[00:37] The site of Aquatic Park was once called Black Point Cove. Public recreation and private development have clashed in the cove since the mid-1800s, when a woolen mill and a metal smelter polluted the waters of a popular swimming spot. The swimmers and rowers of the Dolphin and South End Rowing clubs led the fight to protect the cove and for the establishment of an Aquatic Park. Plans for the park were underway in 1931, when it became a victim of the Great Depression. 

[01:14] San Francisco was hit hard by the Depression, with thousands out of work, and in 1934, a bitter general strike. Yet the city retained a vibrant creative culture. Ground zero was North Beach, where artists lived with cheap rents in the Montgomery Block and bars and cafés like the Black Cat attracted a heady mix of artists, writers, and labor activists.“I think North Beach is the most interesting place in America,” — Sargent Claude Johnson. 

[01:53] Work on Aquatic Park resumed in 1935, thanks to funding from a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, created by President Franklin Roosevelt to provide jobs for the 13 million Americans out of work.  

[02:13] Aquatic Park was one of the most ambitious WPA projects in California, including a public building with facilities for Bay swimmers and bleachers for aquatic sports events. Dressing rooms and lockers would be provided for 3,000. Showers would be activated by photoelectric “eyes,” and blasts of warm air would dry swimmers.  

[02:39] The architect was San Franciscan William Mooser III. His Streamline Moderne design evoked a ship at port. The horizontal orientation of the building, its rounded edges, and nautical references are typical of the style.  

[02:58] Under the WPA’s Federal Art Project to fund the visual arts, San Francisco was directed to “employ all employable artists in need.” Two thousand applications were received in the first two weeks, and the creation of artworks for public buildings, like the Bathhouse, provided jobs for hundreds of the city’s artists and artisans.  

[03:21] The choice to direct the decoration of the Aquatic Park Building was Hilaire Hiler. Originally from Minnesota, Hiler had just arrived in San Francisco from Paris, where his after-hours club in Montparnasse attracted legendary artists and writers of the time. Shirley Staschen, a painter on the Coit Tower murals, and veteran of the protests there, encouraged Hiler to apply for work with the Federal Art Project. A stroke of luck for Hiler, who was soon put in charge of 40 workers, including a team of 20 artists and a sizable budget. 

[04:01] Henry Miller said, “The two things I remember about San Francisco are Hiler’s murals and the cable cars. Hiler’s lobby mural is unlike anything painted during this Golden Age of San Francisco mural painting. Rather than the Social Realist imagery of the Coit Tower murals, Hiler’s design for the lobby was a synthesis of ideas he brought with him from Paris, where his circle included artists connected to the Surrealist movement.

[04:38] Hiler wrote, “The design throughout the building is based on the spiral, a form rich in symbolic as well as biological significance, connected with the sea and the beginnings of life... The decorations were conceived as a flowing arabesque carrying around the room. There was no beginning and no end. Undersea life is organic. There are no straight lines.” 

[05:09] Many of the creatures populating the mural, both real and imaginary, were painted by Anna Medalie, an accomplished artist and furniture decorator, skilled in the application of metallic paints. 

[05:35] Hiler called his design for the Ladies’ Lounge a Prismatarium that would, in his words, “function in relation to the world of color as a Planetarium does for the heavens.” Hiler was fascinated with color, and wrote several inscrutable books on the subject, filled with pronouncements like “Pay no attention to books published before the 1920s” and “Black is not a color to a spectroscope but it is a sensation to us.”  

[06:08] On the ceiling, wedge-shaped spokes of Hiler’s primary colors radiate outward. The colors are arranged in 10 groups of three. The spokes are broken into tones, shades, and tints. Hiler proposed a revolving central light fixture, which was never built, but simulated here, that would rotate through his primary colors, demonstrating interactions of color and light.

[06:40] Sea Forms is the tile mural by Sargent Claude Johnson on the terrace overlooking the cove. Sargent Johnson was an accomplished African American modernist painter, ceramicist, and nationally recognized sculptor. He was already an active member of the Bay Area arts community when he was hired as a supervisor by the Federal Art Project. In an interview years later, Johnson said, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me an incentive to keep on working, where at the time things looked pretty dreary and I thought about getting out of it.”  

