 It's rather poignant for me to be here tonight, because almost 32 years ago, I was recruited into the effort to build this library, and needless to say, we succeeded. My good friend, Steve Coulter, who was chairman of the Library Commission during the time we built the library, is here, and we had many struggles and some adventures. We moved the Pioneer Monument, which would be sitting over your head if it was still here, and in the book I hope to eventually publish, we'll tell you the conniving that we went through. You know, Kevin was a city librarian. Now most people who have that title, it's kind of the ultimate of their career. That was Kevin's first real job. And during the time he was a city librarian, he also was involved in a great battle over whether this library would be built, or at least whether this block would be kept for that library. And so he also is one of the people who's responsible for us being here today. I'm greatly honored to be his friend, and for him to have encouraged me. And I'm not a professional historian, nor a professional writer, and doing this enterprise It's been a struggle since I get distracted really easily, but he has encouraged me, and I've actually finished the last chapter, but we have a long way to go before the book comes. I also want to thank Susan Goldstein and the staff of the History Center, because they've been my backup for all of the efforts I've been involved with in putting this together. And they're always there, and they'll always be there for you, should you have a project that you want to do. Kevin has highlighted some themes that I'm going to talk to, which is great because we sort of primed the pump a little bit. But I want to point out that our Civic Center is the largest collection of monumental public buildings in the United States outside of the Federal Triangle in Washington. It is perhaps the greatest achievement of the city beautiful, reform of the city beautiful movement in its design and use of materials and so forth. It is also the most complete of some 72 Civic Centers which were conceived, if not just discussed in the early part of the 20th century. On the other hand, when the city icons are put out by the San Francisco Travel Association and other things, it doesn't come up in the first tier. It may not even come up in the second tier. Unfortunately for the last 60 or 70 years, Civic Center has been ignored, neglected, if not disdained by many people. And I've concluded that one of the reasons for that is that there's very little written about it. And the little that is written is sort of antiquated and amateurish, inaccurate, and if not downright wrong. And so it has been my effort to try to correct that. And being that critical, I've had to work overtime to make sure that everything that I say is well documented. The common view of Civic Center is that the city people built City Hall and then they built a few more buildings and they put a label on it and said it was Civic Center. That may be a handy PR shorthand, but it's historically false. The story is the other way around. And so in the 40 minutes or so that I have, I want to first of all give you an idea of how this progressive reformist notion of a Civic Center came about in the United States and then secondly how it was brought to San Francisco and sort of infused in the public mind of people who thought about things like this. And of course nothing happened until the Panama Pacific International exhibition came to San Francisco and that dramatically changed the story. And I have that story to tell as the third part. And I have not given this speech before and I'm not certain I can get through it all in the time allotted but I will give it a try. When you think about the United States after the Civil War up to 1900, the country was full of economic industrial dynamism and it also had developed great disparity of wealth. There were millions of people from various countries who came that had to be absorbed into the community and this was a very disruptive time. Middle class, upper class, professional people were engaged in efforts to reform things, to make things better, to integrate all these people into the larger society. And they went through a whole lot of things. They tried Sunday schools. They tried the YMCA, getting all those young men out of the bars into more constructive activity and there's a whole list of reformist activities that you will find that people engaged in in the 19th century. And then they came up with the notion of the city beautiful movement. It has its roots in Frederick Law Olmsted who I think you all know was the man who created Central Park and he had this view that parks were the lungs of a city. And so people started with the notion of creating parks and going forward. The thing that really set it off was the Chicago World's Columbian exhibition of 1893. The idea of holding an exhibition for that purpose was a competitive one. We had one in Philadelphia earlier and so forth. But a number of cities competed for Chicago, made a great effort to get it. They hired Olmsted, who was quite an old man by that time, to come and help lay out the plan and they recruited one of their own, Daniel Burnham, with his then partner John Wellborn Root to work out the plan. So what you see here, and if you look at the bigger map of the exhibition, is what Olmsted had in mind. Now he may be the real father of planning because he laid this out with lots of natural areas and he included the water. And the two of them came up with this notion of a court of honor. They then recruited the best architects in the country, some from Chicago, some from New York elsewhere, to design all the buildings. Now the New York architectures, architects who might consider to be a little snobbish said, well they weren't exactly excited to be part of this until Burnham went to New York and convinced them that they would be part of it and listen to them as to what they thought should be. And they recommended a uniformed cornice line and the neoclassical architecture, breaking from what Kevin mentioned, the former Richardson architecture. Now this is a kind of American neoclassicism. It's not directly removed from Paris or elsewhere. It was something that the American architects created. Now what they wanted to show in this fair, because people who were living in cities at that time were living in really rather cray chaotic conditions. The streets unpaved and horse carts and tenements and so forth, they wanted to show order and harmony and symmetry. And this fair was well planned and it had garbage service and utilities and they used Edison Electricity to light it at night. It was an amazing success. Something like 5 to 10 percent of the citizens of the United States came