Decline
After years of underfunding and poor maintenance, the pool was showing some deterioration when a storm in January 1971 damaged its drainage pipe. Because the repair costs exceeded the City's budget, the pool was converted to a fresh water pool which resulted in poor water quality. As a result of the poor attempt at conversion and resulting water quality, the pool was closed by the end of 1971.
In 1999, the San Francisco Zoological Society was granted ownership of the pool house. The swimming pool itself was filled with rocks and gravel, with the space now serving as a parking lot for the zoo. The poolhouse was neglected by officials, derelict and occupied by the homeless for many years until it was destroyed by a fire on December 1st, 2012.
Read more about this topic: Fleishhacker Pool
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness, they rise with beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)