History – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

Little Puffer

Posted by Cindy on August 7, 2022

Aug 072022

San Francisco Zoo
At the area between Grizzly Gulch and The South American Area

Little Puffer is believed to have been built by the Cagney Brothers’ Miniature Railroad Company around 1904. Herbert Fleishhacker purchased the train in 1925 and installed it at the new Herbert Fleishhacker Zoo, where it remained for 53 years.

The history of Little Puffer is somewhat ambiguous, and if you would like to read the “stories”, you can do so here on the San Francisco Zoo website.

I will pick the story up here. After many years of service at the zoo the train sat in storage for over 20 years and suffered greatly for it. In 1997 the Zoo staff decided to put Little Puffer back in service on newly laid track. The cost to renovate the train was $75,000, and the addition of the new depot, plaza area, track layout, landscaping and storage barn brought the total cost to $700,000.

While I truly enjoyed my twice around 4 minute ride on the Little Puffer, I question if it was worth the $5.00 admission (this is in addition to your zoo entry ticket), that is a lot of money for a family of four.

I am sure conductor Johnny Sala would disagree, you can read his story here.

Mining Exchange

Posted by Cindy on September 9, 2018

Sep 092018

350 Bush
Financial District

The history of the Mining Exchange can be read here, as this is a follow up post regarding the “historic restoration” of the building that took place in 2018.

The City of San Francisco has a policy that allows developers to put up a history vignette in place of actual historical restoration. Walking into the building, in the left hand wing is a television screen with lovely photos of San Francisco and an attempt at an artful history review. It fails.

The most important aspect of the restoration was the the terra-cotta facade, the missing pieces, the ornamentation above the arch, were recast by Gladding McBean, the original creator of the tympenum sculpture.

The plaster walls of the old trading hall have been replicated, and the detailed ceiling has been restored.

Restoration of the Historic Plaster in the SF Miners Exchange

Historic photos of the ornamental plaster in the SF Miners Exchange

All this is publicly accessible — you can walk through the trading hall and the tower’s lobby and emerge on Pine Street but it is sadly not a welcoming space or a properly restored space.

The Miners Exchange prior to the restoration

The Miners Exchange prior to restoration

The central hall was originally designed to hold hundreds of traders, complete with a catwalk at the mezzanine-level trading floor and a chalkboard along one wall to keep track of stock fluctuations.

Now this marvelous open space sits empty except for four round columns along the edge.

Photos of the Miners Exchange in its heydey, photos from the SFPL.

Pre-construction photo showing the ceiling before restoration

Chinatown Public Library

Posted by Cindy on December 21, 2015

Dec 212015

1135 Powell Street
Chinatown

The Chinatown Branch of the San Francisco Public Library started its life as the North Beach Branch. It was changed in 1958.

Andrew Carnegie left the City of San Francisco, then under Mayor James Phelan, $750,000 for a main library and branches. One half was for the main library and the rest to be distributed amongst seven branch libraries. The city paid the difference of $1,152,000.

Most of these seven branches have been enlarged very slightly, all have been retrofitted to modern earthquake standards and all are included in San Francisco’s “List of Architecturally Significant Buildings.” All of the branches still serve as libraries.

The old North Beach Carnegie branch was the sixth of the branches built with the Carnegie donation and occupies almost all of the 70’x137′ lot it sits on.

The site was formerly occupied by a school and cost $68, 186.

The building was designed by G. Albert Lansburgh in the Italian Renaissance style.

Gustave Albert Lansburgh (1876 1969) was largely known for his work on luxury cinemas and theatres. He was the principal architect of theaters on the West Coast from 1900 – 1930.

Lansburgh was born in Panama and raised largely in San Francisco. After graduating from Boys High School, he enrolled in UC, Berkeley. While a student there, he worked part-time in the offices of architect Bernard Maybeck. Upon graduation from Berkeley, he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, and graduated in 1906.

Lansburgh returned to the Bay Area in May, 1906, just in time for the building boom that would take place after the earthquake and fire.

First in partnership with Bernard Julius Joseph for two years, then in his own practice, Lansburgh designed numerous buildings in the recovering city. Among these was his first theater, for the San Francisco-based Orpheum Theater company.