[07:23] To cut the difficult tile shapes for the mural, Johnson needed a skilled tile mason. William Gaskin, the San Francisco painter tasked with hiring artists, found Mohammed Zyani applying for work. “We had this fellow who kept coming in looking for a job, and he told me he and his father had done the mosaic work for the Mosque of Paris. I wanted to see what he could do and I gave him a piece of tile, and he cut it in the shape of a star.”  

[07:56] For the entryway to the building, Johnson carved sections of two-inch thick, green, Vermont slate in his studio at Shotwell and 15th Street, which were attached to the building using wires and plaster. The canopy carving is of marine life... fish, turtles, birds, and shells while the side panels show work life on the waterfront. Thomas Albright, the late San Francisco art critic, called Sargent Johnson “one of the most innovative Bay Area artists of the period.” And his graceful lines and partially abstract forms are unique among WPA artworks in the city.  

[08:40] “Frog” and “Seal,” the two sculptures in polished granite on the terrace, are the work of San Francisco artist Beniamino Bufano. Bufano originally created 10 animal sculptures to be installed at Aquatic Park. Thomas Albright wrote, “Bufano was an artists of his times. His themes were those of the anti-war and labor movements: peace, unity, brotherhood. He found in the world of animals his most appropriate subjects. Their forms, stripped down to the barest essentials, mirror perfectly the innocence and serenity that Bufano sought to express.” 

[09:22] Richard Ayer, a painter on the Presidio Chapel frescos, was assigned by Hiler to design and paint the third-floor banquet room. “Nautical Abstractions” covers the faces of four columns, several sections of wall, and the terrazzo floor. Ayer added sculptural relief to the walls and columns, using elements of wood, rope, and textured plaster. Shirley Staschen remembers, “Dick’s thing was not what you would call a collage but it was like wood cutouts to imitate the insides and outsides of ships. It was really lovely: very controlled gray tones throughout. And to look out of there and then right out on the bay and to look at Alcatraz was just beautiful.” 

[10:14] The opening day and dedication of the building on January 22nd, 1939 drew a crowd of 10,000. The San Francisco Chronicle called the building “A Palace for the People... for it belongs, every inch of it, to the people.” The crowd didn’t know that just days before the opening, the Federal Government, frustrated with endless design changes and construction delays, had turned the building over to the City of San Francisco. The City had promptly leased it to a private restaurant developer, Gordon Brothers Concessions, outraging Benny Bufano, a champion of public art.  

[10:59] Bufano removed his sculptures from the building to the beach, saying “I would rather have kids playing over my statues, than to have drunks stumbling over them.” And in protest, Sargent Johnson left his great tile mural unfinished.  

[11:17] Undaunted, the Gordon Brothers took over the building, and almost overnight, the “Palace for the People” became the Aquatic Park Casino, with only the beach level open to the public. For a brief time, the Casino was a hot spot for nightlife on the waterfront. But by the end of 1940, the Gordons were ousted in a storm of litigation, and the building was padlocked.  

[11:44] During World War Two, the building served as the headquarters for the 4th Army Anti-Aircraft Command. In 1948, the Marine Reserve staged a mock amphibious assault on the beach. After the War, the building sat empty until Karl Kortum, a maritime historian with a love for the Age of Sail, approached the City with his idea for a museum dedicated to the maritime history of the Pacific. In 1951, the San Francisco Maritime Museum was born.   

[12:17] The Museum became a popular destination, but the years would be hard on the building. In 2006, it closed for a federally funded renovation, including the repair of water leaks that threatened to destroy the artworks. On the third floor, making matters worse, murals had been painted over, and walls were constructed, covering, and sometimes destroying, the original artwork.  

[12:46] It took two years of painstaking work by conservator Anne Rosenthal and her team to return the room to its original form. Every surface was examined inch by inch, the layers of paint removed, original colors determined by colorimetry, and the paintings meticulously restored and, where needed, recreated.

[13:29] Why was the artwork in this room held in such little regard? What it might come down to is the museum needed exhibit space and America was in a frenzy of modernization. And these eccentric, abstract murals from the 1930s weren’t considered worth saving.

