Meet Me at Riis

SWAN REAL: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Swan Real. 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 Riis Park–also known simply as Riis.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: My first time at Riis was July 4th, 2017.

SWAN REAL: This is artist, producer, and dear friend Jazmine JT Green.

JAZMINE 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-kissed toes would soon touch the Atlantic.

When I first got to Riis, 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 a playground 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 Riis Beach. It formed a kind of U-shape facing the shore.

SWAN REAL: This abandoned building was called the Neponsit Beach Hospital. The area right in front of it is where queer folks have chosen to call their home.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: This rundown, old hospital became a landmark of queer sanctuary. It offered a kind of protective shadow for this queer paradise to persist.

SWAN REAL: Jazmine Green is going to take the story of queer Riis from here.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: Ever since that first visit to Riis, I’ve made a trip every summer to enjoy a nutcracker while gazing at the Atlantic Ocean. But while Riis 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 Neponset Beach Hospital. And the demolition brought with it a new set of questions. How did queer Riis come to be? What might become of it now?

DEAN LABOWITZ: It’s so striking how, like, going to the beach used to be you’d see this huge building and it was this looming abandoned structure. It’s in the background of all of the photos I have of Riis, and it’s completely gone now.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: This is Dean Labowitz.

DEAN LABOWITZ: I’m Dean Labowitz. I’m an urban planner and researcher and writer and person who loves and adores Riis above all else. Yeah.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: Riis is Dean’s queer haven as well. Their apartment is decorated with shells and sea glass they’ve collected from the beach.

DEAN LABOWITZ: I always celebrate my birthday at Riis because I have a late June birthday. And as I like to say, God’s gay children were born on the days around Pride.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: Dean filled me in on the history of Riis. In 1914, before it was a beach, it was a military base for the Rockaway Naval Air Station. And then in 1915, the Neponsit 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 space and the city decided to create a public park there instead–Jacob Riis Park. Jacob Riis 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 Riis 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.

DEAN LABOWITZ: 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 one of the largest in the U.S. at some point.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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 bathhouse, got a facelift. There was even a golf course built. But the hospital stayed put–untouched.

DEAN LABOWITZ: I believe initially you couldn’t access the beachfront in front of the hospital because it was a working hospital. But even then, basically as soon as it opened, it was a queer beach.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: This was the 1940s. And ever since, queer people have been flocking to this part of the beach in front of the hospital.

CHRIS BERNSON: Yeah, we are looking at– It’s a little bit of a crop of a larger picture.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: This is documentary artist Chris Bernson. 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 Hallum.

CHRIS BERNSON: 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 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 Neponset Hospital in the early ’80s. And it is just looking so glorious. 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: Riis 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 a hundred 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 Riis I know and love today.

CHRIS BERNSON: You’re seeing a multiracial gathering of people. You’re seeing women. Also, you’re seeing these bathing suits that look so hip today even with, like, these little revealing sides. To me, this is this weird timeless image where I’m like, “Riis has always been a congregation point for everybody.”

[Riis Beach background]

RIIS BEACHGOER #1: Three, five, seven, nine, lesbians are mighty fine!

[applause and cheering]

RIIS BEACHGOER #2: 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: And while this beach became a popular spot for cruising and reveling in the nude, the cops were also cruising for citations.

CHRIS BERNSON: This was kind of the cruisy spot of the beach. And so it was a place where you could cruise, but it was 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 if you got a ticket or got in trouble in this part of the beach, it kind of would out you a little bit. So, if people that you weren’t out to found out, they would assume you might be gay.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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.

CHRIS BERNSON: There was a camaraderie and an exchange and actually 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 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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.

NEWS ANCHOR: 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…

JAZMINE JT GREEN: Here’s Dean again.

DEAN LABOWITZ: It was estimated there was like half a million dollars in damage done, which is not nothing, right?

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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.

DEAN LABOWITZ: 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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 Riis I saw when I encountered it for the first time–a sandy beach adjacent to the hospital, further falling into disarray. On one side, in large text, graffiti read, “Queer trans power” on the other side, “Know your power.” Many a queer will make a sanctuary out of anything. Riis 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.

CHRIS BERNSON: I think that queers thrive being kind of in that in-between place, where it’s less regulated and there’s more possibility, so we are more likely to be left alone.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: As the Neponset 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.

CHRIS BERNSON: 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 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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, guardhouses, and cleaning up debris–until spring of 2023 when the hospital was finally torn down.

[sounds of Neponsit Beach Hospital demolition]

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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 Riis now that our private oasis was no longer in shadow.