Compton’s Cafeteria

Posted by Cindy on June 27, 2015

Jun 272015

Corner of Turk and Taylor
Tenderloin

Funny how a plaque can stop you and educate you about something you may have known nothing about, and at the exact same time leave out so very very much of the story.

If you were to hear about this event during those times you would have been told that in Gene Compton’s Cafeteria at the corner of Taylor and Turk Streets, in August 1966*, a person, described as a “queen” threw a cup of coffee in a police officers face. The police began arresting “queens” and a riot broke out. The riot included around 50 to 60 patrons, and an unnumbered amount of police.

*The exact date of the riot is unknown because 1960 police records no longer exist and the riot was not covered by newspapers.

Photo Courtesy of Shaping San Francisco and FoundSF

While hard to believe in our more progressive times that it was unlawful to crossdress or impersonate a female in San Francisco in 1966. The harassment of “effeminate” gay males was prolific and since discrimination was so prevalent, often the only type of employment open to the transexual, drag performing and “gay” population was prostitution. The one thing that has not changed was that the tenderloin was a place to ply your trade.

Another thing that has not changed is Glide Memorial’s open heart and helping hand to the situation. Glide began a program titled Vanguard to help trans and gay youth improve their living situations. Vanguard had been holding their meetings at Gene Compton’s Cafeteria.

To continue the story in the words of Susan Stryker, author of Screaming Queen:

“Late one August night in San Francisco in 1966, Compton’s Cafeteria was hopping with its usual assortment of transgender people, young street hustlers, and other down-and-out regulars who found refuge there from the mean streets of the seedy Tenderloin neighborhood. The restaurant’s management, annoyed by a noisy crowd at one table that seemed be spending a lot of time without spending a lot of money, called the police—as they had been doing with increasing frequency throughout the summer. A surly cop, accustomed to manhandling Compton’s clientele, grabbed the arm of one of the queens.

She responded unexpectedly and threw her coffee in his face. Mayhem erupted: plates, trays, cups, and silverware flew threw the air at the police, who ran outside and called for backup. Tables were turned over, windows were smashed, and Compton’s queer customers poured out of the restaurant and into the night. The paddy wagons pulled up, and street fighting broke out in Compton’s vicinity, all around the corner of Turk and Taylor. Drag queens beat the police with their heavy purses, and kicked them with their high-heeled shoes. A police car was vandalized, a newspaper stand was burned to the ground, and—in the words of the best available source on what happened that night—“general havoc was raised in the Tenderloin.”

According to Strykers’s Screaming Queens the next night, more transgender people, hustlers, Tenderloin street people, and other members of the LGBT community joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow transgender people back in. The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate-glass windows being smashed again.

All of this was three years before Stonewall.

If you would like to explore further, Susan Stryker’s documentary is titled Screaming Queens . The fascinating story, by the author and filmmaker, about how the movie came about, can be read here.

The building today 2015

The building itself has a wonderful history as well. It was designed by architect Abraham M. Edelman and built in 1907. At that time it was the 115 room with 50 baths Hotel Hyland. It became the Hotel Young in 1908, The Hotel Empire in 1911 the Chapin Hotel in 1920, the Hotel Raford in 1923 the Tyland Hotel and then the Warfield Hotel in 1982 it is now the Taylor Street Apartments.

Abraham (or Abram) M. Edleman (August 19, 1863) was the son of a Polish-born American rabbi living in Los Angeles. While most prolific in Los Angeles, with many buildings on the National Historic Register, he often worked in partnership with firms in San Francisco.

Edelman began his own practice in Los Angeles in the 1880s; he became a member of the Southern California Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 1902 and remained a member until 1941.

Edelman’s education came from having worked as an apprentice for various architects in San Francisco, which most likely is how his name became attached to this particular building.

Minerva

Posted by Cindy on August 16, 2014

Aug 162014

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 sits only in the Senate today. Michael H. Casey sculpted the new minerva that resides in the present Senate Chamber.

Minerva is actually cast in plaster with a bronze paint finish. Michael H. Casey was the Artist-in-Residence for the California State Capitol Project at the time that he sculpted Minerva. The General Contractor on the project was Continental Heller and one of the partners of the firm was Cecil J. Mark, who, ten years later, would become Michael’s father-in-law.