[13:53] Today, the graceful form of the Aquatic Park Building still overlooks swimmers and rowers in the cove. A building outside of time... With its restoration, indifference and neglect have been replaced with a new appreciation for the building as a masterpiece of the WPA, once again fulfilling the goal of its creators that it be operated entirely for the public good. Its architecture, murals, sculptures, and mosaics live on as a monument to a vital chapter in the creative history of San Francisco and a perfect storm of talent, courage, imagination, and a civic commitment to public art.

[00:01] [Sounds of a sea gull over background music of stringed instruments.] 

[00:37] [Ringing bell.] The site of Aquatic Park was once called Black Point Cove. [Waves on the shore.] Public recreation and private development have clashed in the cove since the mid-1800s, [tooting factory whistle] when a woolen mill and a metal smelter polluted the waters of a popular swimming spot. [Tooting factory whistle.] The swimmers and rowers of the Dolphin and South End Rowing clubs led the fight to protect the cove and for the establishment of an Aquatic Park. Plans for the park were underway in 1931, when it became a victim of the Great Depression. 

[01:14] San Francisco was hit hard by the Depression, with thousands out of work [crowd murmuring], and in 1934, a bitter general strike. [Tear gas, gun, siren.] Yet the city retained a vibrant creative culture. Ground zero was North Beach [beeping car horn], where artists lived with cheap rents in the Montgomery Block [tooting car horn] and bars and cafés like the Black Cat attracted a heady mix of artists, writers, and labor activists. [Café sounds.] “I think North Beach is the most interesting place in America,” — Sargent Claude Johnson. 

[01:53] [Sound of hammering.] Work on Aquatic Park resumed in 1935, thanks to funding from a new federal agency called the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, created by President Franklin Roosevelt to provide jobs for the 13 million Americans out of work.  

[02:13] Aquatic Park was one of the most ambitious WPA projects in California, including a public building with facilities for Bay swimmers [beach sounds] and bleachers for aquatic sports events. Dressing rooms and lockers would be provided for 3,000. Showers would be activated by photoelectric “eyes,” and blasts of warm air would dry swimmers.  

[02:39] The architect was San Franciscan William Mooser III. His Streamline Moderne design evoked a ship at port. The horizontal orientation of the building, its rounded edges, and nautical references are typical of the style.  

[02:58] Under the WPA’s Federal Art Project to fund the visual arts, San Francisco was directed to “employ all employable artists in need.” Two thousand applications were received in the first two weeks, and the creation of artworks for public buildings, like the Bathhouse, provided jobs for hundreds of the city’s artists and artisans.  

[03:21] The choice to direct the decoration of the Aquatic Park Building was Hilaire Hiler. Originally from Minnesota, Hiler had just arrived in San Francisco from Paris, where his after-hours club in Montparnasse attracted legendary artists and writers of the time. Shirley Staschen, a painter on the Coit Tower murals, and veteran of the protests there, encouraged Hiler to apply for work with the Federal Art Project. A stroke of luck for Hiler, who was soon put in charge of 40 workers, including a team of 20 artists and a sizable budget. 

[04:01] Henry Miller said, “The two things I remember about San Francisco are Hiler’s murals and the cable cars. Hiler’s lobby mural is unlike anything painted during this Golden Age of San Francisco mural painting. Rather than the Social Realist imagery of the Coit Tower murals, Hiler’s design for the lobby was a synthesis of ideas he brought with him from Paris, where his circle included artists connected to the Surrealist movement. [Background music.] 

[04:38] Hiler wrote, “The design throughout the building is based on the spiral, a form rich in symbolic as well as biological significance, connected with the sea and the beginnings of life... The decorations were conceived as a flowing arabesque carrying around the room. There was no beginning and no end. Undersea life is organic. There are no straight lines.” 

[05:09] Many of the creatures populating the mural, both real and imaginary, were painted by Anna Medalie, an accomplished artist and furniture decorator, skilled in the application of metallic paints. [Background music.]  

[05:35] Hiler called his design for the Ladies’ Lounge a Prismatarium that would, in his words, “function in relation to the world of color as a Planetarium does for the heavens.” Hiler was fascinated with color, and wrote several inscrutable books on the subject, filled with pronouncements like “Pay no attention to books published before the 1920s” and “Black is not a color to a spectroscope but it is a sensation to us.”  

