Sutro Baths: San Francisco
When a self-made millionaire opened the Sutro Baths outside of San Francisco in 1894, his idea was to give the city’s residents an ocean pool aquarium in a rocky cliff with an accompanying bathhouse that would be accessible (for a low fee) for cooling off, relaxing, and getting into nature.
Sutro Baths was wildly popular for years—but during the Great Depression, funds for leisure dried up, public transportation to the baths suffered, and new public health codes made running the baths more difficult.
The baths never really recovered their fiscal footing and were destroyed in a fire before they could be demolished to make way for high-rise apartments.
