Quick answer
The Cliff House is a landmark restaurant on a headland above Ocean Beach in San Francisco, built in 1863 and destroyed by fire twice. The current concrete building opened in 1909, became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1977, and is being restored to reopen under a new lease.
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Built for the Wealthy
The first Cliff House opened in 1863, built by C.C. Butler and Senator John Buckley as a fashionable resort perched on the cliff above Seal Rocks, so far from the city that a toll road and a stagecoach line were built to bring visitors out. Its guest register once carried the signatures of three American presidents. On January 16, 1887, an abandoned schooner called the Parallel exploded while aground offshore, a blast heard a hundred miles away that demolished the building's north wing. The landmark was repaired. Then, on Christmas night of 1894, a chimney fire burned it to the ground.
Sutro's Castle
Adolph Sutro, the millionaire who made his fortune ventilating Nevada's silver mines, rebuilt the restaurant in 1896 as an extravagant Victorian chateau, spending seventy-five thousand dollars on a building some called the Gingerbread Palace. That same year, work began on the Sutro Baths in the cove next door. The grand chateau survived the 1906 earthquake, then burned to the ground on September 7, 1907. Sutro's daughter Emma Merritt had the third incarnation built in steel-reinforced concrete — the building that stands today, opened in 1909 in a restrained neoclassical style.
The View That Won't Quit
The Whitney brothers, owners of the nearby Playland amusement park, bought the property in 1937, and the National Park Service acquired it in 1977 as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The restaurant's long-time operator left at the end of 2020, but in 2023 the park service confirmed a new twenty-year lease with a new operator, and restoration is planned to reopen the cafe in 2026 and the whole building by the end of the year. The terrace still hosts a room-sized camera obscura that projects a live image of the coast onto a screen inside. Stand on the terrace, watch the sea lions on Seal Rocks, then walk north along the coastal trail to the ruins of the Sutro Baths.