Coit Tower Frescoes

Being mostly ignorant of San Francisco and its many sights before this trip, I hadn't heard of the Coit Tower, which sits atop Telegraph Hill, overlooking the bay. It was built in 1933, and soon afterward, a crew of WPA artists began painting a set of frescoes around the inside of the first floor.

We managed to make the climb the morning before we left the city. I loved the frescoes -- for the WPA story behind them, the coherence of the style (even though many artists worked on them), and most of all for their content.


Most of the frescoes tell the stories of working people in different walks of life (farmers, miners, machinists, even scientists and financiers). There aren't many women depicted -- the two above are probably the most prominent ones. (Inside joke from the plant world -- the flowers they're harvesting are cannas and callas. These similar names lead to confusion sometimes. And it doesn't help that both are sometimes called lilies, even though neither is actually a lily.)


This street scene is crammed with details. The guy getting mugged in the foreground and the serious car accident in the background are the two main ones, but there are a lot of others. The magazine covers on the newsstand themselves are worth a close perusal.

Each of the windows received special attention from the artists. One has bottles of wine on shelves along the angled planes surrounding the window; another has books; a third is located in the middle of a convincingly rendered corn crib that almost looked 3D, with the actual window receding in the opposite direction from the 3D effect. A farmhand pokes his head through a ladder painted alongside the window. (We didn't take a picture of this, unfortunately.)


One window is in the midst of the newspaper section that shows a pressman and has funny papers running up the sides. At the bottom of the window is this San Francisco Chronicle front page. The main headline reads, "Artists Finish Frescoes / Coit Tower Murals."

We didn't manage to get to either of the Diego Rivera murals while we were in the city (I feel badly about it, but since we were on foot and mass transit, we just got too tired and ran out of time), but at least we saw the Coit Tower frescoes. Glad we made the climb.