the Fleishhacker Pool House

It's always amazing to see urban exploration in abandoned, historic landmarks: photographer Thomas Hawk has been making trips to the Fleishhacker Pool House and shooting the street art and creepy Eastern European wasteland-feeling space. But it's not in Europe at all; it is, in fact, beneath the parking lot of the San Francisco Zoo.

The pool was opened in 1925 by an eccentric millionaire who wanted to make the biggest swimming pool in the US -- and he did. There's an excellent, extensive post about it at Terrastories (vintage image via), who tell us:

Throughout its five-decade history as a public swimming destination, Fleishhacker would be the setting of San Francisco's most unique lores and legends; there was the story of the shark being sucked in through the 200-foot-long intake pipe coming from the ocean, a stove discovered in the deep end of the pool when it was drained for maintenance, and the disembodied hand reportedly found by a gardener, floating in the pool.
But the real amazing facts reside in the sheer size of the pool - 1000 feet long, over 150 feet wide, and 13 feet deep at its deepest point. The pool held 6,000,000 gallons of ocean water, continually cleaned once every six weeks by becoming completely drained and sweeped and pumped clean. It had a capacity of 10,000 people. Years after its construction, when Fleishhacker was asked by one of the pool's lifeguards why he had built such a large pool, he responded by telling the lifeguard to swim the entire length. When the lifeguard returned, he responded, "Did anyone get in your way?" The lifeguard said no; and Fleishhacker promptly replied, "That's why."

Its history is also rife with stories about 1920's and 30s movie stars such as Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams and Ann Curtis. But now all that's left is the pool house, which now looks more like a colorful haunted house for taggers. I want to go there...