This 21-by-64-inch horizontal panorama documents the ruins of Sutro Baths at San Francisco’s Land’s End—the skeletal remains of what was once the world’s largest indoor swimming establishment. The five-foot-plus width captures the cave-like spaces where the Pacific Ocean now reclaims what Adolph Sutro’s Victorian ambition constructed.

Created in 1989, the work documents ruins that have become more famous in their ruined state than they were during operation. Sutro Baths opened in 1896, featuring seven swimming pools of varying temperatures, a museum, restaurants, and tropical gardens—all enclosed under an enormous glass roof overlooking the ocean. The complex closed in 1966 and burned in 1966, leaving concrete foundations that the National Park Service now preserves as romantic ruin.

The horizontal format captures the cliff-side setting where ruins meet ocean, the composition emphasizing the landscape context that makes Sutro Baths’ remains so evocative. The photo collage technique fragments views through cave-like openings where the glass structure once enclosed recreational space.

The ruins occupy a liminal zone between land and sea: concrete foundations filling with tide water, vegetation reclaiming former promenades, the Pacific Ocean gradually dissolving what human engineering constructed. This process of ruin and reclamation makes Sutro Baths a meditation on impermanence despite ambition.

The work connects to Hayashi’s broader documentation of post-industrial landscapes, though Sutro Baths represents recreational rather than manufacturing infrastructure. The same forces—changing economics, maintenance costs, shifting popular tastes—that abandoned Cleveland’s factories also abandoned San Francisco’s most ambitious swimming complex.