The unattributed photos are from the book California State Capitol Restoration, A Pictoral History, by Lynn G. Marlowe.

Wally Heider Recording Studio

Posted by Cindy on November 8, 2013

Nov 082013

245 Hyde Street
The Tenderloin

The blue building hidden behind this tree (the fourth film vault) has a prominent place in San Francisco Music history as well.

In early 1969, Wally Heider opened the San Francisco Wally Heider’s Studio at 245 Hyde Street. Heider had reportedly apprenticed as an assistant and mixer at United Western Recorders in Hollywood, CA, with Bill Putnam, “The Father of Modern Recording”, and he already owned and ran an independent recording studio and remote recording setup called Studio 3, in Hollywood, California.

In 1967, Heider had been involved in live recording at the Monterey Pop Festival. Artists like Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Grateful Dead had been recording in Los Angeles and New York, and Heider saw the need for musicians involved in the San Francisco Sound to have their own well equipped and staffed recording studio close to home.

The studios were built by Dave Mancini while Frank DeMedio built all the studios’ custom gear and consoles, using UA console components, military grade switches and level controls, and a simple audio path that had one preamp for everything. The console was designed with 24 channels and an 8-channel monitor and cue, which was replicated in both the Studio 3 setup in Los Angeles and the remote truck. The monitor speakers were Altec604-Es with McIntosh 275 tube power amps.

This building still houses Hyde Street Studios.

There are several Tenderloin plaques. They celebrate all parts of Tenderloin history and culture, including the first hard-core adult feature film shown in the U.S. at the Screening Room, 220 Jones Street, Sally Rand’s burlesque fan dances at the Music Box now Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell Street, the former B’nai Brith, 149 Eddy Street, the former Original Joe’s, 144 Taylor Street, and the former Arcadia Dance Pavilion/Downtown Bowl at the corner of Eddy and Jones Streets at Boedekker Park.

A $12,500 grant from SF Grants for the Arts funded the sidewalk plaque project. Centrix Builders provided expertise in metal work with installation by Michael Heavey Construction.

Further reading from people that were there, about the amazing history of this building under Wally Heider and other recording/ film studios:

Beyond Chron

Found SF

Guglielmo Marconi Memorial

Posted by Cindy on October 31, 2013

Oct 312013

Lombard Avenue
On the drive up to Coit Tower
North Beach

This memorial to Guglielmo Marconi was placed sometime in 1938-1939.

A group called the Marconi Memorial Foundation incorporated in the 1930s for the purpose of enshrining Marconi as the inventor of the wireless (a fact contested by the Russians). They placed two memorials one on the slopes of San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill and one at 16th and Lamont Streets in Washington D.C..

The Foundation collected public subscriptions from the supportive Italian-American community in North Beach, and on April 13, 1938, received permission from the U.S. Congress and President Franklin Roosevelt to erect memorials on public land. The foundation spent $65,115 for the two memorials.

Carved in Raymond California granite the latin on the base reads: Outstripping the lighting, the voice races through the empty sky.”

Marconi, is credited with not only developing radio telegraphy (wireless), but he brought it to England. A patent was granted him in 1896.

“In 1899 a team of San Franciscans reproduced Guglielmo Marconi’s method of communicating by radio waves and demonstrated its usefulness by sending a message in Morse code from a lightship anchored outside the Golden Gate to the Cliff House on the San Francisco Shore. This was the first wireless message broadcast on the West coast and the first ship-to-shore broadcast in the United States.” University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 by Gerald McKevitt

A month later Marconi himself came to America and repeated some of his experiments.

On April 27th , 1934 Marconi celebrated his 60th birthday by receiving an honorary citizenship of San Francisco. It was conferred in a ceremony at the Academy of Italy by Father Oreste Trinchieri, representing Mayor Angelo Rossi. The inventor made a 10-minute talk. Marconi recalled his visit to San Francisco and the fact that California had welcomed thousands of Italians to her bosom. He asked Trinchieri to convey to the mayor his heartfelt thanks and say that he hopes to return to San Francisco soon.

