Cindy

Twitter

A San Francisco Jewel

Posted by Cindy on May 14, 2013

May 142013

2266 California
Pacific Heights
Sherith Israel Synagogue
“Loyal Remnant of Israel”

On a whim, a photographer friend of mine, Lisa, suggested we stop in and take a look at the Sherith Israel Synagogue. She has been documenting its amazing details for posterity, and I had never been inside. What an incredible adventure and I am truly grateful to have been introduced to this architectural and artistic gem that holds so much San Francisco history.

Sherith Israel was designed by Albert Pissis. Pissis (1842-1914) was the son of a French physician who immigrated first to Mexico and then to San Francisco in 1858. Pissis was born in Mexico. He graduated from secondary school in San Francisco and went to work for architect William Mooser. He then attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts between 1872 and 1876, being one of the first San Franciscans to do so. After his return to San Francisco, his success with the 1892 Hibernia Bank design led to another commission with a grand dome, the Emporium Department Store in 1896.

Completed in 1905, the synagogue is an eight-sided building with a beautiful dome rising 120 feet above the street, The interior is magnificently decorated with stenciled frescoes and opalescent stained glass windows.

Since the structure withstood the 1906 earthquake it housed San Francisco’s Superior Court for two years after the quake. It was the setting for the corruption trials of political boss Abraham Rueff (known as Abe Ruef). Ruef was an American lawyer and politician. He gained notoriety as the political boss behind the administration of Mayor Eugene Schmitz in the period of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. On December 6, 1906, Ruef was arraigned. “As the indictments were read out by the clerk, Ruef made clear his disdain for the proceedings by standing with his back to the judge.” During the period of his trial, Ruef occupied offices in The Columbus Tower (now the Sentinel Building). In February 1907 Ruef pleaded “not guilty”. On March 18, 1907, the Supervisors confessed before a grand jury to “receiving money from Ruef in connection with the Home Telephone, overhead trolley, prize fight monopoly, and gas rates deals. In exchange, “they were promised complete immunity and would not be forced to resign their offices. The grand jury then returned 65 indictments against Ruef for bribery of the supervisors.”

In 1945, Sherith Israel provided the setting for a meeting of national Jewish organizations to commemorate the founding of the United Nations.

The building survived the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake unscathed as well. Nevertheless, the city passed a law requiring all unreinforced masonry places of public assembly to meet stringent seismic safety standards, and despite its great track record, Sherith Israel had to comply.

The exterior walls are brick, standing on brick footings. These bricks are clad in Colusa sandstone, a popular material of the time that is highly porous and susceptible to the elements, it had experienced considerable spalling (delamination). At some point in the late 1950s, the building had been painted a salmon color, probably to cover patching work. What was not known in the 1950s was that paint would only accelerate the deterioration of the sandstone by trapping water beneath it. Over time, the paint began literally pulling off the top layer of stone. The paint has been removed from all but the dome at this time.

Berkeley architectural and planning firm ELS was brought in to help with the seismic retrofitting and repairs. You can read an in-depth article on all of the work that was done here. The synagogue was also the subject of an Architectural Preservation Technology Bulletin that can be read here in its entirety.

“In preparation for the building’s centennial in 2005, several art historians studied Sherith Israel’s stained glass windows. The identity of the artist/s was unknown until congregants Joan Libman and Ian Berke discovered an invoice for $1100 made out to Emile Pissis.”

The stained glass windows were designed by Emile M. Pissis, the architect’s brother. Emile was born in San Francisco on March 10, 1854. A lifelong resident of San Francisco he was a co-founder of the San Francisco Art Association in 1871. A man of wealth, he never sold a picture and seldom exhibited. He remained a bachelor and spent his leisure time roaming the Marin hills, fishing, hunting, and painting. Many of his landscapes and portraits were lost in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Emile maintained a luxurious Nob Hill studio-apartment at 18 Pleasant Street. Upon his death, he was cremated and his ashes thrown to the winds above Marin County by airplane. One of his award-winning paintings, “Discovery of the Bay by Gaspar de Portola,” was recently discovered hidden away in the museum of the Society of California Pioneers when Sherith Israel began to research its artistic history. Sadly, the only surviving work by Emile Pissis consists of the Sherith Israel windows, two paintings at the Society of California Pioneers and nine watercolors held by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco.

The prolific paintings and frescoes that grace the synagogue were created by and under the tutelage of, Attilio Moretti. Moretti was born in Milan, Italy on April 16, 1851. Moretti moved to San Francisco with his family in 1865. By the late 1880s, he was sharing a studio with Bernardo Trezzini. Well known as a painter, Moretti also designed altars and memorial chapels. In an unpublished manuscript, Emile Pissis observed, “(Attilio) Moretti was busy painting saints and angels in the Catholic churches throughout the state.” Moretti’s obituary describes him as “… one of the best-known men in his line in California.” Among his last projects was a chapel in Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma under the direction of the late Archbishop Patrick Riordan, a close friend, and admirer. Neither his Holy Cross decoration nor his painting in the chapel of Notre Dame des Victoires Church still exists. The Sherith Israel frescoes are believed to be the last examples of Moretti’s prolific career. He died in San Francisco on March 27, 1915

During the restoration of the 2000’s artist, Beate Bruhl was hired to restore stenciled decorative painting on the interior walls and ceilings in the areas that had been damaged by water intrusion over the years. In some areas, original stencils were discovered under layers of paint, knowledge that will help with future restorative work.

Other than the blue of the dome, most colors of the frescoes and stencils are rust reds, ochres, golds, and yellows, characteristic colors of the English Arts and Crafts Movement.

ELS is currently working with the congregation to replace the original 1905 carpet with custom woven carpet to match the original. Evidence that the sanctuary carpet is original to the building was found by reviewing congregational records from 1905, currently stored in the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. They found an original 1905 receipt for the carpet, carefully filed in the archives. The receipt gave them the name of the mill, which matched the weave mark on the back of the carpet. Lisa told me that many of the cushions that line the pews are also original. There is mattress ticking on the bottom, and yes, they are filled with horse hair.

There are so very many unifying design elements in the synagogue, it makes for a peaceful and delightful experience. There were tiny columns with capitals everywhere, as well as a unifying theme of knots in both the windows and the frescoes.

The steel frame of the sanctuary is enclosed in lath and plaster to create a composition familiar in Byzantine, Romanesque and Renaissance architecture of an ecclesiastical space. This particular space consists of piers (a column designed to support concentrated load), pendentives (One of a set of curved wall surfaces which form a transition between a dome (or its drum) and the supporting masonry), a drum (A circular or polygonal wall supporting a dome or cupola), and a dome. The side and rear arches that frame this central space are vaulted, framing large stained glass windows and covering galleries. The arch motif is repeated and each arch together with the ring of the drum and the front edges of the galleries, are outlined in incandescent light bulbs, totaling more than one thousand in all.

The synagogue has been given an historic designation. You can read the entire report regarding the building and its significance here.

Live Life Love

Posted by Cindy on May 13, 2013

May 132013

6th and Natoma
SOMA

Live Life Love is by Laser Punch and the Rattlecan Blasters, who have been on this website before. Laserpunch and the Rattlecan Blasters consists of 2 graffiti artists, Camer1 from San Francisco, CA and Fasm from Modesto, CA. The Duo teams up frequently to paint church youth rooms and do art shows.

The mural is covered in sayings such as:

Love is Kind
Love is Patient
It does not Boast

Love does not Envy
Love rejoices in the truth, it always protects
Love always perseveres

The King of Beasts in Golden Gate Park

Posted by Cindy on May 11, 2013

May 112013

Golden Gate Park
Music Concourse

This lion sits outside of the new DeYoung Museum near the Pool of Enchantment. It is by Roland Hinton Perry. Created in 1898 it was given to the City of San Francisco in 1906 by San Francisco jeweler Shreve and Company. The sculpture survived a fire in Shreve’s showroom caused by the ’06 earthquake.

The red stone the sculpture sits on was donated by John D. McGilvray. John D. McGilvray Jr. and Sr. worked in the stone and masonry contracting business in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Palo Alto, California. ( McGilvray-Raymond Granite Company) Together they helped build many of San Francisco’s best known buildings including the City Hall, the Civic Auditorium, the Public Library, the State Building, the St. Francis Hotel, the Emporium, the Flood Building, the Stanford University Chapel and the original buildings on the Stanford campus.

Roland Hinton Perry was born in New York City to George and Ione Hinton Perry January 25, 1870. He entered the École des Beaux Arts in 1890 at the age of 19. At 21, he studied at the Académie Julian and Académie Delécluse in Paris and focused on sculpture, the medium in which he would achieve the most artistic success.

After returning to the United States, Perry received a commission to sculpt a series of bas-reliefs for the Library of Congress inWashington, D.C. in 1894. The following year, he was commissioned to create the Court of Neptune Fountain in front of the Library’s main building, now known as the Thomas Jefferson Building. He died October 28, 1941.

350 Bush Street

Posted by Cindy on May 10, 2013

May 102013

San Francisco Mining Exchange
350 Bush Street
Financial District

The San Francisco Mining Exchange, the second oldest exchange in the United States after the New York Stock Exchange, was formed in 1862 to trade mining stocks. It is San Francisco Landmark #113.

When trading in mining stocks surged in the early 1920s, the Mining Exchange hired the firm Miller & Pflueger, whose work can be found all over San Francisco, to design this Beaux Arts building. 350 Bush is an adaptation of the classical temple form much favored by financial institutions in the period, the building’s pediment and four pairs of fluted columns recall the New York Stock Exchange, constructed twenty years earlier.

The building was a trading hall for mining commodities for only five years; the Mining Exchange relocated in 1928.

Subsequently the building was occupied by the San Francisco Curb Exchange (1928-1938). When the Curb Exchange was absorbed into the San Francisco Stock Exchange the building was occupied by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce (1938-1967), and then Western Title Insurance (1967-1979).

