Welcome to S.F.’s Highest Point
OFFICIAL SITE OF SUTRO TOWER
Sutro Tower is the Bay Area’s most visible icon. Antennas on the 977-foot-high steel tower safely deliver clear signals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for television and radio stations; essential communication services for public safety, transportation and other agencies or private providers; and unique, non-stop transmission opportunities for emerging technologies.
Sutro Tower is used by 11 television stations, four FM radio stations, satellite and cable providers, and nearly two dozen public and commercial wireless communication services.
Signals originate from each TV station’s studio, are delivered to the Sutro Tower transmission building by microwave or fiber optic cable, amplified in its transmitter equipment and sent up the tower to the antenna, which transmits the signal throughout the region.
Sutro Tower is owned by Sutro Tower Inc., which manages the structure and the leasing and use of its spaces.
Coit Tower
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Coit Memorial Tower
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Coit Tower with statue of Columbus in foreground
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| Location | 1 Telegraph Hill Blvd.,San Francisco, California |
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| Coordinates | 37°48′09″N122°24′21″WCoordinates: 37°48′09″N 122°24′21″W |
| Area | 1.7 acres (0.69 ha) |
| Built | 1933 |
| Architect | Brown, Arthur Jr. |
| Architectural style | Art Deco |
| NRHP Reference # | 07001468[1] |
| SFDL # | 165 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | January 29, 2008 |
| Designated SFDL | 1984[2] |
Coit Tower, also known as the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco; at her death in 1929 Coit left one-third of her estate to the city for civic beautification. The tower was proposed in 1931 as an appropriate use of Coit's gift. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.[1]
The art deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard, with frescomurals by 27 different on-site artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation off-site. Although an apocryphal story claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle[3] due to Coit's affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance is coincidental.[4]
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[hide]History[edit]
Coit Tower was paid for with money left by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy socialite who loved to chase fires in the early days of the city's history. Before December 1866, there was no city fire department, and fires in the city, which broke out regularly in the wooden buildings, were extinguished by several volunteer fire companies. Lillie Coit was one of the more eccentric characters in the history ofNorth Beach and Telegraph Hill, smoking cigars and wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was an avid gambler and often dressed like a man in order to gamble in the males-only establishments that dotted North Beach.[5]
Lillie's fortune funded the monument four years following her death in 1929. She had a special relationship with the city's firefighters. At the age of fifteen she witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 in response to a fire call up on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and threw her school books to the ground and pitched in to help, calling out to other bystanders to help get the engine up the hill to the fire, to get the first water onto the blaze. After that Lillie became the Engine Co. mascot and could barely be constrained by her parents from jumping into action at the sound of every fire bell. After this she was frequently riding with the Knickerbocker Engine Co. 5, especially so in street parades and celebrations in which the Engine Co. participated. Through her youth and adulthood Lillie was recognized as an honorary firefighter.
Her will read that she wished for one third of her fortune, amounting to $118,000,[6] "to be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved."[7] Two memorials were built in her name. One was Coit Tower, and the other was a sculpture depicting three firemen, one of them carrying a woman in his arms. Lillie is today the matron saint of San Francisco firefighters.[8]
The San Francisco County Board of Supervisors proposed that Coit's bequest be used for a road at Lake Merced. This proposal brought disapproval from the estate's executors, who expressed a desire that the county find "ways and means of expending this money on a memorial that in itself would be an entity and not a unit of public development."[6] Art Commission President Herbert Fleishhacker suggested a memorial on Telegraph Hill, which was approved by the estate executors. An additional $7,000 in city funds were appropriated, and a design competition was initiated. The winner was architect Arthur Brown, Jr, whose design was completed and dedicated on October 8, 1933.[6]
Coit Tower was listed as a San Francisco Designated Landmark in 1984[2] and on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.[1]Although Coit Tower is not technically a California Historical Landmark yet, the state historical plaque for Telegraph Hill is located in the tower's lobby, marking the site of the original signal station.[9]
Design[edit]
Brown's competition design envisioned a restaurant in the tower, which was changed to an exhibition area in the final version. The design uses three nesting concrete cylinders, the outermost a tapering fluted 180-foot (55 m) shaft that supports the viewing platform. An intermediate shaft contains a stairway, and an inner shaft houses the elevator. The observation deck is 32 feet (9.8 m) below the top, with an arcade and skylights above it. A rotunda at the base houses display space and a gift shop.[6]
Mural project[edit]
The Coit Tower murals were done under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project, the first of the New Deal federal employment programs for artists. Ralph Stackpole and Bernard Zakheim successfully sought the commission in 1933, and supervised the muralists, who were mainly faculty and students of the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA), including Maxine Albro, Victor Arnautoff, Ray Bertrand, Rinaldo Cuneo, Mallette Harold Dean, Clifford Wight, Edith Hamlin, George Albert Harris, Otis Oldfield, Suzanne Scheuer, Hebe Daum, Jane Berlandina, Frederick E. Olmsted Jr., Jose Moya del Pino and Frede Vidar.[10][11]
The artists were committed in varying degrees to racial equality and to leftist and Marxist political ideas strongly expressed in the paintings. Bernard Zakheim's mural "Library" depicts fellow artist John Langley Howard crumpling a newspaper in his left hand as he reaches for a shelved copy of Karl Marx's Das Kapital with his right. Workers of all races are shown as equals, often in the heroic poses of Socialist realism, while well-dressed racially white members of the capitalist classes enjoy the fruit of their labor. Victor Arnautoff's "City Life" includes The New Masses and The Daily Worker periodicals in the scene's news stand rack; John Langley Howard's mural depicts an ethnically diverse Labor March as well as showing a destitute family panning for gold while a rich family observes; and Stackpole's Industries of California was composed along the same lines as an early study of the destroyed Man at the Crossroads.[12]
The youngest of the muralists, George Albert Harris, painted a mural called "Banking and Law". In the mural, the world of finance is represented by the Federal Reserve Bank and a stock market ticker (in which stocks are shown as declining) and law is illustrated by a law library.[13] Some of the book titles that appear in the law library, such as 'Civil, Penal, and Moral Codes', are legitimate, while others list fellow muralists as authors, in a joking or derogatory manner.[14]
After Diego Rivera's Man at the Crossroads mural was destroyed by its Rockefeller Center patrons for the inclusion of an image of Lenin, the Coit Tower muralists protested, picketing the tower. Sympathy for Rivera led some artists to incorporate references to the Rivera incident; in Zakheim's "Library" panel, Stackpole is painted reading a newspaper headline announcing the destruction of Rivera's mural.[12]
John Langley Howard's Industry mural (which his architect brother Henry Howard helped design) depicts California industrial scenes, and angered conservatives for its frank depiction of out-of-work men.[14][15]
Two of the murals are of San Francisco Bay scenes. Most murals are done in fresco; the exceptions are one mural done in egg tempera (upstairs, in the last decorated room) and the works done in the elevator foyer, which are oil on canvas. While most of the murals have been restored, a small segment (the spiral stairway exit to the observation platform) was not restored but durably painted over with epoxy surfacing.