The statues are often credited to Attilio Piccirilli (May 16, 1866 – October 8, 1945) an American sculptor, born in the province of Massa-Carrara, Italy, and educated at the Accademia di San Luca of Rome. He in fact did do the Marconi Memorial in Washington D.C. However, the sculpture in San Francisco has been attributed to Raymond Puccinelli by the Smithsonian Institute.

Puccinelli has been in this site before with his Bison Sculpture. Son of Antonio and Pearl Puccinelli, Raymond was born in 1904, on Jessie Street in San Francisco, and attended Lowell High School. Puccinelli studied art in both California and Italy, and for a time maintained a studio in Lucca, Italy. He was sculptor in residence of the Rinehart School of Sculpture of the Maryland Institute of Art and Peabody Institute.

The view from the Memorial is one reason many people don’t notice it is there.

Telegraph hill was named, not for radio telegraphy (wireless), but for the semaphore visual signaling device erected there at the instructions of ship Captain John B. Montgomery and used from 1846 until the turn of the century.

Fishermen’s and Seamen’s Chapel

Posted by Cindy on September 3, 2013

Sep 032013

Fisherman’s Wharf
Pier 45 Inner Harbor

Built in 1979, this charming little chapel is a memorial to the memory of Bay Area fishermen who’ve lost their lives at sea. It’s also something of a touchstone for San Francisco’s mostly Italian, mostly Roman Catholic fishing community, which traces its origins to Sicilian immigrants from the early 1800s. The day I visited there was a notice that they offer the only full traditional Pre-Vatican II Traditional Latin Mass in the Bay Area. Not the New Order Service of 1969, Not the half order Vatican II Service of 1962, but the full traditional Roman Catholic Latin Mass (1950).

Officially known as St. John the Apostle Oratory, the chapel received the blessing of the Archbishop of Palermo during a visit here in 1989. The tiny chapel, with its stained glass windows and separate campanile, offers a splendid escape Monday’s thru Friday’s.

On the first Saturday of October, it is home base for the Blessing of the Fleet, an age-old fisherman’s tradition.

One of the chapel’s most beautiful features is a stained glass window that was presented by the Women’s Propeller Club.

Although it was not open the day I visited, it is easy to look inside through the many windows.Plaques bearing the names of hundreds of men and women who have died at sea grace the chapel’s walls. Flags and banners from diverse religions hang from its vaulted ceiling.

According to the Oratory’s website:

The architect of the chapel is unknown.

The Oratory’s campanile, or bell-tower, rising seven meters from the deck and weighing nearly two metric tons, was installed in September 2006 and cost approximately $100,000. It is capped by a 300-kilogram ship’s bell installed in the tower, donated by the Port Authority of San Francisco from an historic ship.

The architect of the campanile was local architect Anthony Pataleoni. Mr. Pantaleoni was graduated from the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in 1976 and was an instructor in the architectural department at the City College of San Francisco from 1982 to 1984. He is Principal Architect of Kotas/Pantaleoni Architects, of San Francisco.

U.S. Custom House

Posted by Cindy on July 31, 2013

Jul 312013

555 Battery Street
Financial District

The first United States Congress established the U.S. Customs Service in 1789 to collect duties and taxes on imported goods, control carriers of imports and exports, and combat smuggling and revenue fraud. Until the federal income tax was created in 1913, customs funded virtually the entire government.

Possessing an extraordinary natural harbor and one of the country’s finest ports, San Francisco rapidly expanded during the nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, construction of the Panama Canal, which would dramatically shorten trade routes between the Atlantic and Pacific, had begun. City officials likely anticipated increased commerce and determined that a larger custom house was needed.

In 1905, Eames & Young, a St. Louis architectural firm, won a national design competition for a new custom house. The firm was chosen under the auspices of the Tarsney Act, which allowed the Treasury Department to hire private architects rather than use only government designers. William S. Eames and Thomas Crane Young were the principals of the prominent firm. They designed the building in the Beaux Arts Classicism style, which was popular as part of the City Beautiful movement that sought to create more appealing urban centers.

An earlier, more modest custom house, located on Battery Street between Jackson and Washington Streets, was demolished to make way for the present building. Ground was broken for the new custom house on January 28, 1906. The 1906 Fire and Earthquake occurred on April 18th, as a result, construction of the custom house was not completed until 1911.