to see it. And there were 20 million people, but that's people who went a number of different times. And it made a huge impression on everyone that you could live in a place that was well planned. There was orderly and so forth. Now during the course of the fair, the panic of 1893 occurred. It was a terrible financial depression which lasted four or five years and actually caused social disruption even more because you had some of the infamous strikes, the Pullman Strike and others that occurred during that time. So although people saw this, not much happened after they had that experience. And the thing that sort of ticked things off was in 1900, the American architects met in Washington to commemorate the hundred years, the centennial of the longfall plan for Washington D.C., which Kevin mentioned. And to point out that particularly the mall, the Washington Mall, had been let go. There was a railroad station and a rail yard and a cattle stock yard and other things there. And they managed to convince Senator James McMillan of Michigan, who was chairman of the District of Columbia Committee, to put together a council of experts to come up with a plan for Washington parks. And they recruited Burnham, his friend and colleague Charles McKim of the great New York architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. He was the stepson, his father had died by that time. But he and his cousin carried on the business until almost 1940. And they put together this plan, which did more than just deal with the mall. At this point in time, nobody had ever done a citywide plan. But they proposed a bridge across the Potomac River. They put in Rock Creek Park and Burnham himself, through his own negotiations with the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, managed to get them to move the train station to where Union Station is now. And in those days, there wasn't all that much of a nicety about conflicts of interest. Burnham was the architect for Union Station. And he got that well deserved from having convinced President Cassatt to spend this huge amount of money to move the train station. So that had a big impression on people around the country. The next thing I want to show you is the group plan for Cleveland. Some architects who had gone to the Chicago Fair and were impressed by the Court of Honor sort of had this notion that they could do something like that in Cleveland. Cleveland needed a number of public buildings. But with the panic and the financial depression, nothing happened. But by the turn of the century, there was a reformist mayor named Tom Johnson in Cleveland and a great interest. Furthermore, the federal government had put up money to build a new federal building. And the architect for that was Arnold Bruner from New York. And they needed a public library. So the idea was to create this group plan, because the word civic center had not been coined yet, and build all these public buildings in an area of Cleveland which was really run down in front of the lake. And so Mayor Johnson put together with the help of the State of Ohio another committee that included Bruner, who had the contracted to the federal building, and John Carrere of Carrere and Hastings from New York. And they put together this large plan. And this is kind of your classic civic center with a courtyard or a plaza in the middle. This is more rectangle than many. Public buildings on either side and building four and building five at the federal building and the library. And many of those buildings were built over the years. In the 1950s or 60s, Cleveland gave up on following the plan and built for an oil company, a 40-story building on one of the unoccupied lots. And today, they're trying to figure out how to preserve and cherish their civic center under more difficult situations than we have. So that sort of set the stage. And at this time with these things happening, it also produced a whole outflourish of local groups and national groups worrying about removing billboards and parks and other kind of civic improvements all around the country. And it stimulated groups such as the Municipal Art Society in New York which exists today. This purpose was helped to beautify New York. And it also got people writing. A man named John DeWitt Warner wrote an article in something called the Municipal Affairs in 1902 in which he actually used for the very first time the term civic center. And a young journalist named Charles Mulford Robinson wrote several pieces in Atlanta, in the Atlantic magazine about how to improve cities and they were quite popular. So he wrote a book called Improving Towns and Cities, which sold out. And they had to republish it three or four times. So he wrote another one called Modern Civic Arts. And he had a whole chapter in it called Administrative Centers. So by 1902 or 1903, there were a lot of people who had thought about this and what they had in mind for a civic center was the notion that you bring particularly outside of the central business district at a certain important place, all the government functions that you could find and put them in one place because they felt that if you put them in one place and if you put them in grand buildings, the city government would become more honest. They also felt that those buildings shouldn't be on a long boulevard but should be around a plaza, either like a New England Square or a Spanish plaza. And that those buildings, if you did them in a grand palatial manner, that would help equalize wealth. That you would have palaces for the people. That it wouldn't just be private mentions for people that ordinary people could come and go into a palace just like they go into City Hall to get married. 8,000 people a year go to City Hall to get married because it's a great place for people. And they wanted to add libraries and opera houses and other things because they felt that ordinary people might get an uplift. I mean these are people who have these notions which we might think of as a little coin today, but they wanted to improve people and they were trying to do it through architecture and planning. And that is the notion behind Civic Center. It's not people wanting to put up grandiose buildings to impress people. The people behind this movement took the notion that this was a way to build a community and to integrate the community and make it whole. So you need to remember that when we go outside and think of Civic Center. So the next part of what I want to talk about is how did it come to San Francisco? Now when the Chicago Fair was announced, California got particularly excited about it. And Governor Merrick, Merrick, I believe, asked the legislature for $300,000, which was a very large sum at the time, to build a temporary pavilion for