Coit Tower in 2008, looking WSW
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]
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 of
North 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]
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
The
Palace of Fine Arts in the
Marina District of
San Francisco, California, is a monumental structure originally constructed for the
1915 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]
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.
Today, Australian eucalyptus trees fringe the eastern shore of the lagoon. Many forms of wildlife have made their home there including
swans,
ducks (particularly migrating fowl),
geese,
turtles,
frogs, and
raccoons.
