San Francisco, California - Cliff House

Here are some photos from when Catherine and I went to dinner at San Francisco's Cliff House. I will try to post some more pictures from our travels later this weekend.

Pictures enlarge if you click on them.

Seal Rocks in the background

Seal Rocks is a place to watch sea lions not far from the shore near Cliff House. The sea lions congregate here, sunning themselves on the rocks, playing in the surf, and barking.

The ruins of the old Sutro Baths

The Sutro Baths were developed in 1886 by Adolph Sutro, who also owned nearby Cliff House and built the railroad that connected the area with the rest of San Francisco. The railroad helped draw crowds to the three-acre Bath complex, which included a huge glass enclosure containing six pools, which together, held 1,685,000 gallons of water and could be filled or emptied in a single hour (with the assistance of changing tides). In its heyday at the turn of the century, as many as 25,000 people a day used the Bath facilities, which, in addition to the pools, included three restaurants, a 3,700-seat amphitheater, and galleries filled with natural history exhibits, artworks, and cultural artifacts from China, Egypt, Japan, Mexico and Syria.

By the 1930s, the Baths were no longer a commercially viable enterprise. The owners tried for a time to sustain the complex by turning the largest tank into an ice skating rink, but this proved unsuccessful. In the 1960s, demolition of the complex began in preparation for the development of apartment buildings on the site. Although a fire sped the demolition efforts, the apartment houses were never constructed.

Inside the Cliff House Restaurant

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area

The Golden Gate National Recreation Area administered by the National Park Service, which surrounds the San Francisco Bay area. It is two-and-a-half times the size of the city and county of San Francisco. It is one of the largest urban parks in the world and one of the most visited units of the National Park system in the United States, with over 13 million visitors a year.

The park is not one continuous locale, but rather a collection of areas that stretch from northern San Mateo County to southern Marin County, and includes several areas of San Francisco. The park is as diverse as it is expansive; it contains famous tourist attractions such as Muir Woods National Monument, Alcatraz and the Presidio of San Francisco. The GGNRA is also home to 1,273 plant and animal species, encompasses 59 miles of bay and ocean shoreline and has military fortifications that span centuries of California history, from the Spanish conquistadors to Cold War-era Nike missile sites.

This particular section is about a ten minute drive from the Cliff House Restaurant.

The Golden Gate Bridge in the background behind Catherine

To see more of my San Francisco pictures check out San Francisco, California.

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