California. And several counties also participated in it. They were so, and the national law that created the Chicago Fair created a commission which each state got two commissioners. One of them from California was Michael DeYoung of the Chronicle. And he ended up being Vice Chairman of the whole National Commission. The state created its own commission. Irving Scott of the Union Ironworks was the chair, and James DeVall Phelan was the vice chair. Phelan was a well-to-do young man, very well-traveled, erudite, interested in reform and all sorts of things. They were so concerned about getting a good location for their California Pavilion because they wanted primarily to show California goods, often agricultural goods, that they went to Belmont, Massachusetts to visit old man Olmsted at his home to negotiate with him in person as to where the piece of property in the plan would be. And then they hired the most notable architect in the barrier in San Francisco or in California at the time, A. Page Brown, who had worked in the McKinley and White Office in Chicago, and did the ferry building. And he designed this huge mission revival style pavilion. And Phelan, because Scott got sick and wasn't available to be there very often, was there for a number of months. Here's his commissioner badge. And so he hung around with Burnham and he went to all these lectures and met all these people involved in new ideas and so forth, which he had just loved. And so when the fair was over, a variety of people of Californians did various things. Brown came back and in 1894, in December, he published in The Chronicle on the front page, Michael Deung's paper, a kind of diatribe about how awful San Francisco was full of all these ugly wooden buildings that they hadn't dealt with the waterfront very well, that they didn't have grand boulevards and it was places unplanned. And he also felt that the city hall was sort of not well situated. It should have a park around it to impress it. This is the old city hall. And I won't go into the details because it's a long story in itself. It was built over 25 years by eight different architects, seven if you count, one twice, eight if you count one twice, and it's a mishmash of things. But the reason this is standing at McAllister Street looking west and that other street doesn't exist anymore, it's called City Hall Avenue. And what they did is they took this enormous triangular piece of property that once was a cemetery and because they were cheap but they wanted a grand building that they didn't want to pay for it, they sold off all the lots on Market Street in like 25 foot, 100 foot parcels to people who built saloons and stables and other kind of buildings. They actually didn't sell very well so there was a big, several times there was a financial crisis to continue the building. But this is the way it looked in 1894 or so and you can see all these lovely buildings between City Hall Avenue and Market Street. And so the city hall was surrounded by all these sort of tacky commercial buildings and that's what he was talking about. So San Francisco really didn't have any kind of what we'd call modern planet. The next person who came back from Chicago was Michael DeYoung and he thought it would be nifty if he could convince a lot of the exhibitors at the Chicago Fair to transfer their exhibits to San Francisco. And he managed to talk all the locals into allocating a chunk of Golden Gate Park for what he called the Midwinter Fair. He was not interested in architectural beauty and so this is a kind of, this is a terrible picture but the only one I could get in a hurry. It's kind of a mishmash with a kind of Eiffel Tower thing in the middle. And he particularly wanted the architecture to be exotic. So there were sort of things from Ottoman buildings and mogul buildings and so forth. The only building we was sort of traditional was a Spanish revival building that I think A Page Brown did. It was a huge success from his point of view. Two million people came, they made money and we got the DeYoung Museum out of it and the music concourse. But that had an effect on the general public of enhancing the notions of the Chicago Fair. This is Phoebe Apperson Hearst. She went to the fair. She was there for 12 days. She was interested in kindergartens. She went with a group of women to learn about the latest thinking in kindergartens in Chicago, but she experienced the whole thing. And when she came back with her association with Bernard Maybeck, they then created the effort to do a master plan for UC Berkeley. And one of her advisors stated that they had hoped that the master plan would create buildings and an ensemble of buildings that looked like the Chicago Fair. So that's Phoebe Hearst. And here we have Mr. Phelan. He came back with a reformist zeal and in 1896 ran for mayor. He turned out to be one of the most able public speakers of his time. And he was elected mayor. And his platform, partly or mostly, was to bring home rule to San Francisco. San Francisco did not have what we would call a city charter. So all the big deals had to be sent to Sacramento to be approved by the legislature. They couldn't borrow money and so forth. So being a progressive of that era, he was interested in good management and efficiency and merit hiring and all those good things. So he managed to get a charter passed in 1898. And although he campaigned and spoke a lot about beautifying the city and he would like to quote Pericles and the beautification of Athens and all this sort of thing. In the five years that he was mayor, he didn't get to really build anything. But he helped set the tone. And in 1901, there was a huge labor issue. He offended the labor unions because the police broke up a team to strike. And he offended the business interests because he refused to bring the state, asked the governor to bring the National Guard in to control things. So he sort of left the scene. Now we're getting into the question or the time of the city which is well written about and I don't have the time to really get into the details. But it has to do with the Union Labor Party boss Abraham Roof, Mayor Eugene Schmitch, and which eventually ended up at the graph trial. After feeling left office under his new charter, many of the supervisors who served with him continued on. So the graft and corruption that ended up happening in 1905 and 1906 weren't there in the first couple of years. And Roof was a shrewd politician. He wanted to keep his labor constituency happy. And he also wanted to keep the small business people that supported them happy by having low taxes. These people were not like the mayor of Cleveland. They weren't interested in big plans. They weren't interested in anything, just keeping everything under