Lately, arrests at Riis for public nudity and other infractions have been rising. The Rockaway Times, the local paper for that slice of Queens, published a report featuring quotes from local residents demanding an end to “Riis porn,” propping “children’s safety” as their number one concern. The organization GLITS–Gays & 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, Riis feels to be one of the few left. But like the history of the Chelsea Piers 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 Riis.

CHRIS BERNSON: What I would really love to see there personally is native plants and grasses and trees be planted there. And let’s use that as a place to kind of a little bit rewild the space and give some nature back to the place.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: And perhaps maybe, in future images, there will be more cute butts, but in the background, just a little bit more trees.

CHRIS BERNSON: A little more trees. I know. I wish we had a little bit of a shade structure.

[waves rolling]

JAZMINE JT GREEN: I went to Riis 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 6:00 PM hit, I would take my first dose. And I wanted to take it here, at Riis. 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 be. 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.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: I’m here for another ritual–to leave another part of myself behind.

JAZMINE JT GREEN: 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.

SWAN REAL: After the break, we leave Riis and travel west to a different beach. And like the abandoned hospital by Riis, this beach has its own set of ruins. Stay with us…

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back. Here’s a classic 99PI story remixed and rescored. It’s about how abandoned places can have a certain kind of allure.

ROMAN MARS: If you’ve wandered at Machu Picchu or Stonehenge or the Coliseum–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 Planet of the Apes kind of way. So, of course, there’s a German word for it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: “Ruinenlust.” The longstanding aesthetic obsession with decay.

ROMAN MARS: Resident Germanophile and producer Avery Trufelman.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: My friend, Austin, brought me there one night.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: So, how do you get in? Does the trail just lead right to it?

AUSTIN: Yeah, yeah, there’s steps. There’s a parking lot up there and steps that go down.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Head to the rocks at Lands 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 and no guards–only a warning sign that says, “Danger! Cliff at surf area extremely dangerous. People have been swept from the rocks and drowned.”

AUSTIN: What you can see down here are the ruins of the bathhouses.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Have you heard any rumors as to what was what here?

AUSTIN: Strangely no.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And last time you were here, it was just like… Were people wondering about the history of it at all?

AUSTIN: No. It was, like, 300 punks in a cave.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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 Sutro Baths all the time.

ROMAN MARS: And it’s easy to see why. This place has a draw.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: The night that I was there, a group of photographers was snapping shots of the moon.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Is this, like, a known photo destination?

AUSTIN: I would say, in the last three years, it’s been more common. So, I think people are finding out about it. I just know that, in 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.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

JOHN MARTINI: 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 Sutro Baths, I mean, there’s people crawling all over the ruins like ants.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But the thing about these ruins at the edge of the continent–they may look ancient, but they really aren’t at all.

JOHN MARTINI: You talk to ’em and 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 their ruins. And if they know the name Sutro Baths, they know there were swimming pools. And that’s about it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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.

ROMAN MARS: 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 and 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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.

JOHN MARTINI: 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.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

JOHN MARTINI: 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, he hires an architectural firm. Assumably, it 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 a 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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, saltwater 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 Merrie Way. There was a Firth Wheel…

ROMAN MARS: Basically a Ferris Wheel.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Along with a roller coaster and a hall of mirrors and games of chance.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

JOHN MARTINI: 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’s, like, $37, $40 million. It couldn’t make money from charging people 10 cents to get in and 15 cents to go swimming.

ROMAN MARS: It would’ve had to be packed almost every day.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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.

JOHN MARTINI: At the same time–remember–he owned all the land surrounding it that people were going to 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 and, at the same, trying to make some money.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But Sutro Baths just never ever made money.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: The Sutro family tried for years to sell Sutro Baths, while also trying valiantly to make it turn a profit.

TOM BRATTEN: 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: If you go to Sutro Baths, you may run into Tom Bratten.

TOM BRATTEN: My name is Tom Bratten. 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 ’em know just exactly what all these ruins were about.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Tom’s father was an engineer, and he helped Sutro Baths undergo its really wiggy midlife crisis.

TOM BRATTEN: 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.

ROMAN MARS: The Tropic Beach was supposed to be a warm, sandy place indoors just to hang out, even though the real beach was right outside.

TOM BRATTEN: That really didn’t work out too well.

ROMAN MARS: Which really is a shame because, right outside, the beach is freezing and usually foggy. A tropical version isn’t that crazy.

TOM BRATTEN: 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.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And when Tom was in high school, his father got him a job working at this very ice rink.

ROMAN MARS: Yes, Tom worked at this place while it was still standing, which seems impossible given how ancient the ruins look.

TOM BRATTEN: People will really come up to me and say, “Were these really ruins from Rome?” And I say, “Not really–just Sutro Baths.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: By the time Tom was employed there, the name of the place had changed from Sutro Baths to just Sutros.

