The people of the new, growing city of San Francisco needed a playground and they turned their eyes to the sea for their relief. The west side of the penninsula consisted of rocky cliffs and sand dunes. Though close to the metropolis, these shores remained wild. In 1863, the business partners Butler and Buckley built a modest restaurant upon a headland overlooking several rocks onto which sea lions were wont to haul their blubbery bodies to sun themselves. San Francisco acquired special title to these rocks during the 1890s, when the Federal Government turned them and the pinniped inhabitants over to the City's care. The business sold the resort in 1881, to Adolf Sutro, the Honest Miner. Sutro expanded the small resort and built a quarter million dollar bathhouse featuring both fresh and salt water pools nearby. Fire destroyed the first Cliff House on Christmas Day, 1894. Sutro built the Second Cliff House, modeled in the style of a grand French chateau upon the ashes of the first. Visitors, brought to the spot by Sutro's Land's End railroad, enjoyed dancing, dining, an art gallery, a gem exhibit, a two hundred foot tall observation tower, and other entertainments. Though Sutro's chateau appeared to be precariously perched and ready to fall into the sea, it withstood the 1906 earthquake. A fire in the following year, however, erased the marvel. Sutro's daughter Emma raised the Third Cliff House on the same plot as the first two in 1909. This humbler building is the one that survives today, housing a restaurant, a penny arcade, shops, and a visitor center for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The sea lions, part of the original attraction of the spot, suffered from the depredations of hunters until they were nearly extinct. Protection of the species under the Marine Mammal Act has brought them back in staggering numbers. From this protected sanctuary, they now overflow, to amuse visitors to San Francisco's Pier 39, the Marin Headlands, and other nearby rocky shores.

Text Copyright 1998 by Joel GAzis-SAx