The following is adapted from the San Francisco City Planning Commission Resolution No. 8578 dated 1 May 1980:

“This building is the last visible remnant of the San Francisco Mining Exchange which dissolved in 1967. The exchange was instrumental in making San Francisco the financial center of the West, and its capital was used to develop the mines and other industries of the entire western United States. Names associated with the Exchange include Coit, Sharon, Ralston, Mills, Hearst, Flood, Sutro, Hopkins and many more whose fortunes were founded or greatly augmented on the Exchange.With the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, the need for a central market for trading in mining stocks became apparent. In 1862, the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board was organized, housed first in the Montgomery Block, then in the Merchant’s Exchange.

By the middle of the 1870’s, the Exchange dominated the Western financial world, with capital from the East Coast and Europe pushing its volume of sales over that of the New York Stock Exchange, helping to establish the California-Montgomery Street area as “Wall Street West”.

By the early 1880’s, the Comstock began its permanent decline, and the Exchange’s specialization in mining stocks proved disastrous. In 1882, the rival San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, dealing in a wide range of commodities, was formed and prospered.

The silver discoveries in Tonopah, Nevada, in 1903 gave the Exchange new life, and in the 1920’s it commissioned Miller and Pflueger to design a grand Beaux Arts trading hall at 350 Bush Street.

In 1929, the Exchange, hard hit by the Crash, entered its final decline, with a brief revival during the uranium boom of the 1950’s. An investigation of irregularities in its operation by the Securities and Exchange Commission resulted in an order to close, and on August 15, 1967, after almost 105 years of existence, the Mining Exchange came to an end.”

The building has been vacant since 1979. The Swig Company and partners Shorenstein Properties LLC and Weiler-Arnow Investment Company purchased the Mining Exchange building in the 1960s. In 1979, The Swig Company and its partners began assembling the six land parcels around the Mining Exchange for the 350 Bush development. The partners obtained entitlements in the early 2000s. In 2007 Lincoln Property Company acquired the property from the Swig/Shorenstein and Weiler-Arnow group for $60 million. The intention was to break ground that spring, at this writing, that has not happened.

According to Heller Manus, the architects for the project, the historic exchange hall will be used as a grand lobby for a modern office building. The building will provide 360,000 sf of office space with a dramatic galleria at the street level as well as a mid-block pedestrian link between Bush and Pine Streets

The pediment was sculpted by Jo Mora. Joseph Jacinto “Jo” Mora (1876–1947) was an Uruguayan-born American cartoonist, illustrator and cowboy, who lived with the Hopi and wrote extensively about his experiences in California. He was an artist-historian, sculptor, painter, photographer, illustrator, muralist and author. He has been called the “Renaissance Man of the West”.

Mora was born on October 22, 1876 in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father was the Catalonian sculptor, Domingo Mora, and his mother was Laura Gaillard Mora, an intellectual French woman. His elder brother was F. Luis Mora, who would become an acclaimed artist and the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design. The family entered the United States in 1880 and first settled in New York, and then Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Jo Mora studied art in the New York and Boston, at the Art Student’s League in New York and the Cowles School in Boston. In 1903 he moved to Solvang, California. After wandering the Southwest he returned to San Jose, California.

By 1919, he was sculpting for the Bohemian Club, including a memorial plaque dedicated to Bret Harte, completed in August 1919 and mounted on the outside of the private men’s club building in San Francisco. In 1925, he designed the commemorative half dollar for the California Diamond Jubilee. Mora died October 10, 1947, in Monterey, California.

The building was reopened in 2018, you can read about the “restoration” here.

Tut-mania

Posted by Cindy on May 9, 2013

May 092013

Originally the Title Insurance Company Building
130 Montgomery
Financial District

This lovely Art Deco building was built in 1930 by the O’Brien Brothers along with Wilbur D. Peugh.

O’Brien Brothers consisted of Walter J., Albert L. and Arthur T. O’Brien, and practiced in San Francisco from 1907 through 1935. They were architects with the Pickwick Corporation. In 1925, after the deaths of his brothers, Walter J. O’Brien began working with Wilbur D. Peugh; the firm ultimately became known as “O’Brien Brothers and Wilbur D. Peugh.”

Wilbur D. Peugh was born January 9, 1897 in Kelseyville, California. He attended High School in Modesto before attending the School of Aeronautics at University of California, Berkeley in 1918. He then went on to get his degree in Architecture also at University of California, Berkeley in 1923. Prior to having his own firm, Peugh worked with Willis Lowe in San Fransisco from 1921‐1922, W.H. Ratcliff in Berkeley in 1923, Maston & Hurd in San Fransisco from 1924‐1925, and O’Brien & O’Brien from 1925‐1934. He served in the US Army Air Corps, was a member of AIA, and also was a member of the San Fransisco Chamber of Commerce. He died in 1953.

Peugh was an architect for the Pickwick Corporation along with the O’Brien Brothers. They practiced architecture in San Francisco during the first half of the twentieth century. The team was responsible for the design of many San Francisco buildings and two of their most important structures are this, the Title Insurance Company building on Montgomery Street and the Pickwick Hotel on Fifth Street. Three major buildings designed by Peugh individually are the Lurie Building at 417 Montgomery Street, the Equitable Life Building at 120Montgomery Street and the Pacific Mutual Life Building at 600 California Street.

The Art Deco movement had an Egyptian period to it. Upon the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb America was swept with Tut-mania. This is reflected in the scarabs that adorn the two sides of the entryway to 130 Montgomery.

55 Stockton Street – Looking up

Posted by Cindy on May 8, 2013

May 082013

55 Stockton Street
Union Square / Market Street

This building, designed by Heller Manus Architects in 1989 stands at a very busy corner one block off of Union Square.

If you look closely you can see 14 figures drumming or holding spheres.

According to the Smithsonian Institute, these figures were done by Tom Otterness. Mr. Otterness has a difficult history with the City of San Francisco. In 1977, at the age of 25 Otterness bought a shelter dog, tied it to a fence and shot it on camera. He displayed the footage in an art exhibit in a constant loop and called it “Shot Dog Film.” In 2011, when this was discovered, Otterness’ contract for $750,000 worth of work for the new subway terminal, was cancelled. You can read about the controversy here.

Tom Otterness was born in 1952 in Witchita, Kansas. He is an American sculptor whose works adorn parks, plazas, subway stations, libraries, courthouses and museums.

His style is often described as cartoonish and cheerful, but also political. His aesthetic can be seen as a riff on capitalist realism. He studied at the Arts Students League in New York in 1973, the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. and was a member of the Collaborative Arts Project in 1977.

The pieces at 55 Stockton Street are of concrete.

When Infrastructure Buildings Kept Beauty in Mind

Posted by Cindy on May 6, 2013

May 062013

2920 23rd Avenue
Merced Manor / Sunset District

This classical building is the Central Pump Station. Designed by Willis Polk and built in 1936, it sits atop the asphalt capped Merced Manor Reservoir which holds 9.5 million gallons of water to supply the city of San Francisco. The building has been attributed to N. A. Eckart by some, but he was the General Manager and Chief Engineer of the Water department.

The City and County of San Francisco through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, owns and operates a regional water system that serves 2.4 million people, primarily in San Francisco and the south San Francisco Bay region. The system extends about 167 miles, from Yosemite National Park (Hetch Hetchy) to San Francisco, and develops water supply from three principal watersheds: the Tuolumne River, Alameda, and Peninsula watersheds. The regional water system includes over 280 miles of pipeline, over 60 miles of tunnels, 11 reservoirs, 5 pump stations, and 2 water treatment plants (filtration). The history of the system dates back to the 1860s, and many parts of it are over 100 years old.

The Fish and Trident motif are also used in his design of the Sunol Water Temple.

This is the 23rd street entrance to the lawn area above the reservoir. The Valve House is at the top of the stairs.

The Insurance Exchange

Posted by Cindy on May 4, 2013

May 042013

Insurance Exchange Building
433 California Street
Financial District

Turning 100 years old this year, the Insurance Exchange was designed by Willis Polk. This highly ornamented building is complimented by its sister building the Merchant’s Exchange next door. The highly decorated exterior of the building, flanked with majestic Corinthian columns and topped with a very detailed cornice simply commands attention.

The ornamentation is derived from Renaissance/Baroque sources. The building exemplifies the City Beautiful Movement in its simultaneous success as urban architecture, achieved through form and composition, and as an individual building, achieved in the quality of its details.

Insurance Exchange Cornice

From the San Francisco Call September 7, 1912

“Final Plans Accepted and Financial Arrangements Made for $500,000 Building

After some variations in the original plan the design for the Insurance Exchange building has been finally accepted. Work will be started in a few weeks on this great structure at the southeast corner of California and Lledesdorff streets. The building has been financed through stock in the corporation, the Insurance Exchange, and a bond mortgage for $500,000 which was executed last week to the Savings Union Bank and Trust Credit Company as trustee. The plans of Willis Polk & Co., the architects, have been finally approved acd adopted by the directors of the Insurance Exchange, and contracts will be awarded Immediately for excavating the lot and laying the foundations. Immediately thereafter contracts will be awarded for various parts of the superstructure, beginning with the steel frame which is to be of the cage type. With a frontage of 107 feet on California Street the new Insurance building will be one of the largest office structures in San Francisco. It will cover the entire lot. Besides a basement there will be 11 stories, with the ground floor arranged for banking houses or Insurance offices. The offices in the upper floors will be largely occupied by Insurance brokers and agents and others engaged in some way with insurnace business, although others may locate in the building. The steel frame work will be covered with re-inforced concrete fireproofing and the floors, walls and roof will also be In concrete, the fronts having a facing of pressed brick with terra cotta ornament in the same color tone. In the first story marble and stone will be used. On the California street front will be a colonnade running up three stories to a cornice, the columns and pilasters to be of the Corinthian order. The shaft of the building will be plain, after the style of the Merchants’ Exchange building, and the top will be ornamented-with a classic cornice. Tbe interior throughout Its 11 floors will be finished in first class style similar to the best office buildings of the city.”

