San Francisco - Coit Tower

Before I leave our SF staycation, I need to say a few words about Coit Tower. This 210-foot tower was completed in 1933, using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's $118,000 bequest to the City of San Francisco. Her only stipulation was to use the money to add "to the beauty of the city which I have always loved." Here you see Steven enjoying the 365 degree view at the top.

There is a single elevator to the top, well worth the $10 fee to ride, and while you wait in line you can fully appreciate the murals on the ground level. Our elevator operator informed us that people always ask which mural Diego Rivera painted, but she has to disappoint them. There are no Rivera paintings, but all of the murals are in the Rivera style and all are captivating.

As one of the first Depression era WPA projects, local artists were paid $25-45 per week to depict "aspects of life in California."

They focused on California industries, professions, and past times and covered all the walls on the ground floor. (See the Wikipedia article here for the full list.)

All the artists used the tower's recessed windows to create depth in their murals. Here you see a man reaching for a book above that recess, in the fresco called "Library." The artist was Bernard Zakheim, a Jewish immigrant from Warsaw, who painted in friends and family in an imagined California public library. According to Coittower.org, "above the window are three books lying on their sides in the central stack; their Hebrew letters spell out the contents: Torah (Scriptures), Prophets, and Wisdom Literature, books of the Old Testament. His "gun-slit" window invites the viewer up the steps into the library containing classical authors like Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Swift, and Oscar Wilde, as well as writers of the 1930s like Dos Passos, Jeffers, Stuart Chase, and Kenneth Rexroth, the young poet who supplied most of the authors' names, here shown on the library ladder."