The U.S. Custom House was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. After the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, seismic and other upgrades were made from 1993 to 1997. While the building continues to serve many of its original purposes, the U.S. Customs Service is now the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security.

Eames and Young consisted of Thomas Crane Young, FAIA (1858-1934) and William Sylvester Eames, FAIA (1857-1915). Young was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin and went to St. Louis to attend Washington University, then spent two years at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in 1880, and briefly worked for the Boston firm of Van Brunt & Howe. Eames had gone to St. Louis as a child, attended the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, and served as Deputy Commissioner of Public Buildings for the city.

They formed a partnership in 1885. Their first works were elaborate mansions for Vandeventer Place and other private places in St. Louis, which led to an important series of landmark downtown warehouses, later collectively known as Cupples Station. Eames was elected President of the American Institute of Architects in 1904-1905. Through the 1900s and 1910s the firm designed several St. Louis skyscrapers and built a reputation for offices, schools, and institutional buildings constructed nationwide.

Eames died in 1915. Young’s last building was the 1926 immense St. Louis Masonic Temple, he stopped practicing in 1927.

Eames was the uncle of American designer Charles Eames.

The smaller granite sculptures was sculpted in-situ by unknown artists.

You can read an excellent complete article with amazing photographs on the U.S. Customs house here.

Original Customs House, Photograph courtesy of San Francisco Public Library

The Hayward/Kohl Building

Posted by Cindy on July 30, 2013

Jul 302013

400 Montgomery Street
Financial District

The Hayward/Kohl Building was designed by Percy & Polk (George Percy and Willis Polk both of whom have been written about on this site many times before) for Alvinza Hayward.

Hayward made his fortune from the Eureka Gold Mine in California and the Comstock Silver Mine in Nevada as well as investments in timber, coal, railroads, real estate, and banking. He was a director of the Bank of California and one of the original investors in the San Francisco City Gas Company which become the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Hayward was in his late seventies when he commissioned the partners Percy and Polk to create a first-class office building that would be a testament to his wealth and position in the community. The building was completed in 1901. The footprint of the building is shaped like the letter H, perhaps a giant monogram for Hayward.

Purchased in 1904 by C. Frederick Kohl the building was one of the first steel-frame “fireproof” buildings in San Francisco. It survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire with damage to only the first floors which were reconstructed under Polk’s supervision. (see the end of this posting)

The lower stories have been redesigned several times, but the upper stories with their brick curtain walls clad in Colusa limestone remain unchanged.

As noted in Splendid Survivors: San Francisco’s Downtown Architectural heritage (Michael R. Corbett, 1979):

It was an early and excellent example…of the more formal designs that later came to characterize the city, relying on a relatively restrained and “correct” use of Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation and the two or three part compositional formula….Ornamentation in this three part composition is concentrated in the upper tier with its mannerist giant order and carved garlands and animal heads.”

C. Frederick Kohl was a man of leisure who lived on an estate down the peninsula inherited from his father, who made his fortune in the Alaska fisheries. In 1909 a French maid employed by Kohl’s wife got into a dispute with a chauffeur. After Kohl had her arrested she sued him for false arrest. When found not guilty two years later he was shot, by the maid, in the chest while leaving the courthouse . He survived and Adele Verge was required to spend time in a mental institution in her native France. She spent years bombarding Kohl with threatening notes. In 1921 at the Del Monte Lodge in Carmel he committed suicide.

Separated from his wife, Kohl left most of his $4 million estate to his mistress Marion L. Lord, ex-wife of the heir to the Lord and Taylor retail chain Alfred P. Lord.

News clippings after the 1906 Fire and Earthquake regarding the Hayward Building:

Very little fire entered the basement, and the power plant is practically uninjured. The marble finish of the entrance hall is in good condition, the ornamental plaster being but slightly damaged. The second and third stores are fire swept, but a few offices in the northeast corner of the building escaped. In the fourth and fifth stories, the fire did the most damage in the offices around the southwest corner of the building. In the sixth and seventh stories the fire entered the building through windows in the northeast corner, consuming all the combustible contents in a few offices and discoloring the rest of the story by smoke. The upper stories are but slightly damaged by fire and smoke, but are disfigured by a great number of plaster cracks caused by the earthquake (Himmelwright 1906: 168-172).

