99% Invisible - Meet Me at Riis

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

As the last warmth of summer fades, Riis Beach—a hidden queer oasis behind a decaying hospital—faces a new reality. With its shadowy protector demolished, can this haven survive in the open, or will its magic disappear with the ruins?Meet Me at Riis Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Swan Royale. Every year around this time in New York City, when the weather starts getting colder and the world starts to slow down a bit, I think about the summer that slipped away, and I always have the same thought, God, I wish I had gone to the beach more. And not just any beach, but this one beach in particular. The People's Beach at Jacob Rees Park, also known simply as Rees. My first time at Rees was July 4th, 2017. This is artist, producer, and dear friend, Jasmine JT Green. I was seven months into living in Brooklyn after a move from Chicago.

The ocean was never part of my landlocked life in the Midwest, but after a crew of new friends invited me to a group chat titled Beach with two sun emojis, I knew that my Lake Michigan kiss toes would soon touch the Atlantic. When I first got to Rees, it first appeared to be a larger version of my Midwestern beach past. A cute bazaar of food, sunburnt shoulders, and that summer's generic Drake song playing from many a speaker. But as I wondered where the six of us would land for our afternoon of escapism, everyone except myself seemed to already know where to head.

We were walking to the eastern edge of the beach, 20 minutes from the parking lot, past the playgrounds and food carts and public bathrooms. Eventually, we landed on a patch of sand that was partially shaded by an abandoned building, separate from the beach by a metal fence. For decades, this large, graffiti-covered structure loomed behind this sliver of Reeves Beach. It formed a kind of U-shape facing the shore. This abandoned building was called the Nipponset Beach Hospital.

The area right in front of it is where queer folks have chosen to call their home. This rundown old hospital became a landmark of queer sanctuary. It offered a kind of protective shadow for this queer paradise to persist. Jasmine Green is going to take the story of queer Reese from here. Ever since that first visit to Reese, I've made a trip every summer to enjoy a nutcracker while gazing at the Atlantic Ocean. But while Reeves is known for topless bathing and running into your exes, it was never intended to be a queer public space, and its identity shifted and morphed into many things before we called it

our home. Last year, after decades of abandonment, the city's health department demolished Niponset Beach Hospital. And the demolition brought with it a new set of questions. How did queer Reeves come to be? What might become of it now? It's so striking how it like, going to the beach used to be, you'd see this huge building and you'd, and it was this like,oming, abandoned structure. It's in the background of all of the photos I have of Reese. And it's completely gone now.

This is Dean Labowitz. I'm Dean Labowitz. I'm an urban planner and researcher and writer and person who loves and adores Reese above all else, yeah. Rees is Dean's queer haven as well. Their apartment is decorated with shells and sea glass they've collected from the beach. I always celebrate my birthday at Rees

because I have a late June birthday. And as I like to say, God's gay children were born on the days around pride. Dean filled me in on the history of Rees. In 1914, before it was a beach, it was a military base for the Rockaway Naval Air Station. And then in 1915, the Niponsant Beach Hospital, our beloved four-story red brick abandoned behemoth was built. There were beautiful porches, open-air balconies, and eastern and western wing openings all

facing the beach. The hospital was intended to treat children with tuberculosis. Soon after World War I, the military abandoned its base and the city decided to create a public park there instead, Jacob Reeves Park. Jacob Reeves was a social reformer and photojournalist who advocated for building parks, playgrounds and houses for the poor and working class. With bath houses and picnic tables, the goal of Reeves was to provide public transit accessible recreation for New York's working class. And then in the 1930s, the whole thing was scrapped and redesigned by Robert Moses.

That Robert Moses led redesign was classic Robert Moses. It was this huge 14,000 car parking lot, gigantic. I think somebody said it was like one of the largest in the U.S. at some point. And while the property was taken up mostly by the parking lot, the beach got an expansion while the rest of the park, like the bath house, got a facelift. There was even a golf course built, but the hospital stayed put, untouched. I believe initially, like you couldn't access the beachfront in front of the hospital because it was a working hospital.

