The two-alarm blaze that broke out at the Fleishhacker Pool building on Saturday has been deemed suspicious by SFFD investigators. The building was part of the historic complex that once included the largest pool in the United States. In its twilight years it has been abandoned, left for the homeless and the graffiti artists who took advantage of its still-intact roof and long walls of concrete canvas.
According to Assistant Fire Chief Tom Siragusa, however, that roof is no longer there. It collapsed during Saturday's fire just after fire crews inside the structure made the call to pull back and fight the fire from the outside. Only one firefighter was injured as she exited the burning building.
A couple of years ago, SFist took a look around the crumbling building, which was once an opulent, Mediterranean structure. As one descendent of the pool's creator Herbert Fleishhacker told us at the time, "I'd always figured it had been bull-dozed, but I guess not, because they appear to be pics of the derelict pool house of the old Fleishhacker Pool. The pool is obviously gone, but the pool house remains, and is apparently some kind of dystopic home for junkies."
More recently, local photographers Chase Ottney and Ramón Burgos-Ruíz were behind the chain link fences shooting these striking (and fashion-y) photos of the hidden urban gem. "Even the transients who stayed there," one Redditor remembers, "were nice as fuck."