking lot up there and steps to go down head to the rocks at lands end on the very northwest corner of San Francisco walk down the flight of stairs into a grassy slope that hugs the sea off to the right is the gaping mall of a cave to your left is the crumbled foundation of a concrete structure. It looks like a giant Belgian waffle, about 7 feet tall and 50 feet wide on the longest

side. Beside the waffle are two pools of still water, with a concrete jetty between them that dares you to walk its length. Make it to the end and you are at a sea wall, where the pacific ocean crashes into the rocks. There's no fence, no guards, only a warning sign that says danger. Cliff at the surf area extremely dangerous. People have been swept from the rocks and drowned. What you can see down here are the ruins of the bath houses.

Have you heard any rumors as to what was what here? Strangely no. I mean, other than it's a bath house in San Francisco, with all that I might indicate. Well, not the kind of San Francisco bath house he's thinking of. If he's thinking of what I think he's thinking of. But we'll get back to that in a minute. And last time you were here was just like, were people wondering about the history of it at all? No, it was like 300 bucks in a cave.

Austin had seen a band playing in the cave. They plugged their amps into a generator that they brought themselves. He told me things like that were happening at Sutobats all the time. And it's easy to see why. This place has a draw. The night that I was there, a group of photographers was snapping shots of the moon. Is this like a known photo destination? I would say the last three years has been more common, so I think people are finding out about it.

I just know that in the like the 30s it was some sort of bath for people to sit in and just soak, I don't know if it was hotter cold or what it was about. Ruins have drawn people to them for centuries. Starting the late 1600s, a tradition emerged among European men of means to go visit sites of antiquity. Paris, Venice, Rome, and learn about the roots of Western civilization. Today, lots of people visit what's left of the old world. People like ruins. It gives us a sense of time passing, maybe a sense of place. Why do people go to ancient Egypt?

Why do they go to the Acropolis? A sense of time go on by, a sense of timelessness. And I think also that urge to try to explain what people are looking at. Anytime you go out to suit you a bit, I mean, there's people crawling all over the ruins I can't. But the thing about these ruins, at the edge of the continent, they may look ancient, but they really aren't at all. You're talking, you're all trying to figure the place out. What is this? What are these tunnels do? What's this thing? There's a curiosity to it. They know their

ruins, maybe if they know they need Sutro Bans, they know they were swimming pools, and that's about it. This is historian John Martini. Martini wrote a book about this place called Sutro's Glass Palace, so named because this pool of water used to be underneath an enormous glass structure. And it was the pet project of Adolf Sutro. The name Sutro might sound familiar to you, especially if you live in San Francisco. There's Sutro Tower, Sutro Heights. There's a Sutro library at the San Francisco State University,

all named after this one German immigrant. He struck it rich by engineering a mining tunnel during the Nevada Silver Strike in the 1860s, and he turned his money into San Francisco real estate, a lot of real estate. Some historians estimate that at one point Adolf Sutro owned one-twelfth of the city. Adolf Sutro was to San Francisco with John D. Rockefeller was to New York, and what Henry Huntington was to LA. Sutro built public gardens, presented free concerts, and built the structure that would eventually become Sutro Bats. Sutro's original idea was that he wanted to build a giant outdoor aquarium that would

be filled by the tides and it would empty at low tide. So in 1884 he created a catch basin that refilled naturally as the waves broke in. And then Sutro kept making more and more plans, adding on and on to his aquarium. He built the network of swimming pools, connecting canals, he even built a powerhouse as a freestanding building to heat the water. Then when all that was done, then he hires an architectural firm.

Assembly would be like, if some crazy self-improvement guide built the foundation for an elaborate house, but didn't know what the house was going to look like, he just built a foundation, and he plumbed it. And then you hire an architect to come in and make a building fit on top Well, it was already there. That's how the baths were designed from the outside Sutro baths looked like an ornate palatial greenhouse

Underneath its majestic three-tiered glass canopy were several different swimming pools hot water and cold Saltwater and fresh and there were more than 500 Individual changing rooms beneath the sweeping arena-style bleachers. An attached to the baths was a museum full of sutra's crazy collection of stuff from around the world. miniature boats, model buildings, taxidermy to animals, gems, mechanical figures, a real Egyptian mummy, all inside of a glass palace facing the ocean at the edge of San Francisco. Up the hill, towards the road, was a street called Maryway. There was a Firth Wheel, basically a Ferris Wheel, along with a rollercoaster and a hall of mirrors and games of chance. And keep in mind Sutro was building at the edge of nowhere on the rocks by the sea.