But even then, it was like, basically as soon as it opened, it was a queer beach. This was the 1940s, and ever since, queer people have been flocking to this part of the beach in front of the hospital. Yeah, we are looking at, it's a little bit of a crop of a larger picture. This is documentary artist Chris Bernsen. After combing through his own photos, he showed me some archives he started collecting of queer life throughout the decades, including this one by photographer Frank Hallam. In this series of pictures we're seeing, there's a lot of naked guys and you can tell

he's clearly just trying to take a picture of like a naked guy without asking his permission. And so he just kind of passes through but okay, so now we're looking at a picture of Nippon's at hospital in the early 80s and it is just looking so glorious like no broken windows no graffiti. There still is the fence line. And you can see there's just queers all up and down the area. And in the foreground, you're seeing just a lot of people. Some are naked, some are not, just hanging out.

Everyone's fashion is really on point. Reeves Beach, in its entirety, is fairly large. 260 acres, to be exact, but it's only here in front of this hospital that queer folks claimed as their own. The nature of this building, mostly housing tuberculosis patients, led to it being an undesired site in the neighborhood, and the building offered a physical shield that made it the perfect place for uninterrupted debauchery. Chris kept flipping through these photos until he came across one of my now favorites by

Richard Peckinpah. It was a crowd of people, maybe 100 total. It's the 60s maybe? And in the foreground there's all sorts of people, like all sorts, not just cisgender white men. It looked very close to the Reeves I know and love today. You're seeing like a multiracial gathering of people. You're seeing women.

Also, you're seeing these bathing suits that look like so hip today even, with like these little revealing sides. It's just like, to me, this is like this weird, timeless image where I'm like, Reeves has always been a congregation point for everybody. Stay in, stay in. Reeves, let's say, I'm like, Reese has always been a congregation point for everybody. Say it, say it! Reese!

Let's say it together! Three, five, seven, nine. Lesbians are mighty fun. Yay! Yay! Woohoo! The body is more accepted here, and so people tend to think of people who show their body as exhibitionists.

And it's very common on this bay. And while this beach became a popular spot for cruising and reveling in the nude, the cops were also cruising for citations. This was kind of the cruisy spot of the beach. And so it was a place where you could cruise, but it's also a place where men were targeted for doing so by the police. And historically, one of the things that a lot of people were very scared of, at least in the 60s from interviews that I hear, is just, you know, if you got a ticket or got in trouble in this part of the beach. It was kind of without you a little bit. So if people that you weren't out to found out, they would assume you might be gay.

Once we reached the 80s, the hospital was still operating in the background, though it was no longer specifically a children's hospital. There was a metal fence that separated the hospital from the beach, but Chris told me that beachgoers and hospital patients would pass cigarettes back and forth through the fence. There was a camaraderie and an exchange and actually like a porous relationship with the people that were in the hospital. I mean if you look at the history of this beach and of this

hospital, it's a really fascinating history to think about. This was built as a tuberculosis clinic and TB was like a very stigmatized illness when this was built in the 1930s. So there's this long history of us kind of being next to this space where people are kind of kept at a distance from the rest of society.

And that's how it was for the next several decades. Eventually the building transitioned from hospital to nursing home. And then in 1998, a stormy weekend swept through the Rockaways. It raced through central New York just after midnight on Labor Day morning and left a path of destruction unlike any storm we've seen before or since.

Thousands of trees were destroyed, changing the landscape. Here's Dean again. It was like estimated there was like half a million dollars in damage done, which is like not nothing, right? This was when Rudy Giuliani was the mayor and was very much the king of privatizing New York. This damage was the perfect excuse to shut down this publicly funded hospital. But he did it in the middle of the night.

And there was something close to like 300 nursing home patients still in the building. Several died in the process of being evacuated in the middle of the night. in the process of being evacuated in the middle of the night. Renovations to the damaged building were promised to residents, but they never came, and the residents never returned. The hospital was closed soon after and stayed vacant for years. Decay began to set in as that red brick became a dusty brown. This was the reese I saw when I encountered it for the first time. A sandy beach adjacent to the hospital, further falling into disarray.