Willis Polk (1867-1924) was born in Jacksonville, Illinois. In 1989 he joined the office of A. Page Brown and moved with Brown’s firm to San Francisco. He took over the Ferry Building project following Brown’s death. Polk published the Architectural News from 1890-1891 and wrote a series of short critiques for The Wave, a San Francisco weekly review. In 1901, he moved to Chicago to work with Daniel Burnham. Polk returned to San Francisco in 1903 and worked on the master plan for the City of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire. After opening his own office he was named supervising architect of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Besides the Insurance Exchange he was responsible for such famous buildings as the Hallidie Building (the first glass curtain-walled building ever constructed) the Bourn estate at Filoli and Grass Valley and the water temple in Sunol, California.

Polk’s architectural firm, Polk and Company completed more than one hundred major commercial and residential buildings in the Bay Area.

Lobby Elevators of 433 California Street

The coffered ceiling in the lobby of the Insurance Exchange

A Gothic Revival Gem

Posted by Cindy on May 3, 2013

May 032013

St. Francis of Assisi Church
624 Vallejo Street
North Beach

This was the first parish church in San Francisco after Mission Dolores. The cornerstone of the present building was laid in December, 1857, and the church was dedicated in 1860. This twin towered Victorian Gothic Revival church, in the heart of North Beach, was gutted by the fire of 1906. It was rebuilt in 1913. The walls and the two towers survived the fire, so the church we see today is almost identical to the original that was built in the 1850’s. The original architect was Charles J. Devlin.

The Thomas England interior design that we see today has clustered columns supporting a rib-vaulted ceiling that divides the nave from the side aisles. There is Gothic tracery in the wainscoting, the front and side altars, the vestibule transom and even the pews.

In 1994 the church was closed along with six others because of the declining number of Catholics in San Francisco. In 1999, the National Conference of Bishops named St. Francis the National Shrine to St. Francis of Assisi (Patron Saint of San Francisco) under the guidance of the Franciscan Friars.

Thomas England was a partner at, [William] Craine and England, Architects, of San Francisco. While little is known about him I did find his obituary notice and the obituary from the San Francisco Chronicle of October 24, 1869. He died on October 23rd at the age of 46. The funeral took place at St. Francis of Assis Church.

“ENGLAND–It is with heartfelt sorrow that we record the untimely death of a true-hearted Irishman, who may justly be considered the pioneer of ecclesiastical architecture in California.

Thomas England, who died in this city on the 23d inst. Mr. England was a native of County Cork, Ireland, a county which has contributed so many illustrious names to the history of modern art, and though his career was necessarily a more restricted one, yet in it he showed himself no unworthy countryman of Macline and Barry.

His family was one of the most respectable among the Catholics of Bandon, and is moreover distinguished for the talents of its members. His brother, Professor England of Cork, was, until a late date, the only Catholic savant who made his way to a professorial chair in the Queens University, and the name of his uncle, Rt. Rev. Dr. England, late Bishop of Charleston, is a synonym for all that is noble in the Episcopal character among American Catholics.

The fine Arts were the favorite pursuit of Thomas England from his boyhood, and he had made considerable progress in his artistic studies in Cork, when the Young Ireland agitation broke out in that city in 1848. Faithful to the spirit of his family, he flung himself heart and soul into the patriotic movement, and on its failure, he resolved to witness no longer the miseries which seemed hopeless of redress in his native land.

In Philadelphia, whither he directed his course, he applied himself to the study of Architecture, in which his cultivated taste and art knowledge eminently fitted him for success.

His residence in California dated back to 1851, thus making him one of the pioneers of his profession on the Pacific coast, and during the entire of his career, few have been so fortunate in winning the esteem and friendship of those with whom he came in contact.

His works in this state are numerous, in almost every department of Architecture, but Gothic Art was his study of predilection, and to his talents and study are due almost all of Catholic Art that we possess in California. St Mary’s Cathedral, the fine College now occupied by the Christian Brothers, Grass Valley Cathedral, Stockton Church, and St. Francis’ Church in this City – the latter unquestionably the most beautiful Catholic Edifice on the coast – are a few of the buildings designed and executed by him; and considering the little knowledge of or relish for the true principles of ecclesiastical architecture that existed in this country when he commenced his career, and the difficulty of carrying them into practice in California a few years ago, the success which attended his efforts was something wonderful.

In fact, Thomas England may be said to have been born both an Artist and an Architect, and the knowledge and correct taste which in another is generally the result of long years of training, seemed to come to him by a special gift of nature, seconded by an intense application to study. Had the circumstances of his life been more favorable to the proper development of his talents, he certainly would have ranked among the first Architects of the present century, either in Europe or America; or, as an Artist, he might have attained a foremost place in the Art world; and from what he effected with the limited resources at his command, it is no hard task to conjecture what he could have done under conditions more favorable to Art culture than the early history of California afforded.

In private life his character was peculiarly engaging. Unassuming in his manners, generous to a fault, gentle and considerate in his dealings with others, the soul of honor, and a warm and constant friend, it is rarely indeed that we meet with a disposition possessing so much to attract and so little to repel the love of those around its possessor, as did that of Thomas England.

The lingering disease which for upwards of two years slowly sapped his life away, he bore with cheerful resignation and when the dread summons of death arrived, his gentle spirit, fortified by the life-giving Sacraments of Holy Church, passed calmly away to another and, we trust, a better world. Peace to his soul is, and will be the heartfelt prayer of many a friend, for rarely indeed has the earth closed over a brighter intellect or a more generous heart than when it fell on the coffin of Thomas England.”

Then there was this about the Funeral Service: “On Monday of this week a solemn Mortuary Mass was celebrated in St. Francis’ Church for the repose of the soul of Thomas England, its Architect, who died on the Saturday preceding. The church was thronged by the friends of the deceased gentleman, including most of the members of the Architectural profession in San Francisco, who had assembled to render the last tribute of respect to the memory of their late confrere.

At the conclusion of the Mass, the Rev. Father King, of Oakland, addressed the congregation, and in a few brief but touching words recounted the services of his lamented friend to the cause of Catholicity in California, and aptly compared his labors in behalf of Catholic Art on the Pacific coast to those of his illustrious uncle, Bishop England, in building up the spiritual edifice of the Church on the shores of the Atlantic. When the Reverend gentleman had finished his discourse, the funeral procession moved from the sacred edifice – Messrs. Farquharson, Turnbull, Williams, Mooser, Gosling and Clinch (who was his student), as representatives of the Architects of San Francisco, and Dr. O’Brien, (his friend), Hon. Jasper O’Farrell and Messrs. Lyons, Doyle, Callaghan, Black and John Sullivan, as private friends of the deceased, acting as pall bearers and walking a considerable portion of the way to the cemetery. The length of the funeral cortege simply testified to the esteem in which Mr.England was held by his numerous acquaintances in San Francisco, and rarely indeed is it the lot of anyone to leave behind so many friends, and so few, or rather, no enemies, as he has done. At the Cemetery the remains of the deceased were received with the appropriate funeral ceremonies by the Rev. Father Aerden, assisted by Fathers King and Byrne, and deposited in the elegant little mortuary chapel which he had himself designed, there to remain until they should be deposited in their last resting place.” Source: San Francisco Monitor (Archdiocese of San Francisco), 30 Oct 1869

Carl G. Larsen. Chickens to Jet Fighters

Posted by Cindy on May 2, 2013

May 022013

Larsen Park
19th Avenue at Ulloa
Sunset District

This plaque can be found on the corner of 19th Avenue and Ulloa. The plaque was done by M. Earl Cummings in 1913 of Carl G. Larsen.

Cummings has appeared prominently in this website for the many sculptures he has done around town.

“In the late 1800s, many speculators began buying land in the Sunset District. By the early twentieth century, landowners in the area included Michael deYoung, Fernando Nelson, and Adolph Sutro. But one of the largest land owners, Carl Larsen, also had other ties to the district.

Larsen did not live in the Sunset District, but he owned a business and a lot of land in the area. Sometimes called the “Gentle Dane,” he donated land for parks in the Sunset and probably would have given more to his city, but underhandedness after his death prevented any further gifts.

Carl Gustave Larsen was born in 1844 in Odense, Denmark. He came to San Francisco in his late 20s and worked as a carpenter. In 1879, he started the Tivoli Café downtown at 18 Eddy Street. In 1905, he moved across the street, constructing his own building at 50 Eddy Street. A popular restaurant, the Tivoli Café was destroyed in the earthquake and fire of 1906. Undaunted, Larsen rebuilt and opened the Tivoli Café and Hotel Larsen.

Plenty of land was available in the Outside Lands in the late 1800s. Larsen’s first venture into real estate was in 1888, when he bought one block in the Sunset at an auction. He continued to buy land in the area, and by 1910 he owned fourteen entire city blocks and lots that totaled about nine more blocks. At this time, all of the land was sand dunes. Few of the streets were cut through, and accessibility was difficult.

As time passed, Larsen sold or donated parts of his holdings. Well-known structures that sit on land once owned by Carl Larsen include St. Cecilia’s Church on Vicente Street and the (former) Shriner’s Hospital on Nineteenth Avenue.

Larsen’s Chicken Ranch

Larsen operated a chicken ranch on one square block bounded by Moraga and Noreiga streets, Sixteenth and Seventeenth avenues. Each morning, a horse-drawn carriage took eggs from the chicken ranch to the Tivoli Café downtown, probably along the only through road in the Sunset, the Central Ocean Road. Tivoli Café ads boasted, “Fresh eggs from Sunset Ranch EVERY DAY.”

Once a year, at Easter, the Larsen chicken ranch hosted a large party for the neighborhood, with open bars and tables of food. Some reports say that these annual parties got out of hand and were discontinued in 1913.

Local Activism

Larsen lived downtown, but he was very involved in the Sunset neighborhood. He was a member of the Sunset Improvement Club and the Nineteenth Avenue Boulevard Club, a group that lobbied for a macadamized road and beautification along today’s Nineteenth Avenue, from Golden Gate Park toIngleside. In 1900, this group raised money to plant “bunch grass” on the west side of the newly macadamized Nineteenth Avenue.