ROMAN MARS: The Sutro family had finally gotten rid of this place in 1952, when entertainment tycoon George Whitney bought it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Whitney was the boss when Tom Bratten 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.

ROMAN MARS: So, he tacked on more amusements, including a ride high above the sea that shuttled between the two cliffs on either side of Sutros. He called it the Sky Tram.

TOM BRATTEN: The Sky Tram. This thing could hold about 20 people. It took about 20 minutes to go across, so it didn’t make a lot of money on it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Whitney also thought an aviary might bring in the big money, so he ordered some exotic birds and some cages.

TOM BRATTEN: What happened was all the birds came in at once before the cages. So, 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.”

ROMAN MARS: What a mess.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But even after the ice rink and the aviary and the Sky Tram, people still weren’t coming to Sutros.

JOHN MARTINI: The Whitneys, after struggling for 14 years, decided, “We’re going to sell the property.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Historian John Martini, again…

JOHN MARTINI: 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.

ROMAN MARS: In 1966, a mysterious fire broke out and reduced Sutros to a pile of rubble. An arsonist was suspected, but no one was arrested.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And then Sutros was just never rebuilt.

JOHN MARTINI: Eventually, the last owner sold the land to the National Park Service in 1980. So, it’s part of a big National Park area.

ROMAN MARS: 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 Parks Conservancy at all. It just looks like a bunch of ruins.

JOHN MARTINI: Sometimes ruins are more evocative than if the site is restored because there’s more of a 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.

ROMAN MARS: So, unlike other ruins, remains of Sutro Baths were less than 50 years old. They’re part of a National Park. Since 2012, they do have their own tiny museum and gift shop onsite, right along Merrie 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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.

JILL CORRAL: 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.

ROMAN MARS: Jill Corral runs sutrobaths.com.

JILL CORRAL: And I don’t say, like, “Oh, I’m just this random chick in Seattle.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: From Seattle!

JILL CORRAL: You know, I just respond to their question like, “Yes, is your wedding party smaller than 30 people? Sure, you can have it there.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Jill snagged sutrobaths.com in 2000.

JILL CORRAL: I couldn’t believe that the domain was available.

ROMAN MARS: If you contact Sutro Baths on Facebook or Twitter, those accounts are also run by Jill–in Seattle.

JILL CORRAL: I love it when people ask me, “How much does it cost? Can I get in?” And it’s just like, “Just go. It’s never closed.”

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And unlike Tom Bratten or John Martini, who actually both experienced Sutro Baths when it was a functioning building, Jill first encountered the place as a ruin.

JILL CORRAL: 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: Jill actually did bury her two pet lizards there. They’re in the cave.

ROMAN MARS: 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.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: But in a city as rapidly gentrifying as San Francisco, in a country as young as the United States, these ruins are an anomaly.

JILL CORRAL: I respect people’s desire for it to be, like, this mysterious unknown thing. But when I hear tourists talking and just sitting there wondering, I have been known to walk up to them and tell them, “There used to be this giant, beautiful, magical thing here. You have to know about it.” Always read the plaque, right?

ROMAN MARS: You got it.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: In addition to researching what the baths were, Jill keeps tabs on how they’re changing.

ROMAN MARS: Ruins seem static, like a fixed ending. But of course they’re not.

JILL CORRAL: 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 slo-mo.

ROMAN MARS: Which is a process the parks are actually trying to stop, according to Tom Bratten.

TOM BRATTEN: As far as the National Parks go, they want to make it so that it’s not going to deteriorate any more than it already has. If it deteriorates anymore, you’re not going to really be able to tell what it really was.

ROMAN MARS: Tom speculates that they might do this by adding more signs–maybe stabilizing some of the decay structures–but not too much more.

TOM BRATTEN: Well, what the parks really don’t want to do is they don’t want to make it look like a box to go inside and look at the ruins and then come out again.

ROMAN MARS: But recently, the young ruins have become something else entirely.

JOHN MARTINI: Nature’s reclaiming the site.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: The ruins continue to evolve.

JOHN MARTINI: The old swimming pools themselves have become partly silted in. It’s become a wetland. Migrating birds love the site.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: And recently an otter appeared, swimming in Sutro Baths. The public dubbed him Sutro Sam.

ROMAN MARS: Sutro Baths continues to be a machine for generating new San Francisco folklore.

AVERY TRUFELMAN: 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…

ROMAN MARS: 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.

SWAN REAL: That story was produced by Avery Trufelman and originally aired back in 2014.

99% Invisible was reported this week by Jazmine JT Green, and edited by Lasha Madan. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. And music by me, Swan Real. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Taylor Shedrick is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Neena Pathak, and of course, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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