Cliff House & Sutro Baths Golden Gate National Recreation Area U S. National Park Service
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Sutro’s daughter rebuilt a neoclassical concrete Cliff House and the National Park Service acquired this building in 1977. Today, the Bistro restaurant is located in the 1909 structure and serves classic San Francisco fare (walk-ins only). The upscale restaurant Sutro's, in the 2004 addition, has two-story floor-to-ceiling windows providing sweeping views (reservations recommended). Perched over the Pacific above rocks populated by lounging seals, this San Francisco landmark has had many lives since it first opened in 1863. Promenade nearby to the glorious ruins of Sutro Baths, then head out to the world-famous panormas of Lands End.
Cozy Diner Up the Road. Coming Back?
Louis started working for his brother and then, in 1937, opened Louis’. “Our goal is to make this beloved icon into a place that welcomes all San Franciscans and all those who love San Francisco,” Sutro Lands End Partners states on its new website, in anticipation of meetings with the public to determine what the restaurant will look and feel like. With a name that pays homage to the long-defunct Sutro Baths nearby—San Francisco Mayor Adolph Sutro founded both operations in the late 1800s—Sutro Lands End Partners is clearly aiming to reinvigorate one of the city’s unique cultural entities.
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Famous guests included Oscar Wilde, Andrew Carnegie, and two American presidents. The new tenant has a 20-year lease and plans to do significant remodeling. The building will reopen with several restaurants inside, similar to what was there before. The ruins of the Sutro Baths remained, giving this place of magnificent beauty a haunting, ephemeral quality. After the National Park Service purchased the land, they would hold public meetings about what to do with the space. More often than not, people called for leaving the ruins as is, Martini said.
Closure of iconic Cliff House ends a remarkable era of San Francisco's history
Later the builders of the toll road constructed a two-mile speedway adjacent to it where well-to-do San Franciscans raced their horses along the way. On weekends, there was little room at the Cliff House hitching racks for tethering the horses for the thousands of rigs. Soon, omnibus, railways and streetcar lines made it to near Lone Mountain where passengers transferred to stagecoach lines to the beach.
History
The Cliff House is positioned in a spectacular locale for visitors to enjoy hiking along the amazing Lands End trails or Ocean Beach. Explore the famous Sutro Baths ruins or visit historic Sutro Heights Park. The National Park Service remains committed to providing an exceptional experience for residents and visitors to the Bay Area and looks forward to welcoming the public back to the Cliff House in the future. Within six months of the devastating fire, Sutro had plans for a new Cliff House and after spending $75,000, he proudly opened the second Cliff House in 1896. The new building was a grand, eight-story tall castle-like structure with turrets, decorative spires, fanciful roof dormers and an observation tower.
The restaurant is currently closed but we hope to reopen it someday soon. The concrete ruins just north of the former Cliff House are the remains of the grand Sutro Baths.You can find these historic sites on the north end of Ocean Beach, where Geary Boulevard and the Great Highway converge. Anecdotal stories claim that in 1858 Samuel Brannan paid $1,500 for lumber salvaged from a ship that foundered on the rocky shore's basalt cliffs near Seal Rocks[5] and built the first Cliff House. While Brannan may have constructed a building there, no historical evidence of this building exists and its role in the origin of the Cliff House remains apocryphal.[6]The Cliff House was built by Senator John Buckley and C. C. Butler, opened in 1863 and leased to Captain Junius G. Foster.[7][8][9] It was a long trek on foot from the city and the restaurant hosted mostly horseback riders, small-game hunters or picnickers on day outings. With the opening of the privately built Point Lobos toll road a year later, the Cliff House became a Sunday destination among the carriage trade.
Parks and activities
In spite of appearing in The Princess Diaries, the Cliff House had largely become incidental to San Francisco’s dining scene—the kind of place where locals would bring out-of-town relatives.