Although he worked for civic improvements and streetcar service to the area, Larsen was not completely happy when his efforts were successful. To help pay for the Twin Peaks Tunnel, a tax assessment was made of Sunset landowners, who would benefit the most from the tunnel’s construction. What happened at this point is not clear. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Larsen owed about $60,000 and filed an unsucessful protest with the city. The newpaper said that to pay his assessment, Larsen sold many of his lots to the city and to private bidders on May 22, 1914. However, Block Books from 1915 and 1920 show Larsen owning most of the same Sunset land he owned in 1910. In More Parkside Pranks and Sunset Stunts, George Stanton wrote that Larsen did not have enough money to pay the tunnel assessment and “died a broken hearted man.” However, according to the Chronicle, the Larsen estate was worth close to $800,000 when he died.

Navy Jet – 1960’s Photo:Richard Lim F-8 in 1975 Larsen Park Photo: Gary Fong

Land Donation

Larsen is best remembered as the donor of Larsen Park, two blocks between Nineteenth and Twentieth avenues, between Ulloa and Wawona streets. Current Sunset residents know the green lawns, baseball diamond, tennis court, basketball court, and Charlie Sava Pool. Sunset residents in the 1950s and 1960s swam in the “modern” Larsen Pool, and remember the military airplanes that sat on the land, one at a time, for years, unique life-sized toys for children to climb over and sit in.

In 1926, when Larsen donated this park to the city, Mayor James (“Sunny Jim”) Rolph thanked him on the steps of City Hall proclaiming that Larsen would “be remembered in company with other benefactors, who have accumulated great wealth within our boundaries and were inspired to reciprocate with gifts to the commonwealth.”

Larsen Park was unique in that two spaces were set aside as “out-of-door card rooms,” one for men and the other for women. The outside card rooms and soccer field are long gone, but the tennis court and baseball diamond remain, now accompanied by a basketball court and an indoor swimming pool.

A memorial to Larsen stands at the Nineteenth Avenue and Ulloa Street corner of Larsen Park. The bronze plaque, mounted on a large stone, displays a bust of Carl Larsen sculpted by Melvin Earl Cummings, who also sculpted Sather Gate at UC Berkeley. Below the sculpture, the plaque reads, “Carl G. Larsen has generously given these two blocks to the city of San Francisco for park pleasure purposes.”

Larsen also donated land at the southern edge of Golden Gate Heights. Golden Gate Heights Park (or “Larsen’s Peak”) rises 725 feet above sea level, one of the city’s highest hills.

Larsen’s Death and Disputed Will

Carl Larsen died on November 5, 1928. He was remembered as generous both to the City of San Francisco and to his employees at the Tivoli Café. Newspapers reported that the Tivoli Café had been losing money for years before Larsen’s death but that he would not close it or terminate any workers.

Evidence indicates Larsen wanted to leave some of his estate to San Francisco. A handwritten will, dated July 27, 1909 and found after his death, gave $10,000 to a brother, $5,000 each to his other brothers and a sister, $25,000 to a friend, $25,000 to the Danish Ladies’ Relief Society of San Francisco, and $5,000 to the Boys and Girls’ Aid Society of San Francisco. The remainder, estimated at more than $500,000, was given to San Francisco for a museum in Golden Gate Park.

Some people listed in the will never saw those funds. When the will was discovered, Larsen’s signature and the signature of a witness had been “cut off.” Larsen’s relatives (22 of them, some living in Denmark) disputed the will and, in 1931, Superior Court Judge Dunne declared the will invalid. The friend mentioned in the will received a settlement; the rest of the estate was divided among Larsen’s relatives.

Larsen’s museum was never built in Golden Gate Park, but two Sunset parks—Golden Gate Heights Park and Carl G. Larsen Park—remain as reminders of the Gentle Dane.”

Lorri Ungaretti, is the author of the above history.

As a child I was fascinated with the airplanes that sat in Larsen park. There were three planes in the park over time. The first was a WWII recon camera plane that sat in the park from 1959 to the mid 1960’s. The jet was hauled to the park by G.W. Thomas Drayage and Rigging Company then the Russell Hinton Painting Company and the District Council of Painters Repainted it.

The second plane was a Navy FJ-Fury fighter that sat in the park from 1967 to the 1970’s.

In 1975 an old F-8 Crusader replaced the fighter plane. The F-8 was slung on a Marine Helicopter and flown under the Bay Bridge, a sight that must have been something to behold. From there it was taken to the San Francisco Zoo and trucked to the park. The F-8 was removed on orders from the City as there was not enough money to do lead-paint abatement. That plane was eventually moved to Santa Rosa and restored.

There is an effort to bring back a play structure that mimics an old military jet, donations are being taken at the Larsen Park Jet Organization.

Tigers and Cougars at the Zoo

Posted by Cindy on April 30, 2013

Apr 302013

San Francisco Zoo
Outer Sunset

Tiger II by Gwynn Murrill

Gwynn Murrill has always worked with animals as her subject matter. She captures the beauty of her subjects and their particular postures with astonishing authority. Stripped of surface detail and complexity, the subject is reduced to the essence of its being and the sculptures are almost abstract in their contemplation of pure form. Her creatures roam amongst us, inviting interaction, yet remain intent on their own purposes, directed by their own passions, their inner life inaccessible to us.

Gwynn was born June 15, 1942 in Ann Arbor, Michigan she holds an MFA from UCLA (1972)

Cougar III

Tiger II and Cougar III were purchased by the Arts Commission for the Zoo’s main entry plaza with funds generated by the City’s percent-for-art program, which allocates 2% of capital projects for art enrichment

Gwynn Muller is also Responsible for the Hawaiian at 200 California Street.

Sand One comes to San Francisco

Posted by Cindy on April 29, 2013

Apr 292013

Leavenworth and Turk
The Tenderloin

This mural is titled Any Man’s Land and is by Sand One. The name seems especially appropriate to me as there was a crack deal going on as I was taking this photo. The street corner really is Any man’s land.

According to Sand One’s Facebook page, she is a Street artist based out of Los Angeles California,influenced by the L.A chicano culture Sand characters come with lots of attitude flavor and funk!

This is straight from a great interview she did with the LAist:

At 19 years old, Sand One has put her art up all over the city, from walls in East L.A. to galleries in Hollywood. She’s at the forefront of a small but growing group of young female street artists who are breaking down expectations about what has long been considered a male-dominated field.

A self-described “little five-foot girl in heels,” Sand is blazing this particular trail with style and humor, in addition to a healthy dose of chutzpah. She chatted with us about her work, her goals and why we shouldn’t call what she does graffiti.

LAist: What’s your signature style?
Sand One: I do cartoon-y females with attitude and swag, painted huge on walls, trucks, corn carts and mobiles. They have big, eccentric eyelashes and fruity colors, and lots of L.A.-influenced tattoos, like three dots that signify “my crazy life,” an L.A. logo, the number 13, penitentiary-influenced tattoos and anything that reminds me of my “Lost Angeles” culture.

My style embodies the female of today, the thug girl in me, and the teenager in all of us, discovering her city horizons, body and joys.

LAist: How did you get started doing graffiti?
SO: I do art on the streets. Maybe it looks like graffiti, but it’s not. My art form can be classified as chick urban street art.

I’ve been seriously invading walls, trucks, and galleries for three years now. It’s a lonely sport, but I love doing it. I love the powerful feeling and the satisfaction that I get after painting a mural that’s three times larger than five-foot me, with my own little hands, some paint, an idea and an extendable ladder.

LAist: So, I clearly made a mistake in calling your art graffiti – can you explain how it’s different?
SO: Don’t get me beat up! It’s almost the same thing, but the fact that I don’t go out at night and jump bridges or run into freeways is what makes what I do different. Graffiti has lots of letter styles, and it involves this sexy danger. My art has this clean and nice image — graffiti isn’t supposed to be nice, it’s rugged and hardcore.

Street art is the artsy side of it, the nice side of it, the gallery, the limelight. It’s not as hardcore. Raise your glasses to both forms, they’re the best forms of art at the moment here in Los Angeles.

LAist: Is it harder for female artists to make a name for themselves in street art and graffiti?
SO: You have to have thick skin to be in this world where it’s male-dominated, and they feel threatened by your presence. A lot of guys see me in my heels, painting girls and cartoons, and they get angry. They try to get crazy with me, even try to take my paint away, but it’s cool — I’m hood so I let them have it!

Once, I was at an art exhibit on Fairfax and Melrose and I was drawing on people’s blackbooks (sketch books). This guy who’s an L.A. graffiti vandal walks up and sees it’s me, and suddenly he’s so angry! He says, “So it’s you, you’ve been doing cartoons all over the city. I have no respect for legal graffiti.”

I’m like, oh my gosh, he’s gonna punch me…but so what? I’ll take a punch for my Sand Chikz (just punch me in the stomach please, not the face). He’s like, “I have three daughters and sisters so I respect what you do, but I’ve never made a cent off what I do, I believe that graffiti should stay illegal. I’ll never fucking paint a wall with you.”

That was the joke of my night, but still I admire it — that he had the nerve to walk up into a crowd and attempt to shatter my passion for art.

LAist: Do you ever get scared?
SO: I wasn’t scared. It’s the lifestyle that I want to live, and I want to experience everything that comes with this world. It’s not boring; it’s exciting. I’ve done trains and other underground stuff, but I’d rather put art on a corn cart or a meat market and give back to the neighborhoods. It’s just a different way of doing things.

And my girls, they’re cute! They’re supposed to bring happiness, and make other girls understand that there’s street art for us to enjoy.

LAist: What inspires you about L.A.?
SO: I love L.A. I listen to Too Short, Tupac and Snoop Dogg a lot, so it keeps my gangsta swagger and hustle on point. It’s so much of everything in L.A. — too many taco stands, too many girls, way too many bums, not a lot of men and tons of greatly skilled artists. So that significantly motivates me to hit the ground harder and seek opportunities instead of waiting for them to arrive in the mail.

