City Hall (San Francisco)

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San Francisco City Hall, Summer 2003.

The City Hall is the city hall of San Francisco in California . It opened in 1915 at the Civic Center Plaza . The building is a Beaux-Arts style monument to the American Renaissance period (1880–1917). It is due to the City Beautiful initiative, whose aim was to make cities more livable.

architecture

City Hall

The current building is the rebuilt City Hall, which was completely destroyed during the 1906 earthquake . The construction of the four-storey structure cost 3.4 million dollars at the time, which should correspond to around 400 million today. The architect was Arthur Brown Jr. from Bakewell and Brown . Brown paid attention to the smallest details during the reconstruction, such as door handles and the font of the signage. In addition, the city invested $ 1.4 million in the forecourt. Most of the money was raised through municipal bonds. The reconstruction of the City Hall only took two years.

City Hall with the Pioneer Monument in the foreground

The building is more than 46,000 square meters and occupies two whole blocks of streets. It is 119 yards along Van Ness Avenue and Polk Street and 83 yards along Grove Street and McAllister Street. Its dome , which is modeled on Mansart's baroque-classicist domed churches, the Invalides and Val-de-Grâce in Paris, is the fifth largest dome in the world. It has a diameter of 20 meters and rises 94 meters. This makes it 35 cm higher than the Capitol in Washington .

The upper floors of the rotunda, the rotunda, are accessible to the public and handicapped accessible. The mayor's office is on the second floor, opposite the large staircase. A bronze bust of the former mayor George Moscone and his successor Dianne Feinstein commemorates the murder of Moscone just a few meters away in a smaller circular building in the entrance hall. A bust of former gay and lesbian MP and civil rights activist Harvey Milk , who was also murdered by Dan White in the building , was unveiled on May 22, 2008.

history

Original San Francisco City Hall before the earthquake
The original San Francisco City Hall in ruins after the 1906 earthquake.

President Warren G. Harding was laid out in City Hall in 1923 after he died of a heart attack at the Palace Hotel. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were married in 1954 at City Hall.

In May 1960, the Rotunda was the site of a protest by students from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges against the Un-American Activities Committee . There were serious clashes with the police. The event was remembered four years later by students from the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley.

The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 damaged the structure and turned the dome four inches on its foundation, after which attempts were made to make the City Hall more earthquake-resistant. To do this, the anchorage between the building and its foundation was lifted. In the event of an earthquake, the mass of the dome acts like a pendulum, which can set the building vibrating and ultimately let it collapse. In order to counteract this, the building was underpinned with hundreds of insulating bodies made of rubber and corrosion-resistant steel. These are intended to reduce the seismic waves before they hit the structure. This makes San Francisco's City Hall currently the largest structure secured against earthquakes in this way.

The large forecourt has been redesigned several times, with fundamental changes in its appearance and purpose. Before the 1960s there were extensive brick squares, few trees and a few large, simple, raised, round ponds with fountains in the middle that weren't really inviting to linger.

The space was then extensively excavated for an urgently needed underground parking deck. A central rectangular pond was created, with a long arrangement of water openings, all strangely arranged in different rows and facing east, with identical water arches and without any sculptural embellishment, plus large groups of trees - again in the 1960s style, militarily precise in Row and link.

With the increasing problem of homelessness in the 1990s, the square was redesigned again and made a little less habitable, whereby the most serious change, the replacement of the pond and the pumps with lawns, can also be explained by measures to save energy .

San Francisco City Hall in the movie

City Hall at twilight

The beauty of City Hall is also known to film producers who work in San Francisco. Scenes inside and outside the building were filmed for numerous films, including

Web links

Commons : San Francisco City Hall  - collection of images, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from June 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Bust of Harvey Milk  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / thecastro.net

Coordinates: 37 ° 46 '45.3 "  N , 122 ° 25' 9.2"  W.