A garden of earthly delight
What a grand place it once was, millionaire Adolph Sutro’s vision of an earthly paradise. His house and grounds overlooked the ocean, along with baths, a concert hall, a museum, a skating rink, and the Cliff House. And now, it’s all ruins.
But at the end of the 19th century, coming across the outer lands from distant downtown, visitors arrived at a real-life fantasy landscape. Sutro spent more than $1 million to recreate an elaborate and intricate Italian garden on the 22-acre site, embellishing it with 200 replicas of Greek statues and urns placed among exotic plants and trees, all of which was open to the public.
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Address 48th Avenue & Point Lobos Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94121 | Public Transport Bus: 38 (43rd Ave & Point Lobos Ave stop) | Tip You can spend the night across the street at Seal Rock Inn (545 Point Lobos Avenue), where Hunter S. Thompson stayed in the early seventies.
Sutro, who served as San Francisco’s mayor from 1894 to 1896, hosted presidents, writers, artists and the celebrities of the day—from Andrew Carnegie to Oscar Wilde—at his estate. You can almost imagine Wilde arriving in San Francisco in 1882 to give his famous lecture, “The House Beautiful,” and strolling through Sutro’s gardens afterward, perhaps envisioning what it would be like to give up London and come west, “where a man can be a man today, and yesterdays don’t count.” The five days he spent in San Francisco made a particular impression on Wilde, later expressed in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when Lord Henry notes: “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.”
Following Sutro’s death in 1898, the property slowly fell into disrepair and was finally demolished after his family donated the land, the gardens, and their home as a public recreation area to the city in 1938. Practically the only reminders of Sutro’s shangri-la today are replicas of the winged lions guarding the entry to what once was. To visitors who don’t wonder at the ramparts or inquire as to the origins of the park’s name, it’s just a lovely picnic area with a view of the Farallon Islands in the distance—and in the foreground, a few statues and a gazebo.
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