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Mark Hopkins Institute of Art plat from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas, c. 1903.


Plat of Mark Hopkins Institute of Art from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Atlas, c. 1903


Author
Jeff Gunderson

Decade

1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s


Tags

Architecture 
Filmmaking Food 
Mark Hopkins
The Meadow
Natural Disasters



In 1893 the Mark Hopkins mansion on the top of Nob Hill became home to the San Francisco Art Institute, then known as the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, when Edward Searles donated the property to the University of California to be used as a school and for art exhibitions. Hopkins, along with Collis P. Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Leland Stanford—“The Big Four”—built the western portion of the transcontinental railroad. This mansion was the highest structure on the highest hill in the city, and it was completed after Hopkins died. Mary, Hopkins’s widow, then married her interior designer, Edward Searles. After Mary died, Searles moved to Massachusetts with the Hopkins’s chauffeur.

 JG 


Slideshow ︎︎︎


 
Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, interior view of exhibitions salon. SFAI—founded in 1871 as the San Francisco Art Association and the California School of Design—was first located at two different addresses on Pine Street before moving to the Mark Hopkins mansion at the top of Nob Hill. This image shows the second location, 430 Pine Street, where the association and school shared the space with the Bohemian Club, combining to become a center of San Francisco art, culture, ideas, and innovation. This is where Eadweard Muybridge exhibited his magic lantern slides of trotting horses, heralding the beginning of motion pictures. In April 1906, the San Francisco earthquake triggered fires that destroyed much of the city, including the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art, as depicted in this painting by William Coulter. View looking south toward City Hall from the ruins of the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. “fire began approaching the Institute from two directions; from Powell street by way of Pine, and from Chinatown by way of Sacramento street. The Pine street fire finally reached Mason street opposite the School building which then ignited and burned to the ground.” —from San Francisco Art Association board minutes, May 10, 1906 After the mansion was destroyed, the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art changed its name to the San Francisco Institute of Art. There were grand plans to rebuild at the same Nob Hill location across California Street from the Fairmont Hotel. Instead, a more modest “temporary” building was constructed that accommodated the California School of Design as well as the SFAA galleries. Note the gates and wall that survived the 1906 fire; they remain to this day at the site of the Mark Hopkins Hotel. By the mid-1920s, the search for a new location resulted in the purchase of property on Russian Hill at 800 Chestnut Street. The design by Arthur Brown of Bakewell and Brown architects was based on an Italian hillside town. Bakewell and Brown designed many landmark buildings including San Francisco’s City Hall, Coit Tower, and Temple Emanu-El, Pasadena City Hall, and Hoover Institution Tower (Stanford). Construction in 1926; Arthur Brown building viewed from the north side. In 1926, the school, known as the California School of Fine Arts, can be seen in the first college catalog image from Russian Hill. Telegraph Hill in the background has yet to be graced with Arthur Brown’s Coit Tower. Portrait of architect Arthur Brown; a detail from Diego Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (1931). The California School of Fine Arts catalog cover from 1940 showing the school at the beginning of World War II, with Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill in the background. The school has been used almost exclusively as an art college and gallery space, although over the years it also served as a location for film and television shoots and weddings. During World War II, it was a critical center for the Red Cross to collect blood for the Pacific theater of war. The flagpole holder for the World War II Red Cross flag above the Jones Street entrance has remained empty since 1945. Anticipating a drop in enrollment with fewer students on the GI Bill, and seeking answers to fiscal woes, former board chair Ted Spencer had plans to develop the 800 Chestnut Street property, constructing an eleven-story apartment building. Board member Harold Zellerbach (left) shows architectural improvement plans to development committee members Mrs. Henry Potter Russell and Rudolph Peterson. Photo: student James Mitchell. In the mid-1960s, SFAI needed to figure out how to accommodate the influx of baby boomer, draft dodging, San Francisco-seeking college students by extensively expanding its studios, galleries, cafeteria, and lecture areas onto the footprint of “the backyard.” One of the more modest proposals in 1965, as seen from Francisco Street, came from the architecture firm Appleton & Wolfard (July 22, 1965). Architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay was hired to design the new wing for SFAI. His model (shown here) was an homage to one of his mentors, Le Corbusier, who designed Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. San Francisco architect Paffard Keatinge-Clay had studied with and worked for Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West. His one nod to the adjacent Arthur Brown building is the appearance of the board-form concrete pour. Construction began on the Paffard Keatinge-Clay wing with the destruction of the north face entry, which would soon become the top of the ramp leading to the expanded sculpture/ceramics studios. Construction view of the 1969 Paffard Clay building. Construction view of the 1969 Paffard Clay building. The completed 1969 Paffard Clay building was featured in Architectural Forum (January/February 1970). The opening of the new building was celebrated with a blowout party, a “wild trip” that was written up in newspapers from coast to coast. With the completion of the 1969 Paffard Keatinge-Clay building, the student eatery moved into its current location—a “gourmet cafeteria” with a midcentury modern vibe that offered panoramic bay views of Alcatraz and the shipping channel. The new café was run by students Sarah Ayres and Cassandra Mitchell, who “were the cooks behind the counter,” and it boasted a menu of French bread sandwiches, homemade soup, fresh fruit, German chocolate cake... and a Mary Jane Special. The café touted “natural sandwiches, goodies” and holiday decorations throughout the 1970s. Another view of the café. With the completion of the 1969 building, there was space for a robust Film Department headed by Robert Nelson. This poster illustrates the lively nature of the department, announcing “Continuous Projections of Films by Students.” The photograph by Dennis Hearne is of a July 1968 film shoot by student filmmakers Michael Wiese and Steven Arnold near Sebastopol. Jay DeFeo’s The Rose arrived soon after the 1969 building was completed, and it was placed in the McMillan Conference Room. DeFeo was teaching painting and was good friends with the school’s director, Fred Martin. The Rose was visible for maybe three to five years; as gravity took its toll on the more than fifteen hundred pounds of paint, the artwork was protected with a covering that included plaster and chicken wire. The Rose remained in the conference room, revered, “peeping out, like, a foot above a false wall,” until the Whitney Museum of American Art purchased it from The DeFeo Trust around 1995. What was once “the backyard” became known as “the meadow.” Here is the meadow’s extensive garden, and student Allison Wood. The added space enabled the school’s “athletic program” to be expanded to include basketball and trampoline. Photo: Stephen Gach. The Paffard Keatinge-Clay building featured a new lecture hall, two new galleries, a new café, additional studio space, and a large rooftop patio with sweeping views of Alcatraz, Angel Island, the East Bay, and a downtown skyline yet to have the signature TransAmerica Pyramid. Its Brutalist style stands in distinct contrast to the Italian hillside town design of the school’s original 1926 structure.

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