The building’s unique survival of the disaster was generally ascribed to its construction. One engineer noted that “The advantages of the metal-covered trim and the incombustible floor finish were clearly demonstrated in this building.”(Himmelwright 1906: 172) Another observed that the “metal-covered doors in this building…prevented to some extent the spread of the fire within the building itself, so that where one room burned out, the fire coming through a front window, an adjacent room was not burned because of the resistance offered by the door.”(Department of the Interior, United States Geological Survey, The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of April 18, 1906, and their Effects on Structures and Structural materials, Bulletin no. 324, Series R., Structural Materials 1, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907, repr: San Francisco Historical Publishing Co., n.p.)

Another reason for the building’s survival was its relative isolation. A local architect, visiting the scene, noted that the “Merchants Exchange building really acted as a screen across the street to the Hayward building, and the one-story Merchants Trust building also served to protect the building, by the fifty-foot open space on the east; California Street on the south and Montgomery Street on the west also protected the building.”(The Architect and Engineer of California, Vol. V No 1 (May, 1906), n.p.)

In 1854 this corner was the site of Sam Brannan’s Express Building, a four-story edifice with a stone facade and New Orleans-style iron balconies around the windows on the upper floors. (source: Rand Richards – Historic Walks in San Francisco) (Photo Courtesy of SF Public Library)

245 Market Standing As A Remembrance of Skyscrapers of Old

Posted by Cindy on March 29, 2001

Mar 292001

245 Market Street
Financial District / Embarcadero

The seventeen story Pacific Gas and Electric Company General Office Building, designed by Bakewell & Brown and built between 1923 and 1925, is one of a series of skyscrapers built during the 1910s and 1920s which imparted to San Francisco its downtown character. This character of large ornamented classic buildings is fast being lost with newer modern style buildings. 245 Market was also one of the first steel skyscrapers built in San Francisco.

The building was enlarged in 1945-1947 to the design of Arthur Brown, Jr. The addition, which has its own address at 25 Beale Street, is fully interconnected with the main structure and functions with it as one building.

Reflecting Beaux Arts and City Beautiful precepts of harmony, the building was designed to be compatible with the adjacent Matson Building (on the left)

Similar to other Chicago School skyscrapers built during the 1910s and early 1920s, the primary elevations are divided vertically into three major divisions – separated by horizontal divisions relating to those of the Matson Building.

The lower divisions are ornamented with a classical arcade, rising through two stories. The fourteenth and fifteenth floors, capping the structure, are articulated by a giant order of applied Doric columns with full entablature which is very similar to the base of the dome on San Francisco’s City Hall. The shaft, or central portion of the elevations, is expressed with paired windows lighting each structural bay.

Rams heads ornament the lower stories of the building.

Bakewell and Brown’s first commissions included the interior of the City of Paris department store (Now Neiman Marcus) and the city hall for Berkeley, before entering the competition for the 1915 San Francisco City Hall for which they are best known. Brown also designed the city’s War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building, the former in collaboration with G. Albert Lansburgh. Browns work shows his training in the Beaux-Arts tradition.

In addition, Bakewell and Brown designed several homes in the Arts and Crafts style championed by Bernard Maybeck.

Bakewell and Brown also designed the Byzantine-inspired Temple Emmanuel (1926) at Lake St. and Arguello Blvd.

The building was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and underwent a comprehensive seismic retrofit and historic rehabilitation completed in 1995.

Embarcadero Interpretive Signage and Walkway

Posted by Cindy on January 28, 2000

Jan 282000

The Embarcadero

Waterfront Transportation Project Historic and Interpretive Signage Program

This interpretive signage program was created in 1996 and covers 2.5 miles of the Embarcadero. The project includes 22, 13 foot high posts, vertical history stations and bronze inlays. these metal black-and-white-striped pylons are imprinted with photographs, stories, poetry in several languages and drawings commemorating the waterfront’s historical significance.

They are a collaboration between historian Nancy Leigh Olmstead and artist Michael Manwaring.

This was funded by a grant from Americans for the Arts, and California State’s Transportation Enhancement Activities