Where we shoot, on a map
Sutro Baths hasn't been shot for portraits yet — most clients come here for couples work. Switch to "All" to see everything.
Hop next door for a different mood
Baker Beach
The Presidio beach with the head-on Golden Gate Bridge view.
Lands End
The Coastal Trail along the northwest cliffs with bridge overlooks.
Golden Gate Overlook
The Langdon Court plaza with the two cypress framing the bridge.
Batteries to Bluffs Trail
The 470 stairs down to Marshall's Beach, tide-dependent.
Sutro Baths is the concrete-pool ruin at the northwest corner of San Francisco, where a 100,000-square-foot glass-and-steel public swimming complex burned down in 1966 and was never rebuilt. The pools fill with tidewater and ground rain, the cliffside tunnel echoes with surf, and on a foggy afternoon the whole site reads as the bones of something the city used to be. It is the SF cluster's most cinematic location, and the easiest to ruin with bad timing.
The first thing you need to know about Sutro Baths is that it is almost always foggier here than wherever you just came from. You can leave a sunny Mission and arrive at the ruins to find a wall of gray pushing in off the Pacific, and the ruins reframe instantly into something that feels like a half-remembered dream of San Francisco. The fog is the work, not the obstacle.
The lay of the land
We rescheduled Lill and Will's session twice for rain before we got a clear evening. Worth knowing about the ruins: the pathways are a little sketchy, which you feel differently when you're carrying ten grand of gear across them. There were plenty of tourists out too, so I got creative with compositions to make it feel like it was just the two of them. We didn't go all the way through the tunnel that day. Too much mud. It's still one of the best photo opportunities out here, guardrails and all.
Make a trip out of it
Where to stay
Getting here
A few things about Sutro Baths
Sutro Baths opened in 1896 as the largest indoor swimming pool establishment in the world. Seven pools, 517 private dressing rooms, restaurants, arcades, an aquarium, a museum, and 100,000 square feet of glass enclosing the whole thing. It could hold 10,000 visitors at once.
— Wikipedia / Outside Lands / NPSThe Baths burned down on June 26, 1966, two years after the owner began demolishing them. The fire was officially ruled arson; the perpetrator was never caught. What remains is the concrete footprint of the pools and a few sections of foundation.
— NPS / WikipediaThe cliffside tunnel at the northwest corner of the ruins was originally part of an aquarium built into the rock. It stretches about 200 feet and opens onto the surf through a series of small windows cut into the wall. At high tide and big-surf days, the tunnel can flood.
— Roadside America / Trees and TentsThe bathhouse was Adolph Sutro's vision for democratized recreation. Sutro made his fortune building the Sutro Tunnel through the Comstock Lode in Nevada, became mayor of San Francisco in 1894, and built the Baths so working-class San Franciscans could ride his train to the ocean for a nickel.
— Outside Lands / WikipediaThe Outer Richmond neighborhood is the foggiest part of San Francisco. The marine layer arrives here first and leaves last. Many days the ruins are blanketed when the rest of the city is clear; many other days the ruins clear half an hour before sunset and reveal a glassy ocean.
— Wikipedia: SF Fog / inside-guide-to-san-francisco-tourismThe Lands End Trail starts directly east of the ruins and follows the old Cliff House Railway bed along the coast toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Sutro built the railway in the 1880s to bring visitors out from downtown.
— NPS Lands End / Modern Hiker
Sutro Baths also appears as Sutro Baths Ruins, Sutro Pools, or Sutro Bathhouse.