James Lick Baths

The building you are approaching was designed for a reality of life in San Francisco that no longer exists. When the James Lick Baths opened in eighteen ninety, the vast majority of working-class homes in the South of Market district lacked indoor plumbing. James Lick, a wealthy real estate investor, provided the funds in his will to build this facility as a free service to ensure that laborers and their families had access to basic hygiene. The building was constructed with a distinct tower housing two massive ten-thousand-gallon water tanks, which supplied gravity-fed hot and cold water to dozens of individual bathtubs tucked into separate halls for men and women.