Category: California Cities outside of San Francisco
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Benny Bufano’s Grave
Holy Cross Cemetery Colma, California Bufano’s gravesite is marked by his own sculpture of St. Francis. The statue overlooks that part of the cemetery that holds the unmarked graves of indigent children, the only part of the cemetery that permitted the type of statuary marking Bufano’s grave. Bufano was a well known San Francisco artist…
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A Duel Fought Over Slavery
The site is in an unamed park Off of Lake Merced Boulevard Access is available off of El Portal Way near number 79 Daly City just South of the San Francisco City Limits Just after the discovery of gold the State of California found that its citizens were as divided as the rest of the…
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Dendroids by Roxy Paine
Philadelphia – February 2018 Benjamin Franklin Parkway 24th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue This piece, titled Symbiosis by Roxy Paine, was installed in 2014. It is stainless steel and part of Paine’s “Dendroid” series of stainless steel treelike structures. “Dendroids”is a greek word that combines Dendron meaning tree and oid a suffix meaning form. The piece…
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Civil Rights Monument
Capitol Park Richmond, VA March 2017 The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial sits on the grounds of Capitol Square in Richmond VA and commemorates the protests which helped bring about school desegregation in the state. Unveiled in 2008 this $2.8 memorial was designed by Stanley Bleifield. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch: “A Commonwealth once synonymous with defiance…
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Reconciliation Triangle
East Main Street Richmond, VA March 2017 Reconciliation Triangle has a fascinating and worldwide story. The statue represents Richmond, Virginia’s place in slave history. With the addition of Liverpool, England, and the republic of Benin, West Africa, identical statues by Liverpool artist Stephen Broadbent are in place in each country marking the three points of…
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Maynard Dixon and A Pageant of Traditions
The Stanley Mosk Library and Court Building Gillis Hall 914 Capitol Mall Sacramento, CA I recently toured the newly restored California State Library building. The $62 million restoration brought the library/courts building into the modern age. (The project came in under budget at around $49 million). Although this Maynard Dixon mural experienced a small amount…
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Burls will be Burls
6th Avenue between Burnside and Ash Portland, OR According to the TriMet website: Burls Will be Burls, by Bruce Conkle, is a tribute to snowmen and to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The cast bronze figures of Burls Will be Burls represent what might happen when a snowman melts and nourishes a living tree—water…
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Tying One on for Big Game
Michael sculpted this for his father-in-law Cecil Mark, a big Bear Backer. Cecil was a natty dresser who always dressed to the nines for football games. Though the photograph does not show it well, there are little Cal bears on the tie. Michael was also proud of the fact that he caught the very small stomach…
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Hotel Pacific
300 Pacific Street Monterey, California Michael H. Casey sculpted these fountains for the Hotel Pacific in 1986. The joy of working on a beautiful hotel such as this is that you get to stay there while installing the fountains. It became the go to place to stay whenever we were in the Monterey area. Including…
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Parget
California State Capitol Parget was common throughout the California State Capitol, but like much work throughout the ages it was lost due to remodeling for new amenities such as electricity and air-conditioning, as well as adding desks and finding more space for an ever growing government. A painted fragment was found when workers removed a…
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Chimney Rock Winery
Chimney Rock Winery 5350 Silverado Trail Napa Valley, California 1989 This was our first big job as Michael H. Casey Designs. The winery, at the time was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hack Wilson. The Wilson’s had been the Coca-Cola distributors in South Africa and they wanted to bring the Dutch-Cape style architecture of Mrs.…
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Creatures in the Assembly
California State Capitol Assembly Chambers Artists that worked on the California State Capitol Restoration left little tidbits of themselves throughout the project. Michael H. Casey was no different. When installing the ornamentation that he had worked on in the Assembly he added a little creature that expressed his feelings about the goings on in the…
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Minerva
California State Capital Senate Chambers According to ancient Roman myth, the goddess Minerva was born fully grown. Just as Minerva was born fully grown, so California became a state without first having been a territory. Minerva’s image on the Great Seal symbolizes California’s direct rise to statehood. Minerva originally was in both chambers but…
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South Hall
South Hall University of California, Berkeley South Hall is the oldest extant building on the University of California campus. The entryway, originally in wood, was completely restored in GFRC (Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete) in 1996. The architect on the project was Irving Gonzales and the General Contractor was BBI. Michael H. Casey Designs was hired to completely…
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1940 Packard Building Comes Back to Life