control. So feeling on a trip and whatnot. But he kept up his interest in things. He was the California and San Francisco Commissioner for planning the World Exhibition in St. Louis in 1904. And so he kept up with all of his interest in reform and whatnot. And so in the summer of 1903, he writes to Daniel Burnham and asks him whether he would be interested in doing a plan for San Francisco. Because in feelings, mind, modest little improvements were enough. We needed to grant a new plan for the whole city. And Burnham wrote to his person in San Francisco, Willis Polk. Because they had a sort of office for DH Burnham and company here that Polk looked after in the fall saying he was really excited about doing it and he would do it only at cost. Which is what he charged, I believe in both Baltimore or in Cleveland and in work in Washington DC. So there was that communication going by. Now, I think there is a connection here, but there's no way I can prove it. A businessman named Alan Pollock who was overseeing the construction of the New St. Francis Hotel on January 4th, 1904, wrote a piece in the San Francisco Bulletin. A sort of Jeremiah ad about San Francisco. All these, he was very concerned that San Francisco was beating our clock, that tourists were going there, people were going there to settle. And why did that happen when we had all the natural advantages and but Los Angeles was doing all of this? And he went on about how we had ugly buildings, we weren't fixing up the waterfront, we didn't have any museums, we didn't have any concert halls, we didn't have much of anything and much of which we had was in his view, ugly. And we needed civic committee to galvanize the city to deal with this threat from the south and enhance San Francisco. Now Pollock was a colleague of Phelan, a progressive businessman. And 12 days later, let me say he had this published in the Bulletin, whose editor was Fremont Older. Who was also a progressive associate of Phelan, who would have in a couple of years organized the graph trials. Phelan, 12 days later, writes to a number of businessmen and asked them to come together to create a, or to talk about creating a group to enhance San Francisco. And out of that came an organization called The Association for the Improvement and Endowment of San Francisco. Now at the early meetings, people had individual ideas about they wanted to build an opera house or create a parkway or something or other. He managed to convince them that the AISF, which is not related to the American Institute of Architects, should sponsor a plan and invite Daniel Burnham out. And he got all these businessmen to support that view. And Burnham came in April and was grandly feted. He was well known in San Francisco because he had done several buildings, the building for Michael DeYoung where the Chronicle was at the time, the Merchants Exchange, and so he enjoyed coming here a lot. So he returned and he agreed and came back in the fall and brought with him a young man named Edward Bennett. Bennett was born in England. He spent time at Petaluma. He had an interest in architecture. He worked in an office as a draftsman. He got involved in Bernard Maybeck's Saturday drafting class where he met a whole lot of people like Arthur Brown Jr. and Julia Morgan. And Maybeck facilitated him getting one of the fellowships that Phoebe Apperson Hearst paid for to go to the Ecole de Beaux Arts. So he went there and then when he finished in 1901, he managed to end up in Burnham's office and became sort of the planner in the office. So Burnham requested and a small cabin was built on Twin Peaks. Oops, where they worked, mostly Bennett, because Burnham had many other things to do, including doing a plan for Manila as Kevin made reference to. And they worked away and finished their plan in the fall of 1905. Now there's a lot to the plan. In the beginning of the plan, he, Burnham says that they were influenced by Europe, by the Ringstrasse in Vienna and Paris, et cetera, et cetera. So as Kevin said, those kind of planning views were brought by Burnham to San Francisco. And I'm only going to show you three sides because he had a chapter on the Civic Center. And this is one of his plates, and it shows kind of the notion of ring roads with the center being at market in Venice. And then there's several, the farthest one is around the waterfront. And here is a plan, his plan for Civic Center. This is unlike Cleveland in every conceivable way. Because you have this huge, what he called a plus, and Venice and market. The old city hall, I'm told, the old city hall is here. And then you've got three or four blocks up here. This is the opera house, which is, I don't know, maybe Macalester and Goff. This is a Grand train station, maybe at 8th and Brannon. And so this was not compact in any way. And he expected all these blocks to be filled up with government buildings and apartment houses and offices and all sorts of things. And here's one more that gives you a little more close. So we have a obelisk in the middle of the plus. Maybe we should try putting one of that in the middle of market in Venice now. So that is his notion. They finished the report in the spring of, well, they finished it in the fall of 1905. There was a lot of fuzzah about it and so forth. Then it had to be printed up, that seemed to take a long time. And the printed copies weren't available until April. The common notion is that most of them burned up in the earthquake and fire. They were delivered to the old city hall and burned up. A researcher at the state library has gotten hold of me and has tracked down like 200 of them. So it appears that a lot of them were shipped around to people before the bulk of them were sent to city hall to be burned up. So there are quite a few of them around. And the earthquake came and decimated the city hall. You're all aware of that. A lot of the structure of the building fell to the west on the Larkin Street side knocking off portions of the building and so forth. And the Burnham was in Europe when the earthquake occurred. And they thought he would be the savior. So they sent him all these telegrams and he stopped what he was doing, got on a ship and came back to California. And he said, forget about my big plan. I'm really interested in practical things and what you really need to do right now is not build classical buildings, but you need to rearrange the streets to improve traffic. And particularly you need to widen Montgomery Street. And there was some interest in that, but it turns out that to do that, they had to go to the state legislature and who was the man to do that, but Abraham Roof and half the people involved were kind of uncomfortable about that. And so not much happened and everyone wanted to go