L.A. changes you; it’s competitive. I originate from the heart, East L.A, where the freaks come out at night and ambition runs low. I consider myself a hustler, a little Mexican gangster, and the fact that I was born and raised here in L.A. made me who I am.

LAist: You’ve had your work shown in galleries, you’re well known in the street art community, and you’ve collaborated with clothing companies — and you’re only 19. Where do you want to go with your art and your career?
SO: Well, I would like to one day get off EBT so I don’t have to pimp the government, and get rid of having a baby sitter that follows me everywhere — I’m grown! Just kidding. I’m not sure. I just enjoy painting. It makes me so happy every time I paint a new mural, join a new art exhibit or travel to a different city or country and leave my mark. I’m proud to come from nothing, and to have slowly begun build something that’s made heads turn.

I’m very focused on my aspirations; I want to be a great artist. I aim for perfection. I don’t go to school to perfect my craft, I take it to the streets. I’m not afraid of criticism or of not being accepted. I enjoy painting huge cartoons with cheesy smiles all over the streets. It keeps me sane. The streets are my canvas, sketchbook, diary.

LAist: What do you like about the street art scene right now?
SO: There’s a lot of positive stuff. I’m happy to be a part of the new up-and-coming street artist culture. I know our art is very different and some of the elders have a hard time accepting it, but so far I’ve been very welcomed.

In regards to females, they’re very distinct and limited, so big ups to the women out there that are truly getting their asses up and running around the streets making their presence felt. This is a man’s world. But it wouldn’t be nothing without a badass L.A. woman.

LAist: What are you working on now?
SO: I’m doing a mural in the Culver City arts district. I was trying to get this very famous underground graffiti artist, MQ, to agree for over a year, and finally I got him to paint with me. He was very open-minded to working with me and painting a huge wall. It’s been two weeks that we’ve been doing this. The wall is very cool, it’s me coming together stylistically with someone old school that I look up to for having been around the graffiti world for so long, and making a name for himself by systematically painting what he loved and believed in. MQ you are awesome!

LAist: Do you still live in L.A.?
SO: I’m still in East Los Angeles. I’ve been exploring different countries and cities as well, but I always end up coming right back to the place I know: home, with my mama and my little brother and sister, and all the awesomely delicious daily leftover food that my mother brings me (she has a Mexican/American lunch truck).

I’m here to live the one life I was given and run around town painting pretty girls with cheesy smiles, long eyelashes and a meaning behind them, empowering today’s L.A woman. My motto is “stay hungry, never full.”

On a personal note. Anyone that writes on a daily basis about street art has friends and family that find things for them. My husband found this and drove me there so I would be safe and since he had no idea where it was he couldn’t give me directions. He took me there in January, just a few days before he suddenly passed away. This mural will always bring tears to my eyes, and yet it was a great outing so I have great memories. Thank you Michael and thank you to all those friends and families that support us writers out there.

A Fossil on the Great Highway

Posted by Cindy on April 27, 2013

Apr 272013

The Great Highway at Pacheco
Outer Sunset

Fossil by Mary Chomenko Hinckley – 1989

A cast bronze medallion inset into the sidewalk depicts the history of the Ocean Beach and incorporates elements discovered or retrieved from the neighborhood into the design.

According to Mary’s website: Her work seeks to illuminate the hidden relationships between found objects. Darwin discovered order in nature’s chaos, Surrealists sought the same; trying to distill sense in nature. The juxtaposition of images and objects from disparate locales generates new insights into the interrelationships between nature and civilization.

Found objects, bits and bytes from Silicon Valley junk bins, building blocks of our generation; the unresolved tension in a bird captured mid-flight; the subtle geometry of a distant landscape and the patterns that define it and it’s peoples; these elements together reveal a new order and visual reality that I continue to explore.

EDUCATION
1982 Master of Fine Arts, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA
1978-79 School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, MA
1977 Ukrainian Studies (Summer Program), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
1973 Bachelor of Arts, Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ

The Masonic Temple – 25 Van Ness

Posted by Cindy on April 26, 2013

Apr 262013

Masonic Temple
25 Van Ness
Civic Center

Walter Danforth Bliss and William Baker Faville were the architects of this, the second Masonic Lodge in San Francisco.

The first lodge, at 1 Montgomery Street, was built in 1860 and burned down in the 1906 fire. In 1911 the Masonic Temple Association, headed by William Crocker, laid a 12—ton cornerstone (the largest ever in California at that time) for their new building. Two years later a grand parade of 8,000 Masons, with Knights Templar on horseback, marked its dedication.

Cornerstone

An outstanding example of the Beaux-Arts period, the temple is primarily Italian Gothic in design, with a Romanesque—style arched entrance and touches inspired by cathedrals in France.

The entrance is through this elegant and noble portal, under a semi-circular hood supported on corbels formed by the stone figures of lions. The tympanum shows three allegorical figures in relief by New York Sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman (The future creator of the Winged Head Liberty Dime and the Walking Liberty Half Dollar), consisting of three figures of Charity, Fortitude and Truth. Beneath, the lintel is a row of nine smaller figures by San Francisco artist Ralph Stackpole, representing David, Abraham, St. John the Divine, Nathan the prophet, Moses, Aaron, St. John the Baptist, Joseph and Jonathan.

The 1913 Chamber of Commerce Handbook for San Francisco declared, “One of the few buildings in America comparable to some of the good buildings in Europe is the Masonic Temple.” And the 1919 Architectural Review said, “Bliss & Faville’s Masonic Temple is widely known as one of the best Masonic structures, both inside and out. . . . It looks like what it is, and this cannot always be said of lodges and fraternity buildings.”

The sculpture of King Solomon is also by Adolph Alexander Weinman. The canopy itself is adorned with sculptured angels, and with enshrined allegorical figures all done by Ralph Stackpole . The man with the capital represents the Builder: the one with the book, Social Order; the one with the lyre, Reverence for Beauty of the World; the one with his hands on his breast, Reverence for the Mystery of the Heavens.

Walter Danforth Bliss was born in Nevada in 1872, the fourth of five children born to Duane and Elizabeth Bliss. Duane Bliss had migrated out to California from Massachusetts during the gold rush period and had become a partner in a Nevada Bank, which was purchased by the Bank of California. Later Duane formed a partnership with Bank of California President, Darius Ogden Mills, in the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Company. This successful venture secured the education of the Bliss’ children, each of whom was sent back to Massachusetts for schooling at MIT.

At MIT, Walter Bliss met his future partner William Baker Faville. Faville, more than 5 years his senior, was born in San Andreas, California, but had grown up in western New York State, and had already served an apprenticeship in Buffalo with architects Green & Wicks. Bliss and Faville both left MIT in 1895 and began working at the prominent New York firm of McKim, Mead & White. Although neither appears to have attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, they would have been exposed to its philosophy in New York at McKim, Mead & White and also at the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects in New York, of which John Galen Howard was then President.

In 1898 the pair decided to form a partnership and selected San Francisco as the city in which to work.

The freemasons moved from this building in 1958, it is now home to a number of city and county departments, including the San Francisco Arts Commission, the New Conservatory Theatre, and the San Francisco Parking Division.

It allegedly sits along the outlines of a pyramid shape planned for the streets of San Francisco by various influential Freemasons. The shape reflects a prominent Freemason symbol and also the pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States. Supposedly, the first diagonal runs from Market to Mission Streets, the second runs along Montgomery Avenue, and the base is formed by Van Ness. The Transamerica Pyramid sits at the capstone.

Incomplete Metamorphosis

Posted by Cindy on April 25, 2013

Apr 252013

Argonne Park
18th Avenue between Geary and Anza
Inner Richmond

Artist Joyce Hsu combines her personal memories of summer adventures with a complex skeletal structure similar to an airplane to create two unique artworks for Argonne Playground. These two sculptures, Firefly and Dragonfly each grace one of the two entrances to the park.

Hsu explains that the title, “Incomplete Metamorphosis” is a scientific term describing a particular type of life cycle of insects. Hsu has adopted the term, but not its specific meaning. She has created her own meaning, seeing in the term a way to describe her insect sculptures: “Not only are they flightless, but they stand motionless, while their skeletal design requires viewers’ vivid imagination to complete.” She has expressed the hope that “many children will be able to share the joy and amazement I found with dragonflies as a youngster.”

Joyce Hsu (who has been in this website before) received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998. For the last ten years, she has exhibited throughout California and increasingly internationally. Currently Hsu is working to complete a Master of Architecture degree at CCA in San Francisco, where she has also received numerous awards for her work. To date, Ms. Hsu has received five public art commissions, including an upcoming major work to be installed at the San Francisco International Airport.

Incomplete Metamorphosis was commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission in accord with the city’s public art ordinance, which provides for an art enrichment allocation equivalent to 2% of the construction budget of a new or renovated civic construction project. Funds for the artwork were provided by the Recreation and Park Department. The two sculptures were commissioned for $25,o00 in the 2006-2007 budget.

PreCast Concretes’ Role in San Francisco

Posted by Cindy on April 24, 2013

Apr 242013

The Tulip at Embarcadero Center Four

Concrete began as a structural component of architecture. A mixture of cement, aggregate and water, concrete has been used as a building material for over a millennia. It was only in the 1920s, however, that technical innovation allowed for precast concrete to become an acceptable substitute for stone in architectural ornamentation.

Moreover, by the late 1950s, precast concrete was a direct competitor with metal-and-glass curtain wall systems. Architectural precast concrete is a broad term for concrete that is colored, shaped, finished or textured for architectural effect. Its appearance can be altered through techniques such as sandblasting, acid washing, high-pressure water washing or polishing. It can be used for load-bearing or non-load-bearing walls, and can be either reinforced or pre-stressed. Precast concrete is typically manufactured at an off-site plant rather than on a construction site. Concrete is poured into molds. The resulting products are trucked to the construction site where they are assembled into a final structure.

