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Born out of a grand, celebratory architectural scheme, the CIVIC CENTER, a little ways southwest of the Tenderloin, is an impressive layout of majestic federal and municipal Beaux Arts buildings focusing on the grand dome of City Hall, designed by Arthur Brown and completed in 1915, just in time for the Panama Pacific International Exhibition. The complex surrounding City Hall is a watered-down version of planner Daniel Burnham’s ambitious schemes for the city, which would have seen grand avenues fanning out across San Francisco, including one extending to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Drawn up with the help of architect Willis Polk, the plans won the wholehearted approval of city leaders, only to be delayed by the massive earthquake and fire of 1906. Political difficulties after the quake delayed the project further, and although Burnham doggedly pursued his vision of a “City Beautiful,” the project was only finished after his death. He no doubt would be saddened by the complex today: it’s still a fine collection of buildings, but the elegant layout has become the focus of San Francisco’s most glaring social problem – the homeless.



Periodically, police evict the hundreds of street people who inhabit the nearby plazas, but with housing in perpetually short supply, no long-term solution is in sight. Being San Francisco’s center for the performing arts – by night, beautifully lit and swarming with dinner-suited San Franciscans heading in and out of the opera, ballet, and symphony – the problem was not one that could be easily hidden, and although the authorities have since established a number of shelters, the Civic Center, along with the adjacent Tenderloin, remains the most intensely down-and-out area of town.
Using the Civic Center Muni and BART station as your starting point, you’ll emerge from underground facing the United Nations Plaza just south of the main quadrangle. Built to commemorate the founding of the UN here in 1945, it is an attractive design with fountain and flags that is generally home to a refugee camp of squatters and skateboarders. From dawn until dusk Wednesdays and Sundays are the exceptions, when the site serves as a Farmer’s Market, the city’s largest and most inexpensive fruit and vegetable market.

Originally housed on the north side of the plaza, the Main Library moved into its current location at Grove and Larkin in 1996, amidst both fanfare and controversy. The building’s sleek new design, which included a large, light-filled central atrium, didn’t include much room for books, and portions of the library’s holdings have repeatedly been sold off in order to squeeze everything into the new stacks. At the top floor of the striking structure is the San Francisco History Center, used primarily for research, but with an interesting collection of old prints, maps and photographs. A trip up the stairway will reward you with an elongated sculpture listing the names of prominent local authors. Just one level below, the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center is the first of its kind in the nation, topped by a dome with a mural depicting leading figures in gay rights and literary movements.

Next door, centered around the collection of former Olympic Committee head Avery Brundage, the Asian Art Museum will soon show one of the largest collections of Asian Art in the Western world. After spending the past decade attempting to escape from an earthquake-damaged building in Golden Gate Park, the museum is finally moving into the library’s former home at Larkin and McAllister, and is due to open in 2002. Because of space limitations in its previous location, the museum was only able to display a fraction of its holdings at any given time, but the new digs will allow more of its thorough collection of ten thousand paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles from all over Asia to come out of mothballs, including the oldest known Chinese Buddha image, from 338 AD. In the meantime, some temporary exhibits are still on display at the museum’s temporary location in Golden Gate Park.

Dominating the quadrangle at its far end on Polk Street, City Hall is arguably the best-looking building in town. Modeled on St Peter’s basilica in Rome, this Baroque structure of granite and marble with a grandiose green-copper dome forms the nucleus of the Civic Center. The interior is as grand as its facade, with a large Baroque marble staircase dominating the center, leading up to opulent arches and balustrades, all beneath a gold-inlaid dome. For years the elegant building was buried in scaffolding, but, thankfully, after extensive work to repair the effects of time and weather, not to mention a seemingly never-ending seismic retrofit to make sure it would withstand another earthquake, City Hall’s refurbished dome was recently reopened for public viewing. It was here in 1978 that conservative ex-supervisor Dan White got past security guards to assassinate Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk; later, when White was found guilty of manslaughter (not murder), it was the scene of violent demonstrations as gay protesters set fire to police vehicles and stormed the doors of the building – an event that became known as the “White Night Riot.”

Directly behind City Hall on Van Ness Avenue are San Francisco’s cultural mainstays, most elegant of which is the War Memorial Opera House. The United Nations Charter was signed here in 1945; today it’s home to the San Francisco Opera and Ballet. Reopened in 1997 after extensive earthquake-proofing engineering work, it’s a suitably refined structure, its understated grandeur a sharp contrast to the giant modernist fishbowl of the Louise M Davies Symphony Hall one block down. Built in 1980, at a cost of almost $35 million, the symphony hall has some fans in the progressive architecture camp, though the general consensus is that it’s an aberration of the otherwise tastefully harmonious scheme of the Civic Center. Both buildings enjoy a healthy patronage, and come nightfall the formally dressed arrive by the busload. Sadly, few performances are subsidized, so prices remain generally high.

If your budget doesn’t stretch to a night at the opera, you can at least get a sense of its history and success at the San Francisco Performing Arts Library and Museum, 399 Grove St (Wed 1–7pm, Thurs–Fri 10am–4pm, Sat noon–4pm; free), between the opera house and symphony hall. Primarily a research center, with the largest collection of performing arts material outside of New York, the museum has more than two million painstakingly collected programs, photographs, posters, books, videos, and press clippings concentrating on music, dance, theater, and opera. Performing-arts fans could spend hours raking through the memorabilia, the highlight of which is the Isadora Duncan collection, focusing on the influential dancer who was born in the city in 1877.

Next to the War Memorial Opera House, the Veteran’s Building houses the gallery of the San Francisco Arts Commission (Wed–Sat noon–5.30pm) in its lobby, a terrific place to discover up-and-coming Bay Area artists. The commission also puts on the provocative window installations a couple blocks away at 155 Grove St and administers Exploration: City Site, an open-air lot used for environmental installations, next door at no. 165. Back near the Performing Arts Library, the Vorpal Gallery (Tues–Sat 11am–6pm; tel 415/397-9200) at 393 Grove St, has earned a reputation for consistently high-class contemporary paintings and has a room dedicated to surrealist sketch artist M.C. Escher. Less prestigious, but worth a look, is the San Francisco Women Artists Gallery at 370 Hayes St, concentrating mostly on photographs, paintings, and crafts.