on building what they were building. And in the fall, Roofless and Mayor Schmitz were indicted for graft. And the measure that Roof had gotten to the legislature had to be put on the ballot. And it was on the ballot as a constitutional amendment or something or other. And it failed. So that ended the press call this Burnham's map here, the cobwebby plan. And the 17 of the 18 Board of Supervisors were threatened with indictment. They all resigned. The mayor was forced out of office. He was replaced primarily by Fremont Older and Rudolph Spreckles by an elderly, but able rather unique individual named Edward Ropes and Taylor, who was a doctor, a lawyer, poet, various other things. And he appointed and got elected a reform group of supervisors. So in 19, those supervisors were confronted with what to do with the old city hall. And they hemmed and hawed and, you know, can't it be rebuilt and whatnot? And eventually they had a study made and they had a panel of people. And they recruited a man who I'll talk about shortly named John Galen Howard, who was involved in that. And they all concluded that there was no point in rebuilding the old city hall. So in early 1909, they proceeded to demolish it except for the Hall of Records, which was not badly hurt and could be fixed up for offices. And a small corner of the old city hall at Larkin and McAllister, which unfortunately I don't have a picture of in which they had offices, but you had to go up some wooden stairs to the second floor to get into them. It really looked, you know, not very grand. And so somebody decided in the winter of 1908 to put lighting on the old city hall for Christmas. Oops. And here's the old city hall being demolished. You can see some equipment around it. That is the Pioneer Monument. That stood right above your heads. And the city hall was sort of behind us. So that's 1909. Now the supervisors then thought that they, it was time to develop a plan for a new civic center. And these are people who had been involved with feeling, who were involved with knew about Burnham. And so Willis Polk prepared a plan for a new civic center at Market in Venice, which doesn't look anything like Burnham's old plan. But it has a certain grace. You have this arc of buildings. You have the city hall, the courthouse, library, new train station on the other side of Venice. That required a bond issue. And that went on the ballot in June of 1909. By then, after Mayor Taylor left office, you had a new administration. The Union Labor Party came back. It was run by Ph McCarthy, who was from the Building Trades Union. And the city was still torn apart. Because of the graph trials. And Michael DeYoung and a number of business people were opposed to doing this at this time. They thought the credit of the city was going to be harmed by it. The labor people thought this was the wrong priority. If they were going to borrow money, they needed to fix the city water system. And you had various other people opposed to it. So it failed, the bond issue failed. And so, oh good. The Union Labor Board of Supervisors worried what to do. Initially, they thought they'd build a new city hall on the old city hall site. But they couldn't make up their mind. And an entity called the Whitcombe Estate, which owned a big parcel on Market Street, came to them and said, well, we were planning to build a hotel there, but we'll build the building and make it into city hall for as long as you need it. And I like this picture, even though it's kind of crude, because it has, as you could see, campaign signs for Rolf on it. But that is the Whitcombe Hotel, not finished. But that's, they agreed to lease it for as long as they needed it for the city hall and that the Whitcombe Estate would put offices in it and so forth. OK, now we come to the Panama Pacific International Exhibition. And what I'm going to tell you is all new. You've not ever heard this before. When the Congress in January of 1911 passed a resolution designating San Francisco, it was an electric event in the city. And the person who is largely responsible, some man named Ruben Hale. So think back to Alan Pollock. Alan Pollock wrote that Jeremiah about San Francisco. Within a few days of writing that, Ruben Hale writes to a number of his business associates and said, we should think about having a exhibition to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. Now he did that several months after there was this sort of phony revolution in Panama, which took the Panama part away from Columbia. And the United States hadn't even signed a treaty for the canal of anybody then. But Ruben Hale was a man who thought in long terms. And without going into all the details, he worked away with a number of his business colleagues, kept the idea alive through times when it looked like the canal wasn't going to be successful. And then they had to fight a huge battle with New Orleans as to who would win. And they won. And Ruben Hale was at the White House in 1912 when President Taft signed the bill for San Francisco. Hale was a long associate of Phelan. He served on the library board as a trustee with Phelan. And he was another progressive businessman. So here are the six vice presidents of the PPIA company. You have three of the most conservative business men in San Francisco. Michael DeYoung, who is on the right-hand side. And remember, he opposed the last city of the Civic Center. And you have Isaias Hellman of the Wells Fargo Bank. Well, that's Isaias Hellman Jr. So that must be his son. And William Crocker, the son of Charles Crocker of the railroad who had another bank. And then you have Leon Sloss whose politics I'm not familiar with. But then you have Ruben Hale and James Rolfe. Well, when these business men got word that they could build the fair, it was like the dog that caught the car. What do we do now? They had four years to put everything together and to fix up San Francisco to be host to all these guests. And they didn't have any confidence in Mayor McCarthy. He ran a rather administration that catered to his own constituency. He reputedly was loose on vice and crime. He appointed people who were incompetent. And more importantly, his public works department couldn't seem to get anything built. Because a bond issue had passed to build a new municipal railroad line on the first municipal railroad line on Geary Street. And nothing was happening. So all these business men figured they needed to take the bull by the horns and replace the mayor. So they created an entity called the Municipal Conference. And the membership overlapped with the board of the PPI company and tried to find someone to run for mayor. They asked Rolfe. And he didn't want to do it initially. But finally, in the middle of April, he agreed. He turned