On one side, enlarged text, graffiti-red queer trans power. On the other side, know your power. Many a queer will make a sanctuary out of anything. Rees was no exception. With cracked windows and rusted metal, the hospital gave off a vibe that we weren't supposed to be there. And we were drawn to it. And I've noticed this elsewhere, too.

Think about Chicago's Belmont Rocks, or Marshall's Beach underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, or the old Chelsea Piers on the New York waterfront. Queerness is scrappiness, creating a life and culture out of society's leftovers, and existing figuratively and literally in the margins. I think that queers thrive being kind of on that,

in that in-between place where it's less regulated and there's more possibilities. So like we are more likely to be left alone. As the Naponset Beach Hospital fell further apart, we kept sunbathing around it. A hospital that was continually serving marginalized groups felt to be the perfect fit for shielding the most vulnerable of New Yorkers.

It actually was kind of a visual shield from the neighborhood next to it. So they didn't really see us as much because of that. So there was a certain amount of kind of like protection in that. But I think we also just like living in these places that have less rules and have more possibility for us to be and do what we want to do.

Over the next few decades, the property was stuck in a political and legal cold war. Proposals shuffled back and forth to renovate or not, to demolish or not. In the 2000s, it was estimated that millions of dollars were spent to maintain the hospital. We're talking about things like fences, guard houses, cleaning up debris. Until spring of 2023, when the hospital was finally torn down. When I first heard that the hospital was demolished, it took me by surprise. Here was this place that had been part of my experience for so long, completely vanished. And I was scared.

I didn't know what would become of this place that had made me, and if these changes would no longer make me feel safe. And we all wondered what would happen to the future of queer Reeves now that our private oasis was no longer in shadow. Lately, arrests at Reeves for public nudity and other infractions have been rising. The Rockaway Times, the local papers at that slice of Queens, published a report featuring quotes from local residents,

demanding an end to quote Ree of Queens, published a report featuring quotes from local residents, demanding an end to quote, Reeves porn, propping children's safety as their number one concern. The organization GLITS, Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society, has been working on a proposal, a community land trust that leads to a healthcare facility that focuses on trans New Yorkers. Because there aren't many public and fairly queer spaces that especially don't surround alcohol and expensive tickets, Reeves feels to be one of the few left. But like the history of the Chelsea Pierses queer past being erased into a playground

for the rich, its legacy is at risk of being washed away. Chris would hate to see that happen to Reece. Chris What I would really love to see there personally is like native plants and grasses and trees be planted there and like let's use that as a place to kind of a little bit rewild the space and give some some nature back to the place. Perhaps maybe in future images, there will be more cute butts, but in the background, just a little bit more trees.

A little more trees. I wish we had a little bit of a shade structure. I went to Reeves recently and it's so much different than what it used to be. Sure there's a brand new snack shop which is tasty, but without the hospital building, things feel so much more on display. I still felt comfortable, but more exposed. But that discomfort wasn't enough to scare me away. I was drawn to it that day, especially because it was the first time that I arrived to the beach as a trans woman.

I brought my freshly prescribed hormones, and when 6pm hit, I would take my first dose, and I wanted to take it here, at Reese. The pill bottle rattled at the bottom of my tote bag, along with some snacks, a book, and a beach blanket. I removed my dress to reveal a bathing suit that I recently ordered. This was the first time that I had ever worn a two-piece. After a few minutes, my skin would begin a new tanning pattern that I had wished for ages, and soon I would step into the ocean for the first time as an out, trans, lesbian woman. And because I'm a glutton for ritual, I took out a pen and my

notepad and began to write what it all meant to me. As I slowly stepped into the Atlantic, the waves lapped around my toes, and then my thighs, and finally up to my waist, same level of water as my first baptism when I was a child. Only this time, it was on my terms. I unfurled my paper and began to read. I'm here for another ritual, to leave another part of myself behind. I took the pill and just like my ancestors before me, I took a deep breath and ducked my head underwater, fully submerging myself into the sea.

