Today in History

On March 14, 1896, seven thousand people gathered at San Francisco's Ocean Beach to celebrate the official opening of the Sutro Baths, an extravagant public bathhouse envisioned and developed by the eccentric one-time mayor of San Francisco, Adolph Sutro. An early immigrant to the city, the Prussian-born Sutro was a mining engineer, construction expert, and real estate investor who once owned an estimated one-twelfth of San Francisco real estate.

Inside the enormous glass structure that encased the Sutro Baths were seven pools, more than 500 private dressing rooms, viewing galleries, restaurants, and natural history exhibits. The pools were filled with steam-heated sea water piped in from the Pacific.

To ensure that transportation to the baths remained affordable, Sutro built his own trolley line from downtown San Francisco. Access was also available via the Cliff House Railroad, built between 1886 and 1888 and later absorbed by the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1894. The film Panoramic View of the Golden Gate features the scenic portion of the Cliff House Railroad route along the bluffs and cliffs of Lands End (at the northwest corner of San Francisco) overlooking the Golden Gate and the Marin headlands.

In November 1879, Milwaukee merchant Edward D. Holton, visiting the original Cliff House, was captivated by the hordes of sea lions he saw there. He described their shenanigans in Travels with Jottings, a diary included in California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900:

Right upon the shore of the ocean stands the Cliff House, an extensive hotel restaurant. It is perched upon the rock, say forty feet from the water. Directly before this house, say five hundred feet away, rise abruptly from the water three conical rocks, naked and bare. . . . It is upon these rocks that the sea lions have come and made a home. Upon any sunny day hundreds of these monsters may be viewed from the broad porch of this hotel at pleasure. . . . Here they lie upon rocks writhing and crawling over each other. They thrust their long tapering necks and little heads up and cry and howl like dogs, keeping up a terrible din.

Edward D. Holton, Letter 6: San Francisco, Cal., Jan. 20, 1880,
Travels with Jottings, Milwaukee, Trayser brothers, printers, 1880.
California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900

• Search the following collections on the keyword resort to find more movies and photographs of vacation resorts of days gone by:
  • Early Motion Pictures, 1897-1920
  • Taking the Long View, 1851-1991
  • Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955
  • Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
• To find more recollections of holidays at the seaside, search on beach in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 and in California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900.
• For more movies of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, browse the subject index of the Great Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco, 1897-1916 collection, which includes 26 early films of the city and its environs before and after the 1906 disaster