Coit Tower

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Coit Tower, San Francisco

The Coit Tower , a 64-meter-high observation tower on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco , was built by Arthur Brown Jr. and Henry Howard in 1933.

On January 29, 2008, the tower was elevated to a National Historic Site .

A child of high society , Lillie Hitchcock Coit was a great admirer of the San Francisco firefighters . Legend has it that she helped out a fire near Telegraph Hill and became the mascot of Engine Company No. 5 of the Volunteer Fire Department ( Volunteer Fire Department ). When she died in 1929, she bequeathed $ 100,000 to the community for beautifying the city. With this donation, the 64-meter-high observation tower in Art Deco style was built in 1933 in honor of the volunteer fire brigade. The legend that the Coit Tower was built in honor of the firefighters is only partly true. It was also intended to enhance the city's beauty and serve as a lookout tower from which to enjoy a panorama of San Francisco. It is wrong that the shape should correspond to the end of a fire hose. This was never intended by the architects and can be clearly seen on the official board on the Coit Tower.

On the approximately 3 m × 3 m large wall painting Library by Bernard Zakheim in the outer lobby of the tower there is a reference to Austrian history : A man reads a newspaper with the headline “Thousands Slaughtered in Austria”, “February 14, 1934”, dated Beginning of the February uprising in Linz in Austria. In 1934 the fresco “Man at the Crossroads” by Diego Rivera in the Rockefeller Center was destroyed by his client because of the depiction of Lenin. The wall painters in the Coit Tower protested against this and incorporated left-wing socially critical elements into their pictures; the destruction of the picture by Rockefeller is also painted as a newspaper text.

The murals were gently restored in the 1960s and 1970s and fundamentally restored in 1989/1990 and (until May 14) 2014. The wall paintings were created using different techniques: fresco - painted on damp plaster, a rare technique in the USA, egg white paint on dry plaster and oil on canvas that was applied to the wall.

In the films The Enforcer (German Dirty Harry III - The Inexorable) (1976) and Dr. Dolittle (1998) staged the tower.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Address: 1 Telegraph Hill Blvd
  2. ↑ a b California Travel. In: About.com (English)
  3. ^ Coit Tower National Historic Site. In: foundsf.org , accessed December 14, 2017.
  4. ^ Coit Tower San Francisco. ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2008 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. In: sftravel.com (English)  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sftravel.com
  5. ^ Library by Bernard Baruch Zakheim (2015). High-resolution image 5472 × 3648 pixels, May 23, 2015, accessed December 14, 2017.
  6. ↑ See picture gallery in the English language Wikipedia: Coit Tower, section Murals
  7. ↑ Famed Coit Tower Murals Restored. In: livingnewdeal.org , June 14, 2014, accessed December 14, 2017.
  8. ^ Jean Shiffman: Restoration of Coit Tower Murals: SF's Monument to the Fresco. In: sftravel.com , November 11, 2014, accessed December 14, 2017.
  9. ^ Coit Tower. In: sftravel.com , accessed December 14, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Coit Tower  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 37 ° 48 ′ 8.6 ″  N , 122 ° 24 ′ 20.7 ″  W.