Six Million Gallons

Every time we went to the zoo as children, my mother would point to the chain link fence.

"That's where Fleishhacker Pool is. Salty and cold with a great big diving board." One of her great childhood triumphs was jumping off the tower in front of her older siblings. We'd peer through the fence and see the diving platform next to a huge pit full of greenish rainwater.

I looked through again the other day after saying something similar to my three-year-old daughter. "There used to be a big swimming pool out there, biggest outdoor pool in the world!" I held her up to look over the shrubbery. She saw a long decaying building and a bunch of dirt with bulldozers parked on it.

"Where did it go?"

Everyone into the Pool

Fleishhacker Pool postcard, circa 1930 - WNP collection

The "world's largest swimming tank" officially opened April 23, 1925.

San Francisco had acquired the sixty acres at the beach from the Spring Valley Water Company. Park commission president Herbert Fleishhacker subsidized the pool and the zoo beside it on the land as a gift to San Francisco. The thousand-foot-long strip of sea water was part of a large complex with the zoo, a children's playground, tennis courts, baseball fields, manicured lawns, and a "mother's building".

Supposedly heated to seventy degrees by a heating system, everyone who remembers the pool speaks of the cold. The chilly waters from the Pacific Ocean joined by the frequent summer fogs made for an invigorating swim.

But the cold didn't keep the people away in the 1920s and '30s. In the first two months after Fleishhacker Pool opened close to 60,000 people jumped in.

And there was plenty of room for them. At one thousand feet long by 150 feet wide, the six million gallons had to be patroled by twelve to twenty-four lifeguards, some in rowboats.

Major diving and swimming competitions took place, including Olympic trials, at the pool. Ann Curtis set world records in it. Flanking it on the west was a bathhouse designed in a mediterranean style typical of civic public structures built in the era. A green glazed tile roof capped lockers, ocean-facing dining rooms, and a mini-hospital to care for slips and falls.

Fleishhacker Pool pool, 1925 - Courtesy of a private collector

Fleishhacker's Folly?

The pool, for all its magnificence, never really paid for itself. Maintenance costs started high and just got worse as the infrastructure aged. The rise of automobiles meant more families could leave the city for recreation, and the west side of San Francisco wasn't getting any warmer.

As early as the 1940s plans arose to turn the pool into an ice skating rink (a fate to which Sutro Baths up the road succumbed). 1950s editorials called the installation a "white elephant", as business dwindled. Still, the pool held on and my mother had her chance to leap off the diving platform.

In January 1971 a storm damaged the outflow pipe to the ocean. The water became contaminated and the writing appeared on the wall. The city tried to use fresh water for the first time, but immediately had an algae problem.

The zoo next door pounced on the opportunity. With an almost disturbing zeal, they began a campaign to bury the pool and expand over the land.

The zoo director, Saul L. Kitchener, proclaimed: "While there is no doubt the pool was an audacious project when it was built in 1924, its day has passed."

What great plans did the zoo have for the grounds? A majority of the land they earmarked as a parking lot.

A resistance movement began, and a measure actually made it to the ballot in 1977 to save the pool. The voters didn't want to pay the million dollars proposed, and twenty years ago this month bulldozers began pushing debris into the drained pit.

Dead and Buried

Three decades after Fleishhacker closed, the zoo still doesn't have its parking lot. A sewage project has worked its way through the land, and the city has an elegant pumping station facing the Pacific. Acting somewhat as a grave marker, the 450-foot long bathhouse still stands. In his book Good Life in Hard Times, Jerry Flamm called it probably the finest ever built for a public pool. Now it's boarded up and fenced away.

The most vocal opponent to the pool closing back in the 1970s was an old lifeguard named Billy Nichols. He told a reporter he'd once asked Herbert Fleishhacker why he built such a big pool. Fleishhacker told him to swim the entire length and back. When Nichols returned, he was asked "Did anyone get in your way?" Billy answered no, and the old man responded "That's why I did it."

Bibliography: San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle, Aug 29, 1976; Good Life in Hard Times, Jerry Flamm, 1978; San Francisco, A Guide to the Bay and its Cities, 1940.

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