865 The Alameda San Jose, California This photo shows the Packard Buidling in 1940. Notice the wonderful sculptural detailing over the windows and the doors. As often happened during the 1960’s and 1970’s many buildings were stripped of their ornamentation to reflect the modernism trend that was sweeping the country. In 2009 the engineering firm…
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Neptune Society Loses its Ruffle Shirt in the Loma Prieta Earthquake
729 South 2nd Street San Jose, California After the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake the owners of this building came to work to find that the ornamentation on the front of the building had cracked, broken and in some cases fallen off. Upon further inspection they found that the building was a wood structure and that…
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EL Granada Apartment Building Goes Back to Its Roots
EL Granada At Sather Gate 2510 Bancroft Berkeley, California The Granada was built by Patrick O’Brien in 1904, and had been passed down in the family ever since. He built it so that everybody in the family would always have a roof over their heads, and so the building would always support the family. Like so…
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Ford Elementary School Lunette
Ford Elementary School 2711 Maricopa Avenue Richmond, California Sally Swanson Architects of San Francisco designed a new $19 million energy-efficient school to replace the outdated original Ford Elementary School in Richmond, California. The new school’s design is a modern interpretation of the Mission Style. The school’s framework, a repeating 30-foot grid, creates the flexibility for the educational programming…
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Salinas – Jose Eusebio Boronda Adobe Casa
Salinas, California The choice of building materials for the early Spanish settlers and Mission builders of California and much of the southwest of the U.S. was adobe. Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, and/or manure), which the builders shape into…
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El Camino Real
California Missions The El Camino Real Tomes have been written about the history of the Spanish and the Missions of California. It was a difficult period in the history of California, fraught with inhumanity, as well as, expansion and progress. Much of California’s history began with the Spanish Missions. The chain of 21 missions along California’s…
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Coalinga – Richfield Gas
Coalinga Central Valley California If you have ever driven Highway 5 down the center of California you have undoubtedly stopped at Harris Ranch, a half-way point between the metropolitan areas of northern and southern California. Just on the other side of the highway is the town of Coalinga. In the early years of railroading, before the…
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San Joaquin Valley
Central Valley California I spent my Thanksgiving holiday driving the back roads of the San Joaquin portion of the Central Valley of California. For those unfamiliar with the area it is a large, flat valley that dominates the central portion of California. It is home to California’s most productive agricultural efforts. The valley stretches approximately 450…
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South San Francisco
Today’s post is, well honestly, a soap box. Most people know the City of South San Francisco because they see the above when they drive into San Francisco from the airport. That is it, that is probably all you need to know as well. It is a delightful little town with an old downtown where…
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Oddities in San Francisco – Aeolian Harp
This is one of the more obscure pieces of art in the San Francisco area. It is actually in South San Francisco off Grandview Drive in the Oyster Point area. It is difficult to find, and surrounded by ugly industrial buildings that over shadow it. Which is sad, because it is really rather magnificent. 92-feet-tall…
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Pennsylvania – Bucks County
Outside Philadelphia – This is the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, (Bucks County) Pennsylvania. Henry Mercer inherited his money from a maiden aunt and with this money he started collecting objects of everyday life, convinced that the history of Bucks County was the history of the world. At first he did all the collecting himself, but…
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Philadelphia
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Palm Springs Art Museum – Glass as Art
Like many people, my first exposure to glass as art was the stuff that you see in street fairs. It wasn’t my favorite medium. As I have gotten older, and visited more museums I fell in love with cast glass. Glass casting is the process in which glass objects are cast by pouring molten glass…
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Van Nuys – Strolling in a sewer plant.
This story is going to take a while to unfold, so grab a cup of coffee and come along with me on a journey. I took the above photograph in Kenrokuen Gardens, Kanazawa, Japan. This is considered one of the three best gardens in all of Japan. (The Japanese do all their “bests” in…
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Palm Springs – Art Moderne
This little Depression Era “Art Moderne” gem is at 342 North Palm Canyon Drive in Palm Springs. There is very little known about it. It is assumed to be built around 1935-1936, the first actual knowledge of its existence is a listing in the 1937 phone book. At that time is was Simpson’s Radio and…
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Palm Springs – Oddities
This is one of my favorite types of architecture. Scavenger, innovative, a tad crazy and an absolute representation of the person that built it. This is the home of Cabot Yerxa. He was the son of a fabulously wealthy family that lost it all. He was a creative, innovative and wealthy man by his own…