Some of the more innovative examples of precast concrete can be found in San Francisco.

Architect William Perriera’s Transamerica Pyramid is considered one of the 50 most significant precast concrete projects in the United States. The use of precast concrete during its construction in 1972 marked an historical engineering and construction moment. The precast concrete façade of this 48-story building is made up of 3,920 pieces bolted to the building’s structural system. The crushed quartz added to the precast concrete helped the building win a Platinum LEED certificate in 2011 with a 62 Solar Reflex Index.

The Peace Pagoda, a five-tier concrete stupa designed by Japanese architect Yoshiro Taniguchi, stands as a beacon to San Francisco’s Japantown. Financed with an $185,000 gift from sister city Osaka, the pagoda was built in 1968 by East Bay Precast Concrete Company Terracon.

The Ramp of the Tulip at Embarcadero Center Four

The Tulip, designed by architect and developer John Portman serves not only as the centerpiece to his Embarcadero 4 building, but as a ramp to move between the three exterior floors. The petals were precast by Western Art Stone. Once on the jobsite, they were assembled by Dinwiddie Construction Company over a wooden structure and attached to the poured-in-place center core. The ramp was poured-in-place as well.

Precast concrete is far less expensive than carved stone, it can mimic details just as beautifully, and also gives you the ability to make multiple copies inexpensively. The use of concrete will continue to add flourishes to modern architecture, as long as architects look at the material as something more than a basic building block.

Edison and DaVinci by Olmsted

Posted by Cindy on April 23, 2013

Apr 232013

CCSF Ocean View Campus
50 Phelan
Sunnyside

According to CCSF’s website “Archibald Cloud, the Chief Deputy Superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, began in 1930 to vigorously articulate a long held educational dream: that the “premier” county in the State—San Francisco—must have the same educational “jewel” as did 38 of the State’s 58 counties. That is, it must have a junior college! Cloud hired world prominent architect, Timothy Pflueger. The two rapidly moved ahead with the design and the construction of the gymnasiums as well as Science Hall, a building they were determined to make into “a showplace of monumental architecture.”

As Vice Chairman of Fine Arts at the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island, Pflueger was able to have transferred to the College, at no cost , several of the culturally significant projects created by artists during the fair. These include these two sculptures carved by Fredrick Olmsted. They are 7 feet high, four foot square, and 9 tons of granite, representing Leonardo DaVinci and Thomas Edison. (In researching these two pieces I have also found reference that they are limestone or Tuff stone, my personal opinion is that they are limestone.)

The sculptures were carved for the WPA exhibition “Art in Action”. Art in Action was an exhibit of artists at work displayed for four months in the summer of 1940 at the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) held on Treasure Island. Many famous artists took part in the exhibit, including Dudley C. Carter, woodcarver and Diego Rivera, muralist.

Frederick Olmsted (April 10, 1911-February 14, 1990) was born in San Francisco. A collateral relative of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Olmsted studied science at Stanford and art at the California School of Fine Arts, where he met and married Barbara Greene. In 1937, the couple visited fellow student Helen Phillips in Paris and spent time working at Atelier 17.

Olmsted worked in the WPA, assisting John Langley Howard and George Harris in the Coit Tower, creating his own mural on a three-foot panel above the main entrance. He also assisted Diego Rivera with his mural at the Art Institute in San Francisco. Olmsted created numerous murals and sculptures for public works in San Francisco, including the Theory and Science mural at San Francisco City College. He taught art for a while at Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

After Barbara and he divorced, he continued to work as a sculptor, moving to Cleveland where he designed medical equipment for the Cleveland Clinic. It was there he developed a machine to shock the diseased heart of one of his dogs, a prototype for today’s pacemaker. Olmsted then worked at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, designing equipment and machinery for the Oceanographic Institute. He died in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

Swimming through Jessie Square

Posted by Cindy on April 22, 2013

Apr 222013

Site of the future Mexican Museum
706 Mission District
Museum Row
SOMA

This is titled Exploring New Territory and is by Henry Lipkis. This wall is the edge of the construction site for the forthcoming Mexican Museum, so the piece will be temporary.

This is from Henry’s blog: “Back in October I painted my first big public mural in San Francisco. It started back in July when I applied to do an interactive mural as a performance piece for Yerba Buena Night, a cultural art happening in Jessie Square. At first I was going to get a big roll of canvas and unroll it on some wall and do my piece there. Thankfully these Yerba Buena folk think big and my contact told me he was going to find a wall for me. He called me about a month later and we met up in front of this 70 foot wall and he said “Here it is”. Then he asked how many panels of it I wanted to paint so they could get the appropriate amount of lights for the event. Pfff how many panels… if they were giving me access to this entire huge wall I wanted to paint the entire thing! So they did indeed rig up this entire wall with clamp lamps so that i could continue to paint into the night of the event.

All told, I was painting for 12 hours straight from 10 am to 10 pm and it was great to work with such an awesome institution.”

About painting “To take a previously mundane surface and splash paint and twist colors around one another, pushing ideas here and there in a mad frenzy until finally a scene pokes its toes into the realm of readability, it gets me higher than anything else ever could. I can’t get enough of it, dancing with my mind and body through dimensions of abstraction and bringing back a handful of solid images to show people where I went.

I hope to lure people in with a tasty, digestible, morsel of an image and from there to snatch them into the realm of abstraction, help them dance around with their own subconscious, and deliver them back to their daily life with a slightly dizzy feeling.”

There is an interesting article on YM&C if you would like to explore further.

Notre Dame des Victoires Church

Posted by Cindy on April 20, 2013

Apr 202013

566 Bush Street
Union Square/Chinatown

There are a handful of buildings in San Francisco that turn 100 this year. This will be the beginning of my covering those buildings over the next few weeks.

Notre Dame des Victoires is one of the names for the Virgin Mary. This statue of Jesus’ mother is in front of the French church, Notre Dame des Victoires.

The French priest, Père Langlois journeyed to Oregon in 1842 with French Canadian trappers under the auspices of the Hudson Bay Company. He arrived in San Francisco in 1848. On July 19 of that year, he celebrated mass in an army chapel which was called St. Francis Church. He was assisted by Père Lebret, with sermons delivered in French, Italian and Spanish.

In 1856, Gustav Touchard bought a Baptist Church located at this site on Bush Street. Eglise Notre Dame des Victoires was founded to serve the spiritual needs of the French Catholic immigrants who came to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. In 1887, Pope Leo XIII signed the decree placing Eglise Notre Dame des Victoires under the charge of the Marists for perpetuity and giving it the designation of being a French National Church.

The old church was destroyed by the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. Work began on a new church and rectory in 1912 and was completed in 1913. Louis Brochoud designed the existing Romanesque church.

This small, buff-colored brick church sits on a high base with double staircases. It has a barrel-shaped central bay flanked by polygonal towers topped by cupolas. The nave and side aisles are defined by red marble columns that support a barrel-vaulted ceiling decorated with Romanesque and Classical plaster ornaments.

The church underwent a $2.1 million retrofit after the 1989 earthquake led by contractors Mayta and Jensen.

The centennial of the founding of the church is commemorated by a plaque given by the Republic of France in 1956 that sits beneath the statue of the Virgin Mary and reads:

” Don du gouvernment de la republique Francaise a l’eglise Notre Dame des Victoires a l’occasion du premier centenaire.” [Given by the government of the Republic of France to the Notre Dame des Victoires church for the occasion of the first centennial.]

SF Genealogy has a wonderful history of the French and their contributions to San Francisco that you can read here.

Fish Tale

Posted by Cindy on April 19, 2013

Apr 192013

San Francisco General Hospital
Potrero Hill

Fish Tale by Hilda Shum was done in 1995.

A stainless steel sculpture of an abstract fish tail rises from a mosaic “pool” of green and blue tiles. The fish is a symbol of transformation in many cultures and, as such, has special significance for this facility, which is the Skilled Mental Health Nursing Facility at San Francisco General Hospital.

Shum is a Canadian artist born in 1957. The Sculpture is Stainless Steel and Mosaic. It is owned by the San Francisco Art Commission.

Dance of the Cubes

Posted by Cindy on April 18, 2013

Apr 182013

San Francisco General Hospital
Potrero Hill

Dance of the Cubes is by Jacques Schnier. It is made of plastic and fiberglass and was done in 1975.

Jacques Schnier taught at Berkeley for 30 years. First appointed as a Lecturer in the Department of Architecture, he retired as Professor of Art, Emeritus, in 1966. Jacques was a prolific sculptor whose work was widely exhibited and given critical recognition throughout his career. Major University recognition of Jacques’ achievements came in the form of appointment to the Institute of Creative Arts in 1963 and the awarding of the Berkeley Citation in 1970.

Born in Romania, Jacques came to the United States with his family in 1903 and grew up in San Francisco. His formal education included an A.B. degree in engineering from Stanford in 1920 and an M.A. degree in Sociology from Berkeley in 1939.

An interest in city planning led to his abandoning a successful career in engineering and enrolling in the Department of Architecture at Berkeley. This in turn gave him his first experience in art, since architecture students were required to take art courses. Architectural interests were rapidly supplanted by his fascination with sculpture, and he dropped out of school to devote full attention to it.

Following his retirement in 1966, Jacques’ creative energy seemed to double and his work underwent a change. Having previously favored such materials as stone, wood, bronze, marble and copper, he now focused on the medium of carved and polished clear acrylic resin (Plexiglas). His concentrated effort in this difficult material led him to say in 1975 that “at last I’ve found my medium” and “it’s as though I’m sculpturing pure light. At 76, I’m hitting my stride.”

Jacques Schnier died March 24, 1988, at the age of 89.

Dance of the cubes is on the dining room balcony at San Francisco General Hospital. It is owned by the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Torso With Arm Raised II by De Staebler

Posted by Cindy on April 17, 2013

Apr 172013

475 Sacramento Street
Financial District

De Staebler has appeared on this website before. Stephen De Staebler, a sculptor whose fractured, dislocated human figures gave a modern voice and a sense of mystery to traditional realist forms, died on May 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 78.