out to be the ideal candidate. He was a self-made businessman from the mission. He'd made money in banking and shipping. He had really good relations with the maritime unions. He had been president of the Merchants Exchange, which was kind of a predecessor to the Chamber of Commerce. He was affable. He was friendly. He was everything he wanted in a great politician. And so in the middle of April, he agreed to run. And here he is out shaking hands. This is a young Jim Rolfe. You usually see him with white hair. And here's his campaign brochure. He had three main planks. One that, and all of them, most of them had to relate to getting the city ready for the exhibition. One was that they needed to build a new city hall and a civic center. Two, they needed to improve the transportation system in the city, primarily for everybody, but in order to service the coming exhibition. And three, they needed to work on improving the water system, which was a long-time goal. This is him being sworn in. But before he got, he was in those days, it was a primary in September. And he just creamed McCarthy in the primary. So he didn't have to run in the general election. He became the mayor-elect in late September. In November, when the general election occurred, 17 of the 18 slots for supervisors were people that the municipal conference had recruited. So he had a really good group of people to work with him on what needed to be done. And he started off before he was inaugurated on trying to solve the problem of what to do with building a city hall. And where should it be? Should it be at Market and Bass? Should it be on the old city hall site? And he went to the PPIE company, which he was still vice president of, and recruited their architectural committee, headed by Willis Polk, and said, I need you to help us figure this out. But knowing, I think a lot, he also recruited John Galen Howard to be on that group. Well, let me go back. I'll tell you about Howard more shortly. And he was just operating at a very fast pace and managed to pull things together. So at his inauguration on January 9th, 2019-12, even though his advisory committee hadn't issued their report, he announced it was going to be on the old city hall site. So he had taken the bull by the horns and solved five, six years of dispute about what should be done about a city hall. Of course, he knew that the advisory committee was going to cite it in the way he wanted. But he, with his energy, pulled everything together. And Howard was his man. And, oops, not him. So one of the first things, well, after he was inaugurated, he got the board to agree that to put the city on record to create a bond issue to pay for a city hall and a civic center. There was no doubt in his mind that there had to be a civic center in which the city hall was the key building. And he then asked Howard to be the head of this Board of Consulting Architects because he didn't have any faith in the existing Public Works Board. And Howard was probably the most prominent architect in the Bay area. He had studied at MIT, which is the first architecture school in the country. Eventually he worked for McKinnon, Mead, and White. They had sort of financed him to go to the Ecole of Beaux Arts. He came back to New York. He didn't work for them. He created his own office. He worked on the World's Fair in Buffalo in 1901. Did a number of buildings. He submitted a plan for Berkeley for the UC campus, which came in fourth. After the UC management and Mrs. Hearst found they couldn't deal with the man who won the award, Mr. Bernard from France. They sent him back to Paris or he never came to Berkeley. That was one of the problems. They wouldn't want to come. And she just sort of jumped over the other two and liked Howard and made him put him in charge of the plan for Berkeley and agreed to fund an architecture school at Berkeley that he was going to be the head of. So he was a very big deal when it came to architect and planning. And then Ralph recruited his son-in-law, John Reed Jr. to be on the Board of Consulting Architects. He was a student of Howard's at Berkeley and had gone to the Ecole of Beaux Arts and had graduated four or five years before. Ralph said to the Board of Supervisors, I'm appointing my brother-in-law. Does anybody have a problem? Nobody said no. I mean he was perfectly competent and eventually Ralph would make him city architect in which he served until 1930. And the third man was Frederick Meyer who was not an Ecole graduate but someone who was a very competent architect and seemed to fit well into the triad of doing things. So Howard and company continued to work on the plan. Ralph worked on getting a bond issue on the ballot. And the city financial advisors told Ralph that he could borrow $8.8 million. So they didn't say, well, the city is gonna cost this much and they went the other way. They said, you can borrow $8.8 million and that's what you can do with it. And so that gave them some leeway on how much property they could buy for the Civic Center. And Howard developed two alternative plans for Civic Center. Now remember we're talking about plans. These buildings just weren't arbitrarily put there. This is a Beaux-Arts plan and you will not find that mentioned in the historic nomination for Civic Center. So this is the first plan which has the city hall in the place of the old city hall down here, down there. And then you have the plaza in the middle and the opera house in the library and this parcel here would be an auditorium and that's where the Mechanics Institute had a big pavilion which burned down in the earthquake. And this might have been an art museum but it could be a state building because the state had bought a couple of parcels in the plaza and they needed to be accommodated somewhere. So this was plan A which they put out and the interesting thing is they put this out at the same time they're having an architectural competition so the participants at the competition weren't exactly certain where things were going to be. And this is plan B where the city hall is where it is now and the opera house and the library, et cetera. And they spent a couple of months going on which were best and they finally came to the conclusion that this plan B worked best partly because the site of the old city hall had all sorts of foundations which would be expensive to remove, they could condemn the property on Venice much simpler and it had sort of wet frame building so it was easier to get. And remember the big push was getting, and Ralph's mind was getting everything built before the fair opened on February 20th, 1915. And also the property under the land under the old city hall site, they did some testing and found in their words it was an underground slu that