Tenderloin – NBC Radio City Building

Mural by C.J. Fitzgerald

Diane Winters is a tile restoration artist.  She recently emailed me about this mural that she was instrumental in restoring.  I had never seen it before, and was thrilled to get a chance to photograph it and learn a little bit of San Francisco history, I was completely unaware of.

The mural sits on the side of a parking garage, little did I know the building also housed Radio City. The NBC Radio City building in San Francisco was not owned by NBC. It was built for NBC and owned by a San Francisco investor, a dentist named Dr. Barrett. The basement and most of the ground floor were used as a public parking garage operated by Dr. Barrett. The upper four floors were used for broadcasting. Rumor has it that Dr. Barrett believed that radio was a passing fad, so he had the framework of his building designed to allow easy conversion of the rest of the building into a parking garage.

NBC moved into Radio City in 1942. It moved out when the twenty-five year lease expired in 1967. The building was a white elephant from the day NBC moved in. It contained ten studios, plus a news studio. Every studio except news had its own control room

The building is an Art Deco marvel and if you are interested in reading more of its architecture and history here is a great link.

The mural, which contains over 2,500 tiles,  measures 16 X 40 feet and begins over the doorway, on the second floor making it very hard for me to bring you really terrific photos.  Notice the hand on a radio dial.

Diane’s email had this to say “As a side note, 22 of the current tiles were made by me to replicate tiles damaged during renovations begun in 2000.  Impact from the interior side of the facade wall caused a portion of the hand and adjacent radio waves to fall off the building, fortunately landing on that “canopy” over the entrance and not on pedestrians.  I used the broken pieces and a photograph, plus glaze and blackline technique tests over the course of two years to recreate them.  I had to match more than 18 glaze colors just in that small section.  …there were 126 colors total (I don’t even want to try to imagine counting and keeping straight that many).”

I sadly, could find nothing about about C.J. Fitzgerald the original designer of the mural.

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