After the break, we leave Reis and travel west, to a different beach. And like the abandoned hospital by Reis, this beach has its own set of ruins. Stay with us. Welcome back. Here's a classic 99PI story remixed and rescored. It's about how abandoned places can have a certain kind of allure. 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 in 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. Ruin and Lust, the longstanding aesthetic obsession with decay. Resident Germanophile and producer Avery Truffleman.

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 Franciscans, 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, there's steps. There's a parking lot up there and steps that go down. Head to the rocks at Land's 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 maw of a cave. To your left is the crumbled foundation of a concrete structure. It looks like a giant Belgian waffle, about seven 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're 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 and surf area extremely dangerous. People have been swept from the rocks and drowned. What you can see down here are the ruins of the bathhouses. Have you heard any rumors as to what was what here? Strangely, no. And last time you were here, it was just like,

were people wondering about the history of it at all? No, it was like 300 punks 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 Sutra Bats 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 it's 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 hot or the 30s it was some sort of bath for people to sit in and just soak. I don't know if it was hot or cold or what it was about. Ruins have drawn people to them for centuries. Starting in 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 gone 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 Soutre-Bez, I mean, there's people crawling all over the ruins like ants. that urge to try to explain what people are looking at. Anytime you go out to Sutro, there's people crawling all over the ruins like ants. But the thing about these ruins at the edge of the continent, they may look ancient, but they really aren't at all. You talk to them, they're all trying to figure the place out. What is this? What do these tunnels do? What's this thing?

There's a curiosity to it. They know they're ruins, and if they know the name Sutro Bathro, 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 what 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 Baths. 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 guy built the foundation for an elaborate house, but didn't know what the house was going to look like. He just built the foundation, and he plumbed it. And then you hire an architect to come in and make a building fit on top of what 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, salt water and fresh, and there were more than 500 individual changing rooms beneath the sweeping arena style bleachers. And attached to the baths was a museum full of Sutro's crazy collection of stuff from around the world. Miniature boats, model buildings, taxidermied 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 Mary Way. There was a Firth Wheel, basically a Ferris wheel, along with a roller coaster 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. And 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 Adolf Sutro about a million dollars when it opened in 1894. And you put that today, that statement, 37, $40 million. It couldn't make money from the charging people

10 cents to get in and 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 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 baths. This was a huge boon for the city's mass transit. At the same time, remember, he owned all the land

surrounding it that people were gonna be traveling through, and there were always advertisements for the Sutro Land Company where they're trying to sell land. So he's doing things for the public at the same time trying to make some money. But Sutro Baths 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 for 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 Sucho Baths undergo its really wiggy midlife crisis. They cut off the bottom pool, cut that off from the regular pool, drained it, scattered 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 indoors just to hang out, even though the real beach was right outside. That 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 Tropic 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, just Sutro baths. By the time Tom was employed there, the name of the place had changed from Sutro baths 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 amusements, 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 would hold about 20 people. It took about 20 minutes to get across. So they didn't 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 Whitney called all the employees and says, okay, everybody here 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 SkyTram, people still weren't coming to Sutro's.

The Whitney's, after struggling for 14 years, decided they were 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 Sutros to a pile of rubble. An arsonist was suspected, but no one was arrested. And then Sutro's 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 urge to try to explain 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 Mary Way, 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 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 chick in 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. If you contact Sutro Baths 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 Harold and Maude, 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, as young as the United States. These ruins are an anomaly. 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 seem static, like a fixed ending, 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 Bratton. As far as the national parks go, they wanna make it so that it's not gonna deteriorate any more than 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 Baths.

The public dubbed him Sutro Sam. an otter appeared swimming in Sutro Baths. The public dubbed him Sutro Sam. Sutro Baths continues to be a machine for generating new San Francisco folklore. Today, Sutro Baths 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. That story was produced by Avery Jasmine JT Green and edited by Lasha Madon, mixed by Martin Gonzalez and music by me, Swan Royale. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstedt is our digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor, Taylor Shedstad is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor

Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Potuck, and of course, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as on our new Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past 99PI episode at 99PI.org. The End.