it had a lot of water. And we know that because when this building was built and they had to dig it up, there was this huge amount of water that had to be pumped out every day to keep it from flooding the site. So the second thing was an architectural competition and they announced that as soon as the bond issue passed but I haven't told you about the bond issue, Ralph threw everything he had into the bond campaign and using his recent election apparatus and all of his committees and friends and they ran around the city and spoke to groups and pushed the bond issue. And there really wasn't any opposition. He also threw into the mix the fact that he got the PPI company to agree to put up a million dollars to build an auditorium. Now the PPI company wanted an auditorium to host various conferences and associations they hoped would come to San Francisco to visit the fair but have their meetings. So they were willing to put up a million dollars but he closed the deal and then he told the people that that would help pay for everything. He also got the Music Association of San Francisco which was a group of wealthy people who wanted a concert hall to put up 750,000 for Opera House and without going into all the details about the library which is kind of convoluted he got the library trustees to agree to move their potential library to the middle of Civic Center which would help pay because you could sell off the property they currently own and pay for part of all of this and then he announced that the state was gonna play. So but my favorite part is that in 1911 the California voted to have women vote, gave the right in the fall to women to vote. And San Francisco women felt that this was the opportunity to show that they really cared. So various women's group went out and registered women and Rolf went and spoke to a number of women's group and he gave them the whole pitch about why things were needed and then he appealed to their sort of domestic side by saying you don't invite people to your house if the house is falling down. So it's likewise the city has to have a city hall that can invite the world and not have a proper house to entertain all these visitors. The amazing thing is when the election was held on March 28th, 92% of the people voted in favor of it, 92%. And that not only showed how great Rolf was but how deeply people had bought into this notion of a civic center and a city hall. So with the passage of the bond issue, the next day the Board of Supervisors certified the election and the city attorney ran down to the court rooms and filed condemnation suits against all the property they wanted to take. Saying that he hoped that everyone would be good citizens and would sell their property without the lawsuit but in case they didn't he was gonna be ahead of the game. And the next day the Board of Architects announced an architectural competition for city hall and they indicated that you had to be an architect in practice in San Francisco on January 1st to participate and 110 firms sent in their bona fides saying they had. They then gave all those people big packets that were kind of prepared in the Ecole de Beaux Arts style as to how you prepare a project and 72 or three architects then agreed to participate. There was going to be, there would be a jury that headed by Howard that would have the mayor head of the Board of Supervisors Building Committee the other Board of Architects and then he recruited an outsider Walter Scott who was president of the National AIA who turned out who happened to be a good friend of his to come out and review these. The submittals were due on June 15th. They went through them and eliminated, well they agreed to pay $1,000 to the top 20 and of course the 21st one, the winner would get 25,000 so they eliminated the first 50 or so. Among those 50 were people like Bernard Maybeck many prominent architects didn't make the first cut and the five days later they announced that they had selected this one the Bakewell and Brown measure. Now they had made this in a blind way so we don't know but Howard knew everybody he probably knew Bakewell and Brown so whether he picked out of the, in the dark or not I have no idea but the specifications for the building are called for a four story building that could have a significant architectural feature in the middle and if you look there are records of the 20 semifinalists and you have a whole variety of buildings that have no architectural feature they have a low dome there's a couple with an office tower in the middle but there is none as distinctive as this and Jeffery Till, Bakewell and Brown Arthur Brown Jr. and John Bakewell were relatively young. Brown grew up in Berkeley his father was the chief engineer of the Central Pacific Railroad and in that job he designed buildings such as the Del Monte Hotel so obviously architecture was part of the family dinner table conversation and so he knew all sorts of people as a young man he went to Bernard Maybeck's Saturday classes because as you studied civil engineering you didn't study architecture and then he went to the Ecole and Bakewell preceded him at the Ecole because he was slightly older and they returned and created an architecture firm and as young architects they didn't get that many commissions and in fact Brown's biographer Jeffery Tillman suggests that one reason they were able to prepare such a spectacular plan was that they didn't have a lot to do and therefore they could devote lots of extra time to all this detailed design and drawing well, this selection was widely approved by everyone that thought it was terrific and so there wasn't any big controversy over that and I need to finish up in about five minutes here but, what do we got in there? Oops so here is a picture Brown is in the middle Bakewell is to the left the man on the right is a man named Jean-Louis Bouchois who is a colleague of Brown's at the Ecole who he asked to come and help with this project and the third man is an architect named John Bauer so there they are they're standing in front of a mock a plaster mock-up of one of the walls in the city hall oops now Howard kept refining his plan and in the middle of 1913 he published it in a rendering which is colored and actually it exists in the city architect's office and it was rendered by a famous illustrator named Jules Guerin but you can see the plan with oops uh oh how do I get this back? I would push the wrong thing there we go you know there's the city hall as oops Bakewell and Brown had envisioned it this was to be the opera house uh well the auditorium is on the you have the plaza and they laid it out as if they wanted to be and thank you very much here's a more detailed rendering of the plaza as he designed, why are we are we on