Most of the murals are open for public viewing without charge during open hours, although there are ongoing negotiations by the Recreation and Parks Department of San Francisco to begin charging visitors a fee to enter the mural rotunda. The murals in the spiral stairway, normally closed to the public, are open for viewing through tours.[16]
Since 2004 artist Ben Wood has collaborated with other artists on large scale video projections onto the exterior of Coit Tower, in 2004, 2006, 2008 & 2009.[17]
Palace of Fine Arts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the structure in San Francisco's Marina District. For the structure on Treasure Island, San Francisco, see Palace of Fine and Decorative Arts, Treasure Island. For the Mexico City opera house, see Palacio de Bellas Artes. For the Palace of Fine Arts that was part of Chicago's White City fairgrounds for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, see Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago).
Palace of Fine Arts
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The Palace of Fine Arts: 2004
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| Location | 3301 Lyon St., San Francisco, California |
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| Coordinates | 37°48′10″N122°26′54″WCoordinates: 37°48′10″N 122°26′54″W |
| Area | 17 acres (6.9 ha) |
| Architect | William Gladstone Merchant; Bernard Maybeck |
| Architectural style | Beaux-Arts |
| NRHP Reference # | 04000659[1] |
| SFDL # | 88 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | December 5, 2005 |
| Designated SFDL | 1977[2] |
The Palace of Fine Arts in the Marina District of San Francisco, California, is a monumental structure originally constructed for the1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in order to exhibit works of art presented there. One of only a few surviving structures from the Exposition, it is still situated on its original site. It was rebuilt in 1965, and renovation of the lagoon, walkways, and a seismic retrofitwere completed in early 2009.
In addition to hosting art exhibitions, it remains a popular attraction for tourists and locals, and is a favorite location for weddings and wedding party photographs for couples throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, and such an icon that a miniature replica of it was built in Disney's California Adventure in Anaheim.[3]
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[hide]History[edit]
The Palace of Fine Arts was one of ten palaces at the heart of the Panama-Pacific Exhibition, which also included the exhibit palaces of Education, Liberal Arts, Manufactures, Varied Industries, Agriculture, Food Products, Transportation, Mines and Metallurgy and the Palace of Machinery.[4]The Palace of Fine Arts was designed by Bernard Maybeck, who took his inspiration from Romanand Greek architecture[5] in designing what was essentially a fictional ruin from another time.
While most of the exposition was demolished when the exposition ended, the Palace was so beloved that a Palace Preservation League, founded by Phoebe Apperson Hearst, was founded while the fair was still in progress.[6]
For a time the Palace housed a continuous art exhibit, and during the Great Depression, W.P.A. artists were commissioned to replace the decayed Robert Reid murals on the ceiling of the rotunda. From 1934 to 1942 the exhibition hall was home to eighteen lighted tennis courts. During World War II it was requisitioned by the military for storage of trucks and jeeps. At the end of the war, when the United Nations was created in San Francisco, limousines used by the world's statesmen came from a motor pool there. From 1947 on the hall was put to various uses: as a city Park Department warehouse; as a telephone book distribution center; as a flag and tent storage depot; and even as temporary Fire Department headquarters.[7]
While the Palace had been saved from demolition, its structure was not stable. Originally intended to only stand for the duration of the Exhibition, the colonnade and rotunda were not built of durable materials, and thus framed in wood and then covered with staff, a mixture of plaster and burlap-type fiber. As a result of the construction and vandalism, by the 1950s the simulated ruin was in fact a crumbling ruin.[8]
In 1964, the original Palace was completely demolished, with only the steel structure of the exhibit hall left standing. The buildings were then reconstructed in permanent, light-weight, poured-in-place concrete, and steel I-beams were hoisted into place for the dome of the rotunda. All the decorations and sculpture were constructed anew. The only changes were the absence of the murals in the dome, two end pylons of the colonnade, and the original ornamentation of the exhibit hall.
In 1969, the former Exhibit Hall became home to the Exploratorium interactive museum, and, in 1970, also became the home of the 966-seat Palace of Fine Arts Theater.[9] In 2003, the City of San Francisco along with the Maybeck Foundation created a public-private partnership to restore the Palace and by 2010 work was done to restore and seismically retrofit the dome, rotunda, colonnades and lagoon. In January 2013, the Exploratorium closed in preparation for its permanent move to the Embarcadero.