![]() It’s gorgeous to look at, but a little incongruous, given the rest of the artist’s career. Try the macaroni and cheese with chicken and truffle oil. In back on the ground floor, there’s the Park Chalet Garden Restaurant, which opened in 2004, offering a more casual menu and view of park greenery. Upstairs, the Beach Chalet Brewery & Restaurant offers ocean views. After costly restoration and refurbishing, it reopened in 1997. The Army took over the building during World War II, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars ran it as a bar and meeting hall from 1947 to 1981, after which it was closed to the public for more than 15 years. We should be grateful we can see any murals at all. ![]() If any political commentary found its way in there, I missed it. In 1936, the federal Works Progress Administration hired artist Lucien Labaudt - formerly a designer of gowns and costumes for high society - as principal designer of a fresco project.Īided by assistants, mosaic artists and wood carvers, he came up with a series of cheerful scenes: picnickers, bathers, fishermen, a guitarist and a photographer, all wedged in amid bits of local scenery, including Chinatown, City Hall and Baker Beach. There, in a two-story Spanish Revival building known as the Beach Chalet, I found yet another batch of classic murals. Pictured: Diego Rivera’s mural “Allegory of California” inside the luncheon club rooms of the Stock Exchange Tower (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)įrom the opera house, I headed west along the edge of Golden Gate Park until the Pacific Ocean blocked my path, then turned left. (I’ll have to check out these two others on my next trip.) Espinoza and his wife, Rosa, had come from Fresno just to look at Rivera murals, and this was one of three stops for them. So it makes sense to follow the example of Val Espinoza, a fellow tourist I met on the steps beneath Rivera’s allegory. He also included the oil wells, the ag workers and a couple of boys playing with a toy airplane. He devised a 30-foot-high design for an allegory of California and used tennis star Helen Wills Moody as the model for the woman whose face would symbolize the state’s beauty and promise. After all, he is the guy who, in 1933, added a portrait of Lenin to a mural in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza, prompting the sponsors to fire him and destroy the work.īut artists have to earn a living too, and this was Rivera’s first job in the U.S. This seems exactly the sort of thing that would cause Rivera to throw a fit. They were painted for a 1915 exposition by celebrated landscape artist Frank Brangwyn, but somebody clever held onto them and had the theater interior designed around them.įrom here, our tour morphs into a mural medley, with a little comfort food on the side. Those speakers have some serious competition the auditorium’s side walls are dominated by eight enormous paintings celebrating earth, air, fire and water. The interior space has been changed and upgraded through the years, but the Herbst Theatre (which opens for tours most Mondays) is still used for speakers’ series and other special events. Though the Rockefeller family’s offer of some precious Manhattan real estate eventually lured the organization to New York, it looked for a while as though the U.N.’s home would be San Francisco. For me, the most striking stop was the Herbst Theatre (formerly known as Veterans Auditorium), where in June 1945, world leaders huddled to sign the charter creating the United Nations. I returned to the War Memorial complex the next morning to be shown a few backstage sights by veteran tour guide George F. Pictured: Herbst Theatre (Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times) ![]() But now that I’ve seen the street-corner crowd that gathers outside after dark, I can’t recommend it to families or solo travelers. It was an elegant night, compromised only by my choice of lodgings: The Hotel Metropolis, at the scruffy end of Mason Street near Market, is fine on the inside, even a bit chic, and cost me a mere $60 for the night. ![]() The buildings, twins from the outside, with a courtyard between them, were built to honor World War I veterans.īecause the San Francisco Ballet was performing the night of my visit, I got a chance to see the 3,200-seat venue with dancers bounding beneath the heavy gold curtain, well-heeled San Franciscans filling the seats. Just a few miles away, in the gritty Civic Center neighborhood (avoid, avoid, avoid this stretch of Market Street), the War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building (which make up the Performing Arts Center) have stood since 1932. War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building ![]()
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