some sort of slide show version? anyway the the plan you know was developed and published and Ralph you know as I said was really eager to get everything built in time so when it came to the auditorium which is the exhibition auditorium the directors of the the PBIE said said that they were going to build it because they had developed their own plans what they wanted but they would hire the board of consulting architects to do the façade so it would fit with the rest of the architectural statement for Civic Center and so that was a way to move it along because if they had their own competition or architects or that it would have delayed things and they needed to get that building open by February 20th 1915 so that is the auditorium this was the opera house that was going to be there Will's Pope did a scheme for the music society I will have a chapter in the book that will come out that explains all the politics I still don't fully understand them and it would take 15 minutes to describe it to you but it never got built Ralph vetoed the opera house and so that lot, Marshall Square where we are today sat empty for 80 years the auditorium they got it together and the auditorium is open for the fair and this is January 9th 1915 where the PBIE held in the auditorium a grand mask ball had 20,000 people everyone from the exalted board of directors down to ordinary people who came with the festivities they used a lot of things from the fair the jewels from the tower and a whole lot of other things to entertain people so that got things started now City Hall was working away but it was not going to be done by February and Ralph hoped it would open in July but there was a strike among the stone cutters union now the Raymond Granite quarry which exists today and provided the granite for this building if you go to Clovis near Fresno and drive east you will drive by the quarry so the Raymond quarry had cut all the stone to finish up City Hall but it couldn't be brought and installed because this strike occurred in May and it ended up going until November Ralph insisted that it open before the end of 1915 so they had a kind of ceremonial opening on December 28 1915 and here he is with a golden key that was prepared opening the door and welcoming everyone the building actually didn't become functional until April and in fact the Board of Supervisors meeting until October of 1916 and here is the finished product and the plaza in front of it and the interesting thing about this picture of the plaza you will see these balustrades around it and there is actually some animal representation statues the consulting architects decided it would be interesting to try and see if that would work so they had all those made out of plaster of Paris including the bears and other animals well, people decided it didn't work and so those were all removed by the end of 1916 and also in the fountains you also see statues and things that was also made out of plaster of Paris and they were removed and you can well imagine that one of the reasons they removed when they turned on the fountain the water blew all over everywhere this is the library the steps to get the library built didn't reach the point where they hired an architect until 1914 so it didn't really open until 1917 but it was under construction in 1915 when people came to the exhibition so they could point out that this was happening and there is a whole brouhaha over the architects there which you will find in my book and in fact the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society has asked me to give a lecture on October 18th where I will get into all this cat fight and the local architects who knew that architects would get into cat fights and here is the state building and that took even longer it didn't open until 1926 and there was another cat fight over that and I will talk about that in October the Rolf and his people didn't like the way the facade was put together they thought it had too high a base and it was unsympathetic to the rest of city hall and they appealed to the governor not do it and he turned them down etc. and this is the demolition of the whole hall of records and that occurred in 1917 so it took them that long to clear up everything that building had served as offices for the city during the whole time of building civic center that's the remain and in fact it was only in 1918 did they find the old cornerstone for city hall and removed it so it was not until 1918 that the whole thing was finished that ends that Rolf served until 1931 he was very busy in promoting civic center in various ways including the war memorial which I will talk about in the book the federal building and the various other things he was always interested in moving it along but the bottom line I want to sort of convince to give you is that this civic center is not just a group of monumental buildings it has a whole statement as to why it's here and the people in 1913, 14 and 15 understood that and related to things that they had learned in the bigger country progressive movement they felt that they could improve civic life and in fact make people better by building great buildings that were available to them and so I would like you to when you go out of this building think of this in that terms because people don't and also the second thing it's part of a grand plan you know 100 years if we did it today we probably wouldn't do this it's part of a grand plan and that grand plan needs to be respected so history is not just an academic activity or relating to aesthetics or what not in terms of civic center it's a life lively matter and Mayor Lee understands that and a year or so ago he asked the planning department and gave them money to create a public realm plan for San Francisco which will deal with that wasteland outside when you go out in the front of the library and other parts of the of the neighborhood Nick Perry from the planning department is here he'll be in the back of the room if you want to ask him what they're going to do he's been fighting the bureaucracy to get the plan underway and then I've gone glossed over or ignored a lot of the stories that occurred during these 20 years those are written not only in the book that I hope to publish but I had sections of them published in the Argonaut which is the Journal of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society and you can see those the library has copies in the catalog and the history room but if you want your own in the back the museum and Historical Society would be happy to sign you up to become a member and you'll get two of the installments and then the Argonaut comes out twice a year with lots of interesting stories so that is my pitch I am really honored that you all came today