Cliff House History
After the Gold Rush, San Francisco's population exploded and the city's downtown area got very crowded with new buildings and neighborhoods. Real estate developers, eager to make more money, saw Lands End and its unparalleled beauty as a new place to develop. They constructed the Cliff House in 1863 as a fashionable resort for the wealthy. To help people travel to this faraway place, a private company constructed a brand new road called Point Lobos Avenue. Eventually, a horse-drawn stagecoach made the trip every Sunday from downtown San Francisco out to Lands End. Because only wealthy citizens could afford to travel all the way out to the remote resort, the Cliff House was considered a very exclusive place.
Architects added an adjacent Sutro Wing to improve access to ocean views, allowing diners and visitors alike to continue the long tradition of enjoying the magnificent Pacific from the Cliff House high above Seal Rocks. After Sutro's death in 1898, his properties were managed by his daughter Emma Sutro Merritt. A year after the destruction of the second Cliff House, Mrs. Merritt obtained approval to construct a third Cliff House. Because so many of the city's wood-frame buildings burned after the 1906 earthquake, builders began to construct San Francisco's new buildings in fireproof steel-reinforced concrete. The third Cliff House, constructed in concrete, was designed in a streamline, classically inspired architectural style; the building settled into the landscape rather than dominating the ocean view.
For many years, the guest register bore the names of three U.S. presidents as well as prominent San Fran¬cisco families such as the Hearsts, the Stanfords and the Crockers. However, by the late1870s the Cliff House had declined in popularity. He had plans to re-establish the restaurant as a wholesome, family-friendly venue and for next few years, he remodeled rooms, hired new management and lured families back to the restaurant. Sutro also began construction on a railroad that would transport more people to this seaside attraction. Unfortunately, a very tragic event happened on Christmas Day, 1894 when fire destroyed the original wood-frame Cliff House. Since 1863, visitors have flocked to San Francisco’s western shore to enjoy sweeping ocean views and fine dining at the Cliff House.
After an 1894 fire destroyed the original structure, Sutro rebuilt the Cliff House as a palatial eight-story Victorian resort with art galleries, dining rooms and an observation tower. It miraculously survived the 1906 earthquake, only to be destroyed by fire the following year. The 1909 stark, neoclassical replacement built by Sutro's daughter Emma remained popular for its saloon and restaurant. It's an attractive building and the restaurants are very pleasant places to eat and enjoy the beautiful views. Today on the craggy cliffs known as Lands End, tourists and locals can get lost on trails lined with eucalyptus trees and emerge onto the ruins of Sutro Baths, a once-decadent swimming pavilion built in the late 19th century, to watch whales breach in the distance.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the owners modified the Cliff House several times. In 1977, the National Park Service acquired the property to become part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The National Park Service rehabilitated the historic Cliff House in 2005 to return it to its original neoclassical design.
The vast beach stretching along the entire western edge of San Francisco. I've listed a number of other places to eat in the area since the Cliff House isn't available. Adolph Sutro's gardens above the Cliff House, with amazing views of the coast. This odd camera-shaped building sitting next to the Cliff House is a remnant of the amusement park that used to be just down the hill along Ocean Beach. It burned down twice, and was closed during Prohibition, but the Cliff House survived (until now), and it's been a wonderful place to come and have a meal and admire the view. As Mark Twain pointed out, it’s cold out there – and with cars more readily available and roads better after the war, San Franciscans found other beaches to go to instead of the cliff.
At its height, the Cliff House was part of a bustling strip of cafes and storefronts that attracted visitors from across the country. At the bar, visitors would fight over tables with window views so they could sip on their cocktails and munch on their seafood as the sun set over the Pacific. In 1883, after a few years of downturn, the Cliff House was bought by Adolph Sutro, who had made a fortune in silver by solving the problems of ventilating and draining the mines of Nevada's Comstock Lode. After a few years of quiet management by James M. Wilkins, the Cliff House was severely damaged when the schooner Parallel, abandoned with burning oil lamps and a cargo including dynamite powder, exploded while aground at Lands End early in the morning of January 16, 1887. The blast was heard a hundred miles away[10] and demolished the entire north wing of the tavern.
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