This bronze sculpture is an abstract figure of a human torso with an arm partially raised. The arm is incomplete. The sculpture was purchased for the Embarcadero Art in Public Places project.

L’Octagon by Pol Bury

Posted by Cindy on April 16, 2013

Apr 162013

353 Sansome Street
The Financial District

L’Octagon by Pol Bury – Marble and Steel

L’Octagon is a result of the 1% for Art program in San Francisco. It is available for viewing between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. M-F

This lovely sculpture actually moves. The balls slightly fill with water on the bottom and roll approximately 90 degrees, once the water drains they roll back to their upright position.

Pol Bury was born on April 26, 1922 in Haine-Saint-Pierre, Belgium. In 1939 he met the poets Achille Chavée and Andre Lorent and joined their Groupe de recherches surréalistes (Surrealist research group): Ruptures. He then discovered the work of Tanguy and started to paint, influenced by the work of René Magritte.

In 1947 Bury turned towards abstract painting and entered the Jeune Peinture Belge (Young Belgian Painting) group. In 1949 Bury broke away from the group and committed himself to geometric abstraction.

After seeing the Alexander Calder exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in Paris in 1950, Bury began to move away from painting towards three-dimensional work. He moved to Paris in 1961. He became professor at Paris’s Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (National School of Fine Arts), where he led a class in monumental sculpture until 1987.

Pol Bury died on September 27, 2005 at the age of 83, in Paris.

The public art requirement created by the downtown plan is commonly known as the “1% for Art” program. This requirement, governed by Section 429 of the Planning Code, provides that construction of a new building or addition of 25,000 square feet or more within the downtown C‐3 district, triggers a requirement that provide public art that equals at least 1% of the total construction cost be provided.

Credit is given to Pol Bury at the cornerstone of the building.

Harvey Milk Rec Center

Posted by Cindy on April 15, 2013

Apr 152013

50 Scott
Castro

This saying is over the back entry way to the Harvey Milk Recreation Center. It is in Architectural foam and is by Michael Davis and Susan Schwartzenberg.

This phrase comes from “A City of Neighborhoods,” speech Harvey Milk delivered during his inaugural dinner after his election to the Board of Supervisors in 1977. “Let’s make no mistake about this: the American dream starts with the neighborhoods, If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. and to do that we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living…”

The artists said that as daylight shifts across the buildings facade, Milk’s words are revealed, obscured, and then reappear, reminding us of his enduring influence throughout the passage of time.

Susan Schwartzenberg works as an independent artist and holds a senior artist position at the Exploratorium. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Art, and Stanford University, and is a Loeb Fellow for Advanced Environmental Studies in The School of Design at Harvard University. Recent endeavors include works for the Stanford School of Medicine, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Office of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles. At the Exploratorium, she has developed numerous projects exploring the intersections of art and science. She is currently principal curator for the Observatory—a social and environmental look at the contemporary San Francisco landscape scheduled to open at piers 15 and 17 in 2013.

Susan was also one of the artists on the Philosophers Walk at McClaren Park.

Michael Davis is a native of Los Angeles, and received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts from Cal State Fullerton. He lives and works in San Pedro, CA. Davis’ sculptures and installations can be found in public, private, and institutional settings throughout the country. His public art collaborations can be found in North Hollywood, Dallas, Miami, and Anaheim, and he is working to complete projects for Santa Monica, San Antonio, New York, Santa Fe Springs, San Jose, and Long Beach.

This piece was commissioned for the SF Rec and Parks Department by the SFAC for $62,000.

Called to Rise

Posted by Cindy on April 13, 2013

Apr 132013

235 Pine Street
Financial District

Called to Rise features individuals who have contributed significantly to the history of San Francisco. The figures include, Juan Bautista De Anza, Eadweard Muybridge, Makato Hagiwara, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Chingwah Lee, Ishi, Alfred Louis Kroeber, Philip Burton, Amadeo Peter Giannini, Benjamin Franklin Norris, Timothy Pflueger, Douglas Tilden, Kurt Herbert Adler, Mary Ann Magnin, Harry Bridges, Robert Dollar, John C. Young, Howard Thurman, John Swett, Charlotte Amanda Blake Brown, Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessey.

Done in 1990 the sculptor was Thomas Marsh who has another piece here in San Francisco.

This bronze is part of the San Francisco 1% for Art Program.

The two bronze panels on each side of the door below the light explain the contributions of each person. Links are provided to art works representing the appropriate person or structure.

Juan Bautista de Anza (2735-c1788) Between 774 and 1776, De Anza brought settlers across vast deserts of the Spanish Southwest, without loss of life, into Alta California and the Bay of San Francisco.

Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) Muybridge took a series of photographs at the Stanford Farm in Palo Alto that led directly to the invention of the motion picture camera.

Makato Hagiwara (1854-1925) Hagiwara conceived of the idea of the “fortune cookie” and, together with his son established the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park.

Phoebe Apperson Hearst (1842-1919) Mother of William Randlolph Hearst, the San Francisco newspaper tycoon, Mrs. Hearst devoted herself to the improvement and expansion of the University of California.

Chungwah Lee (1901-1980) Lee, a Hollywood actor for 40 years helped establish Boy Scout Troop 3, the first all-chinese troop in the United States and the Chinese Historical Society of America.

Ishi (c1860-1916) Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960) Ishi, the last survivor of the Yahi people, worked in association with Kroeber to document the vanished language, customs, and values of his people.

Philip Burton (1926-1983) As author of the Golden Gate National Recreation Act, U.S. Congressman Burton helped preserve the headlands of Marin and northern edges of the San Francisco peninsula.

Amadeo Peter Giannini (1870-1949) Giannini established the Bank of Italy in North Beach, which he latr developed into the Bank of America, the premier bank of the United States.

Benjamin Franklin Norris (1870-1902) A writer of fiction, Norris helped establish the reputation of San Francisco as a romantic seaport city, alive with mystery and adventure.

Timothy Pflueger (1892-1946) Pflueger’s notable architectural achievements include the Pacific Stock Exchange Building, the Castro Theater, the Pacific Telephone Building on New Montgomery Street, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Douglas Tilden (1860-1935) Tilden is famous for his bronze sculptures; the Mechanics Monument on Market Street and the Baseball Player and Junipero Serra statues in Golden Gate Park.

Kurt Herbert Adler (1905-1988( Under Adler, the San Francisco Opera won fame for its bold re-staging of classics and its willingness to produce new or previously obscure works.

Mary Ann Magnin (1849-1943) Magnin, a pioneer business woman opened a notions and fine needlework shop which later grew into I. Magnin & Co., specializing in imported European clothing.

Harry Bridges (1901-1990) Bridges, a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco played a major role in a coastwide strike spearheaded by the International Longshoreman’s Association

Robert Dollar (1844-1932) Dollar is considered a pioneer in the evolution of San Francisco as in important trade and shipping center for the Asia Pacific Basin in the early twentieth century.

John C. Young (1912-1987) An Engineer from Stanford University, Young devoted himself to the improvement of San Francisco’s Chinatown and helped found the annual Chinese New Years Parade.

Howard Thurman (1900-1981) As a preacher writer and social activist, Reverend Thurman helped establish the intellectual and moral foundations of the Civil Rights Movement in America.

John Swett (1830-1913) Devoted to teaching and developing the public schools of San Francisco Swett helped form Lowell High School and pioneered the education of children in preparation for college.

Charlotte Amanda Blake Brown (1846-1904) Dr. Brown, a specialist in the care of women and children helped found Children’s Hospital. She also played a major role in establishing nursing education in San Francisco.

Michael Maurice O’Shaughnessey (1864-1934) As city engineer O’Shaughnessey laid out the municipal railway streetcar system and is mainly noted for his contributions to the Hetch Hetchy water and power system.

Folded Circle Split

Posted by Cindy on April 12, 2013

Apr 122013

201 Spear Street
SOMA Financial Area

Folded Circle Split by Fletcher Benton – 1984

In walking through the lobby of 201 Spear Street I tripped upon this sculpture. The office building is open from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm M-F.

Fletcher Benton (born February 25, 1931 Jackson, Ohio) is from San Francisco, California

He graduated from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1956. From 1964 to 1967 he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and taught as an associate professor and then professor of art at San Jose State University from 1967-1986.

Fletcher Benton began his career as an abstractionist painter in the 1950s and 1960s. Frustrated with the limitations of paint on canvas, Benton began work on movement with geometric pattern pieces and boxes which he was familiar with from his work in commercial signs. This was at the beginning of the kinetic movement, and Benton worked largely in isolation, unaware of other efforts of kinetic artists. The early works were more concerned with change, rather than movement. The pieces were really more like three-dimensional paintings. Full three-dimensional sculptures designed to be viewed from all angles came later and the movement of the pieces became less prevalent in his later works. In the late 1970s, he abandoned kinetic art, switching to a more traditional bronze and steel.

I tripped upon this piece while looking for two other pieces that are part of the 201 Spear Street POPOS. The pieces, titled Smile and News are so poorly executed that I will leave it to the explorer in you to find them and make your own opinion.

Go Bears

Posted by Cindy on April 11, 2013

Apr 112013

817 Terry Francois Way
Mission Rock Resort
Dogpatch

Old Cal Memorial Stadium Wood

Paul Olson is a versatile and very adaptable artist working in a variety of mediums.

Paul has worked as a freelance illustrator for twelve years creating unique artwork as well as adapting styles to work with illustration teams. He has created designs for print and the web for major marketing and PR firms as well as start-ups and private businesses.

As a muralist, Paul has been commissioned large-scale indoor and outdoor pieces for business parks, restaurants, and offices. He has also worked with interior designers to paint murals for private homes.

Tile and Bronze Column

Posted by Cindy on April 10, 2013

Apr 102013

580 Bush Street
Financial District/Union Square/Chinatown

This little hidden gem, done in 1992, is a collaboation of Ruth Asawa, her son Paul Lanier and artist Nancy Thompson.