In public transit didn't go there, and this was a challenge for both construction workers and for customers. It lost money from the day it opened. It was a huge white elephant. It cost eight off Sutro about a million dollars when it opened in 1894. And you put that today, that's the thing. $37.40 million. It couldn't make money from the charging people

10 cents to get in, or in 15 cents to go swimming. It would have had to be packed almost every day. And in an attempt to pack the house, Sutro poured even more money into electric rail lines that led out to the bats. This was a huge boom for the city's mass transit. At the same time, remember, he owned all the land surrounding it that people were going

to be traveling through, and there were always advertisements for the Sutro Land Company where they tried to sell land. So he's doing things for the public at the same time trying to make some money. But Sutro Bats just never ever made money. By the time Adolf Sutro was elected mayor in 1894, his beloved baths were still not turning a profit. When he died four years later in 1898, his family started looking to get rid of the property. The Sutro family tried four years to sell Sutro Baths, while also trying valiantly to make

it turn a profit. In 1934 my father was hired by Adolf Sutro who is the grandson of the pioneer Adolf Sutro. Just about that time Adolf Sutro wanted to do something to get more people out here. If you go to Sutro baths you may run into Tom Bratton. My name is Tom Bratton and now I volunteer for the National Parks, and come out here once a week and for a few hours and talk to people and let them know just exactly what all these ruins were about. Tom's father was an engineer, and he helped Sutro Baths undergo its really witty midlife

crisis. They cut off the bottom pool, cut that off from the regular pull, drained that, scatter sand around on it, put in some tables, ping pong tables and picnic tables, and they called that the tropic beach. The tropic beach was supposed to be a warm sandy place in Dora's just to hang out, even though the real beach was right outside. Then it really didn't work out too well. Which really is a shame, because right outside the beach is freezing and usually foggy. A tropical version isn't that crazy.

And so they said, well, how about this? We'll take that traffic beach away and we'll put a platform there and we'll make that into an ice rink. And when Tom was in high school, his father got him a job working at this very ice rink. Yes, Tom worked at this place while it was still standing, which seems impossible given how ancient the ruins look. People will really come up to me and say, were these really ruins from Rome? And I say, not really. Not at all. Tom's just being nice. By the time Tom was employed there, the name of the place had changed from Sutro Bats to just Sutros.

The Sutro family had finally gotten rid of this place in 1952. When entertainment tycoon, George Whitney bought it. Whitney was the boss when Tom Bratton started as a locker attendant. And even more than the Sutro family, George Whitney was really trying to do everything he could to get people to come out. So he tacked on more amusement, including a ride high above the sea that shuttled between the two cliffs on either side of Sutro's. He called it the Sky Tram.

The Sky Tram, this thing had hold about 20 people. It took about 20 minutes to go across. So they didn't eliminate, make a lot of money on it. Whitney also thought an aviary might bring in the big money, so he ordered some exotic birds and some cages. What happened was all the birds came in at once before the cages, so they had the Whitney quelled all the employees and said, okay, everybody here take a home, take home a bird until our cages come in and then we'll bring the birds back.

What a mess. But even after the ice rink and the aviary and the sky tram, people still weren't coming to Sutro's. The Whitney's after struggling for 14 years decided we're going to sell the property. Historian John Martini, again. It was sold to a land developer who began to demolish it. And in June 66, that's when the very convenient fire broke out. In 1966, a mysterious fire broke out and reduced

two-trows to a pile of rubble. The no-one was arrested. And then, two-trows was just never rebuilt. Eventually, the last owner sold the land to the National Park Service in 1980. So it's part of a big national park area. Sutro baths is right inside Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And when the government finally bought it, it was seamlessly included into this big national park area.

It's not a national park itself, and it doesn't look like it belongs within the Golden Gate National Park's conservancy at all. It just looks like a bunch of ruins. Sometimes ruins are more evocative than if the site is restored, because there's more sense that this is the real deal. Even though these are only 45 years old, they have the same attraction that urged try to explain, but what people are looking at. So unlike other ruins, remains of Sutro baths were less than 50 years old. They are part of a national park. Since 2012, they do have their own tiny museum and gift shop on site right along Maryway where the midway used to be.

