Coit Tower, also known as the Lillian Coit Memorial Tower, is a 210-foot tower
in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California. The tower, in
the city's Pioneer Park, was built in 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's
bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco; at her death in 1929 Coit
left one-third of her estate to the city for civic beautification. The tower was
proposed in 1931 as an appropriate use of Coit's gift. It was added to the
National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.
The art deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by
architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard, with fresco murals by 27
different on-site artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional
paintings installed after creation off-site. Although an apocryphal story
claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle due to
Coit's affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance
is coincidental. History
Coit Tower was paid for with money left by Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy
socialite who loved to chase fires in the early days of the city's history.
Before December 1866, there was no city fire department, and fires in the city,
which broke out regularly in the wooden buildings, were extinguished by several
volunteer fire companies. Lillie Coit was one of the more eccentric characters
in the history of North Beach and Telegraph Hill, smoking cigars and
wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so.
She was an avid gambler and often dressed like a man in order to gamble in
the males-only establishments that dotted North Beach.
Lillie's fortune funded the monument four years following her death in 1929.
She had a special relationship with the city's firefighters. At the age of
fifteen she witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 in response to a fire
call up on Telegraph Hill when they were shorthanded, and threw her school books
to the ground and pitched in to help, calling out to other bystanders to help
get the engine up the hill to the fire, to get the first water onto the blaze.
After that Lillie became the Engine Co. mascot and could barely be constrained
by her parents from jumping into action at the sound of every fire bell. After
this she was frequently riding with the Knickerbocker Engine Co. 5, especially
so in street parades and celebrations in which the Engine Co. participated.
Through her youth and adulthood Lillie was recognized as an honorary
firefighter. Her will read that she wished for one
third of her fortune, amounting to $118,000, "to be expended in an
appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I
have always loved." Two memorials were built in her name. One was Coit Tower,
and the other was a sculpture depicting three firemen, one of them carrying a
woman in his arms. Lillie is today the matron saint of San Francisco
firefighters. The San Francisco County Board of
Supervisors proposed that Coit's bequest be used for a road at Lake Merced. This
proposal brought disapproval from the estate's executors, who expressed a
desire that the county find "ways and means of expending this money on a
memorial that in itself would be an entity and not a unit of public
development." Art Comission President Herbert Fleishhacker suggested a
memorial on Telegraph Hill, which was approved by the estate executors. An
additional $7,000 in city funds were appropriated, and a design competition
was initiated. The winner was architect Arthur Brown, Jr, whose design was
completed and dedicated on October 8, 1933. The tower took five years to
construct. Coit Tower was listed as a San Francisco
Designated Landmark in 1984 and on the National Register of Historic Places in
2008. Although Coit Tower is not technically a California Historical
Landmark yet, the state historical plaque for Telegraph Hill is located in
the tower's lobby, marking the site of the original signal station.
Design Brown's competition design envisioned a
restaurant in the tower, which was changed to an exhibition area in the
final version. The design uses three nesting concrete cylinders, the
outermost a tapering fluted 180-foot shaft that supports the viewing
platform. An intermediate shaft contains a stairway, and an inner shaft houses
the elevator. The observation deck is 32 feet below the top, with an arcade and
skylights above it. A rotunda at the base houses display space and a gift
shop. = Mural project=
The Coit Tower murals were done under the auspices of the Public Works of Art
Project, the first of the New Deal federal employment programs for artists.
Ralph Stackpole and Bernard Zakheim successfully sought the commission in
1933, and supervised the muralists, who were mainly faculty and students of the
California School of Fine Arts, including Maxine Albro, Victor
Arnautoff, Ray Bertrand, Rinaldo Cuneo, Mallette Harold Dean, Clifford Wight,
Edith Hamlin, George Albert Harris, Otis Oldfield, Suzanne Scheuer, Hebe Daum,
Jane Berlandina, Frederick E. Olmsted Jr., Jose Moya del Pino and Frede Vidar.
The artists were committed in varying degrees to racial equality and to
leftist and Marxist political ideas strongly expressed in the paintings.
Bernard Zakheim's mural "Library" depicts fellow artist John Langley
Howard crumpling a newspaper in his left hand as he reaches for a shelved copy of
Karl Marx's Das Kapital with his right. Workers of all races are shown as
equals, often in the heroic poses of Socialist realism, while well-dressed
racially white members of the capitalist classes enjoy the fruit of their labor.
Victor Arnautoff's "City Life" includes The New Masses and The Daily Worker
periodicals in the scene's news stand rack; John Langley Howard's mural
depicts an ethnically diverse Labor March as well as showing a destitute
family panning for gold while a rich family observes; and Stackpole's
Industries of California was composed along the same lines as an early study
of the destroyed Man at the Crossroads. The youngest of the muralists, George
Albert Harris, painted a mural called "Banking and Law". In the mural, the
world of finance is represented by the Federal Reserve Bank and a stock market
ticker and law is illustrated by a law library. Some of the book titles that
appear in the law library, such as 'Civil, Penal, and Moral Codes', are
legitimate, while others list fellow muralists as authors, in a joking or
derogatory manner. After Diego Rivera's Man at the
Crossroads mural was destroyed by its Rockefeller Center patrons for the
inclusion of an image of Lenin, the Coit Tower muralists protested, picketing the
tower. Sympathy for Rivera led some artists to incorporate references to the
Rivera incident; in Zakheim's "Library" panel, Stackpole is painted reading a
newspaper headline announcing the destruction of Rivera's mural.
John Langley Howard's Industry mural depicts California industrial scenes,
and angered conservatives for its frank depiction of out-of-work men.
Two of the murals are of San Francisco Bay scenes. Most murals are done in
fresco; the exceptions are one mural done in egg tempera and the works done
in the elevator foyer, which are oil on canvas. While most of the murals have
been restored, a small segment was not restored but durably painted over with
epoxy surfacing. Most of the murals are open for public
viewing without charge during open hours, although there are ongoing
negotiations by the Recreation and Parks Department of San Francisco to begin
charging visitors a fee to enter the mural rotunda. The murals in the spiral
stairway, normally closed to the public, are open for viewing through tours.
Since 2004 artist Ben Wood has collaborated with other artists on large
scale video projections onto the exterior of Coit Tower, in 2004, 2006,
2008 & 2009. The view
The tower, which stands atop Telegraph Hill in San Francisco's Pioneer Park,
offers panoramic views of San Francisco including "crooked" Lombard Street, Nob
Hill, Russian Hill, Twin Peaks, Aquatic Park, Pier 39, the Financial District,
the Ferry Building, as well as San Francisco Bay itself including Angel
Island, Alcatraz, Treasure Island, and the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges.
Photographs Murals
See also List of towers
History of San Francisco List of San Francisco Designated
Landmarks 49-Mile Scenic Drive
References External links
Official website Coit Tower at Structurae