Pennsylvania Comes to San Francisco

600 California Street
Chinatown

These two bronze plaques were originally the doors to a hand operated elevator.  The doors, designed by Lee O. Lawrie in 1930-1931 were in the Education Building of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Capitol Park in Harrisburg.

The sculpture was one of six sets of elevator doors that the artist originally fabricated. This set of door panels remained there until 1972, when the building’s hand-operated elevators were replaced with automatic ones. From about 1980 to 1989, the doors were in a private collection in Virginia. They were installed at the new Federal Home Bank in 1990.

Lee Oskar Lawrie (1877-1963) was born in Rixdorf, Germany, and came to the United States in 1882 as a young child, settling in Chicago. It was there, at the age of 14, that he began working for the sculptor Richard Henry Park.

In 1892 he assisted many of the sculptors in Chicago, constructing the “White City” for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Following the completion of the work at the Exposition, Lawrie returned East and became an assistant to William Ordway Partridge. The next decade found him working with other established sculptors:Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Philip Martiny, Alexander Phimister Proctor, John William Kitson and others. His work at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St Louis, 1904, under Karl Bitter, the foremost architectural sculptor of the time, allowed Lawrie to further develop both his skills and his reputation as an architectural sculptor.

Lawrie received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Yale University in 1910. He was an instructor in Yale’s School of Fine Arts from 1908 to 1919 and taught in the architecture program at Harvard University from 1910 to 1912.

His most prominent work is the free-standing bronze Atlas (installed 1937) at New York City’s Rockefeller Center.

This panel on the left has allegorical figures representing Exploration, Literature, Architecture and Drama.

The allegorical figures on the right represent Religion, Physical Labor, Sculpture and Music.