The street sign is still there. And yet, the ruins are still pretty dangerous, and to many people, still there. And yet the ruins are still pretty dangerous and to many people still mysterious. So at this point you may be wondering how to get out to the baths or about parking availability or maybe if you can go hold your photo shoot there. Jill can help. People write to me with can I have my wedding there? How can I get there? Can I film my movie there? I answer all their questions. Jill Corral runs sutrobaths.com. And I don't say like, oh, I'm just this random chicken Seattle. From Seattle.

You know, I just respond to their question. Like, yes, is your wedding party smaller than 30 people? Sure, you can have it there. Jill snagged sutrobaths.com in 2000. I couldn't believe that the domain was available when it was. If you contact sutrobaths on Facebook or Twitter, those accounts are also run by Jill in Seattle. I love it when people ask me, like, how much does it cost? Can I get in? It's just like, just go. It's never closed. And unlike Tom Bratton or John Martini, who actually both experienced Sutro Baths when it was a functioning building,

Jill first encountered the place as a ruin. I was flown out to San Francisco for a job interview in 1997. My main mission was to touch the Pacific Ocean that day before my interview. I went down there and I stumbled on this just insane playground of concrete and metal sticking out of the ground. I didn't know what the hell it was. It was just pretty much the closest to a magical place I'd found as an adult. And I fell in love. I think I will toss my ashes there after I die. Well, I won't. Someone else will. Jill actually did bury her two pet

lizards there. They're in the cave. The story of Sutro Baths didn't exactly shape history. Yes, it helped expand San Francisco public transit. Yes, you can see the ruins briefly in a scene in the movie Herald and Mod, but ultimately it was a strange glass complex at the edge of the ocean that was destined to fail. And amusements and attractions were constantly added and removed throughout its life. But in a city as rapidly gentrifying as San Francisco, in a country as young as the United States, these ruins are an anomaly. I respect people's desire for it to be like this mysterious, unknown thing. But when I hear tours talking and just

sting their wondering like I have been known to walk up to them and tell them like there used to be this giant beautiful magical thing here like you have to know about it. Always read the plaque right? You got it. In addition to researching what the baths were, Jill keeps tabs on how they're changing. Ruins seeing static like a fixed, but of course they're not. I have watched it continue to fall apart. There used to be a deck that you could go and read on by the cave, and then it just crumbled into the sea sometime around 2005.

It's still living and dying in slow-mo. Which is a process the parks are actually trying to stop, according to Tom Braden. As far as the National Parks go, they want to make it so that it's not going to deteriorate any more that it already has. If it deteriorates any more, you're not going to really be able to tell what it really was. Tom speculates they might do this by adding more signs, maybe stabilizing some of the decaying structures, but not too much more. Well, what the parks really don't want to do, they don't want to make it look like a box to go inside and look at the ruins and then come out again. But recently the young

ruins have become something else entirely. Nature's reclaiming the site. The ruins continue to evolve. The old swimming pools themselves have become partly silted in. It's become a wetland, migrating birds love the site. And recently an otter appeared swimming in Sutro Bats, the public dubbed him Sutro Sam. Sutro Bats continues to be a machine for generating new San Francisco folklore. Today, Sutro Bats is pretty much back to where it started. All that remains is the foundation, including the original catch basin that Adolf Sutro

built before ever imagining a swimming pool, a tropic beach, a carnival midway, an ice skating rink. So after all the years of building this palace of wonder after adding games and rides and oddities, trying and failing to draw the public out to this strange place by the ocean. All Adolf Sutro or George Whitney had to do was let it burn down and crumble into ruin. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Troubleman With Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 Local Public Radio KALW, in San Francisco, and produced in downtown

Oakland, California, out of the offices of Arxan, an architecture firm who values collaboration so much, they could have even worked without off-sutra. If you like more cool tidbits about design or random jokes in the middle of the night, try finding us on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, but if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people who are kicking themselves because they missed the Kickstarter and would love a 99% visible t-shirt with a razzle dazzle ship on it or one that says always read the plaque, go to 99pi.org and click the link that says shop. And you can show off your great taste and radio programs and associated merchandise.

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