Ruth Asawa has been on this website many times before. I recently found this article by Milton Chen and Ruth Cox at Edutopia that gives a few new details about Asawa that I did not know.

“The daughter of truck farmers, Asawa was born in 1926 in Norwalk, in southern California, one of seven children. In 1942, her family was ordered to report to the temporary incarceration center for Japanese Americans at the Santa Anita Race Track. Her father had already been taken away by government agents and would be separated from the family for several years. Asawa lived with her siblings and mother in a horse stall for six months before relocating to an internment camp in Arkansas.

The one silver lining for the teenage Asawa was encountering Disney artists, also interned, who conducted art classes in the grandstands and taught her to draw. Her first artist teacher, Tom Okamoto, encouraged the students not to copy but to create original drawings from life.

Later, in Arkansas, she and other interned students dutifully recited the Pledge of Allegiance every day for their social studies teacher. After the final phrase, “with liberty and justice for all,” they always added in a loud voice, “Except for us!”

After the war, Asawa went to Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee), intent on becoming an art teacher, but no school district in the state would hire her for student teaching to fulfill her credential requirements and allow her to complete her degree. Decades later, when the university approached her to bestow an honorary doctorate, she asked only that it hand her the undergraduate diploma she had been denied.

Asawa went on to study at North Carolina’s legendary Black Mountain College under artist Josef Albers and designer Buckminster Fuller and alongside composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. It was the formative art experience of her life. She also began experimenting with crocheted wire sculpture and met her future husband, architect Albert Lanier.

After moving to San Francisco in 1949, the two began a family, fulfilling her professed goal of having six children. However, when her kids entered the local public school, Asawa was dismayed to learn that “art” consisted of coloring in mimeographed pages. “I remember what it feels like to be a victim — to be victimized,” she says. “And I couldn’t bear to see the lack of true arts education.”

In 1968, Asawa cofounded the Alvarado Arts Program, which began at San Francisco’s Alvarado Elementary School and now brings together professional artists, parents, and teachers in many of the city’s schools to work with students in clay sculpture, visual arts, music dance, and theater.

The program began by recycling milk and egg cartons and scrap fabric for materials, and it also emphasizes gardening to provide children with a hands-on connection to nature. Asawa has worked tirelessly to convince policy makers to elevate the level of arts teaching in the nation’s schools, serving on the San Francisco Art Commission, the California Arts Council, National Endowment for the Arts committees, and President Carter’s Commission on Mental Health.

Activism in arts education is now a tradition in Asawa’s family. Her son, Paul Lanier, is a ceramicist and has been an artist-in-residence for nine years at the Alvarado Arts Program.

“Through the arts, you can learn many, many skills that you cannot learn through books and problem solving in the abstract,” Asawa says. “A child can learn something about color, about design, and about observing objects in nature. If you do that, you grow into a greater awareness of things around you. Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into. It makes a person broader.”

Many of Asawa’s elegant bronze and steel sculptures began as folded paper or simple clay figures. For the Hyatt Hotel’s bronze fountain sculpture, in San Francisco’s Union Square, she enlisted family and friends in molding city landmarks and scenes from baker’s clay, a mixture of flour, salt, and water, a medium she first used with fifth graders at Alvarado. Her large latticed pieces, evoking organic forms and shapes, originated in a wire-basket crocheting technique she learned while visiting Mexico City in the 1940s.

“Art is for everybody,” Asawa says. “It is not something that you should have to go to the museums in order to see and enjoy. When I work on big projects, such as a fountain, I like to include people who haven’t yet developed their creative side — people yearning to let their creativity out. I like designing projects that make people feel safe, not afraid to get involved.”

Ruth Asawa should be an inspiration for generations of educational activists to come. Confronted with wartime racism, didactic teaching, and the bureaucracy of schools, she was never afraid to get involved.”

Paul Lanier is a ceramist, sculptor and designer.

According to her obituary Nancy Howry Thompson was an original member of the Alvarado Arts Workshop that used local artists to teach the craft to thousands of children in San Francisco public schools.

In 1968, Ms. Thompson joined Ruth Asawa and other artists whose children attended Alvarado Elementary School in Noe Valley to fill what they saw as a gap in arts programs offered at the school.

Two years later, she worked as project coordinator, with several volunteers and about 400 students, to create and install a major mosaic mural in the schoolyard at Alvarado. It was the first time in San Francisco that students, teachers, parents, volunteers and school administrators working with an artist participated in a project which provided a public school with a major work of art.

The Berkeley artist, who worked in a variety of media, including murals, mosaics, stained-glass and sculpture, became the first artist in residence at Alvarado and went on to lead art programs at a number of schools in San Francisco. The Alvarado experiment grew into the San Francisco Arts Education Project, which four decades later serves 200,000 children in the city’s schools.

“She loved teaching and sharing what she knew how to do and she believed that art belongs to the community,” said her daughter, Stephanie Curtis. “She often said she got more out of the programs that she ran than she gave.”

Ms. Thompson once said, “As a practicing artist, I find the interaction of community, artist and student artists immensely rewarding.” An avid bicyclist, backpacker and environmentalist, Ms. Thompson loved California’s landscape.

“The Bay Area’s colors and shapes of the mountains, hills, water and light of Northern California are constant themes in her work,” her daughter said.

Yerba Buena Gardens

Posted by Cindy on April 9, 2013

Apr 092013

Yerba Buena Gardens
SOMA South of 5th Street

Yerba Buena Gardens is a two-block public park that anchors the three sides of the Yerba Buena Center (YBC). The area got its name in 1835 for the “good herb”-mint-growing in the area.

YBC is officially in the South of Market Area (SOMA). Jack London first called this area “south of the slot,” in reference to the cable-car tracks that ran down the center of Market Street.

In 1847 when the city fathers laid out the SOMA, it was partitioned into lots twice the size of those in the north of market area. SOMA also had easy access to the piers, making it a likely location for industrial development. Businesses that eventually settled in the area included factories, gas works, machine shops and laundries. After the 1906 earthquake and fire wiped out the area, reconstruction of SOMA was hasty, resulting in residential hotels, boarding houses, flats and the occasional single-family dwelling.

The 1950s brought a groundswell among business leaders-especially real estate developers-for urban renewal. In 1953 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors designated twelve “blighted” blocks as a redevelopment district. The controversial head of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Justin Herman, led the charge, commenting that “The South of Market Area ranks among the most severely blighted sections of the city…[T]he conditions of the blight are such as to be highly conducive to social disintegration, juvenile delinquency, and crime. The present wasteful use of potentially valuable land must be stopped.” The proposed redevelopment plans included theaters, restaurants, office spaces, hotels, a convention center and a sports complex-all intended to comprise the Yerba Buena Center.

The November 3, 1965 Official Bulletin of the San Francisco Labor Council ran an article by their secretary-treasurer, George John. He wrote, “Speculative real estate operators…seem to have taken over the planning functions of our city….Convention halls and sports arenas have their place. But the loss of millions of square feet of industrial space can only extend unemployment, suffering and poverty….A redevelopment program is certainly needed there. However…a rehabilitation and conservation program makes for better sense than the program of massive clearance…”

Ohlone Indian Memorial: Oche Wat Te Ou

Despite opposition efforts, official removal of SOMA residents began in 1967. By 1969 the Redevelopment Agency had acquired 44% of the properties required for the project. Buildings began to sink into states of disrepair, and the neighborhood continued to decline.

This situation brought out the fight in 80-year-old George Woolf. A retired union man, he was perfect to head up the Tenants and Owners in Opposition Group (TOOR) formed by the residents of the Milner Hotel. Their biggest concern was the displacement of the elderly: 33% of the residents of the area were men over the age of 60, and the average income in the area was $2734, only one quarter of the average income across the city.

In response to Justin Herman’s statement that the folks of SOMA were “nothing but a bunch of skid row bums,” Woolf responded, “I’m not a bum, and I resent being discredited and discounted.”

In an ironic twist, some of the strongest supporters of the YBC were the Building and Construction Trades Council, as well as the Bartenders and Culinary Workers and Cooks Union; they all saw the redevelopment as an opportunity for more jobs. While it was pointed out that most of the men being evicted were on union pensions, one union representative was reported to have said, “They poor-mouth a lot, but under our system the residents can’t remain. A few can’t hold up progress.”

Demolition halted at the Hotel Dewey located at 4th and Howard streets. Photo Credit: San Francisco Public Library

TOOR and their lawyers were able to bring an injunction against the San Francisco Housing Authority in 1970, and construction was stopped. The two sides agreed to bring in an outside party to help with the negotiation process. Their choice, former California Governor Pat Brown, recommended that the project should include 2000 low-income housing units. The judge ruling in the case lowered this number to between 1500 and 1800, and the San Francisco Housing Authority found a way to circumvent the priority list, limiting the number of original SOMA residents to receive this housing.

Cho En Butterfly Garden

Delayed for several more years by additional lawsuits, construction did not recommence until the 1980s, and designs for the sports complex were eliminated.

The first portion of the Yerba Buena Center to be built was Moscone Center South. It was completed in 1981, and the Democratic Convention was held there in 1984. The second portion was Moscone North, completed in 1992, the Yerba Buena Gardens along with the Yerba Buena Center for the arts followed in 1994.

Now YBC is a tranquil San Francisco spot, perfect for tai-chi, dog walking and people watching. Few people making use of the lawn built atop the underground Moscone Center ever know about the long, contentious history of this serene garden oasis.

Mid Market Sees Black and White

Posted by Cindy on April 8, 2013

Apr 082013

1125 Market Street
Mid Market Area

This piece is a collaboration of Cannon Dill and Feral Child. Cannon Dill is from Mill Valley and presently lives in Oakland. Feral Child is a California based artist who has been working in the streets for the past five years. Influenced by folk art, activism, and the geometry within nature.

These two have been collaborating around the bay area lately with a artist well known to this website, Zio Ziegler.

Older Entries Newer Entries