[06:08] On the ceiling, wedge-shaped spokes of Hiler’s primary colors radiate outward. The colors are arranged in 10 groups of three. The spokes are broken into tones, shades, and tints. Hiler proposed a revolving central light fixture, which was never built, but simulated here, that would rotate through his primary colors, demonstrating interactions of color and light. [Background music.] 

[06:40] Sea Forms is the tile mural by Sargent Claude Johnson on the terrace overlooking the cove. Sargent Johnson was an accomplished African American modernist painter, ceramicist, and nationally recognized sculptor. He was already an active member of the Bay Area arts community when he was hired as a supervisor by the Federal Art Project. In an interview years later, Johnson said, “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me an incentive to keep on working, where at the time things looked pretty dreary and I thought about getting out of it.”  

[07:23] To cut the difficult tile shapes for the mural, Johnson needed a skilled tile mason. William Gaskin, the San Francisco painter tasked with hiring artists, found Mohammed Zyani applying for work. “We had this fellow who kept coming in looking for a job, and he told me he and his father had done the mosaic work for the Mosque of Paris. I wanted to see what he could do and I gave him a piece of tile, and he cut it in the shape of a star.”  

[07:56] For the entryway to the building, Johnson carved sections of two-inch thick, green, Vermont slate in his studio at Shotwell and 15th Street, which were attached to the building using wires and plaster. The canopy carving is of marine life... fish, turtles, birds, and shells while the side panels show work life on the waterfront. Thomas Albright, the late San Francisco art critic, called Sargent Johnson “one of the most innovative Bay Area artists of the period.” And his graceful lines and partially abstract forms are unique among WPA artworks in the city.  

[08:40] “Frog” and “Seal,” the two sculptures in polished granite on the terrace, are the work of San Francisco artist Beniamino Bufano. Bufano originally created 10 animal sculptures to be installed at Aquatic Park. Thomas Albright wrote, “Bufano was an artists of his times. His themes were those of the anti-war and labor movements: peace, unity, brotherhood. He found in the world of animals his most appropriate subjects. Their forms, stripped down to the barest essentials, mirror perfectly the innocence and serenity that Bufano sought to express.” 

[09:22] Richard Ayer, a painter on the Presidio Chapel frescos, was assigned by Hiler to design and paint the third-floor banquet room. “Nautical Abstractions” covers the faces of four columns, several sections of wall, and the terrazzo floor. Ayer added sculptural relief to the walls and columns, using elements of wood, rope, and textured plaster. Shirley Staschen remembers, “Dick’s thing was not what you would call a collage but it was like wood cutouts to imitate the insides and outsides of ships. It was really lovely: very controlled gray tones throughout. And to look out of there and then right out on the bay and to look at Alcatraz was just beautiful.” 

[10:14] The opening day and dedication of the building on January 22nd, 1939 [crowd sounds] drew a crowd of 10,000. The San Francisco Chronicle called the building “A Palace for the People... for it belongs, every inch of it, to the people.” The crowd didn’t know that just days before the opening, the Federal Government, frustrated with endless design changes and construction delays, had turned the building over to the City of San Francisco. The City had promptly leased it to a private restaurant developer, Gordon Brothers Concessions, outraging Benny Bufano, a champion of public art.  

[10:59] Bufano removed his sculptures from the building to the beach, saying “I would rather have kids playing over my statues, than to have drunks stumbling over them.” And in protest, Sargent Johnson left his great tile mural unfinished.  

[11:17] [Sound of laughter.] Undaunted, the Gordon Brothers took over the building, and almost overnight, the “Palace for the People” became the Aquatic Park Casino, with only the beach level open to the public. For a brief time, the Casino was a hot spot for nightlife on the waterfront. But by the end of 1940, the Gordons were ousted in a storm of litigation, and the building was padlocked.  

[11:44] [Sound of drumbeat.] During World War Two, the building served as the headquarters for the 4th Army Anti-Aircraft Command. [Muffled sound of orders shouted.] In 1948, the Marine Reserve staged a mock amphibious assault on the beach. After the War, the building sat empty until Karl Kortum, a maritime historian with a love for the Age of Sail, approached the City with his idea for a museum dedicated to the maritime history of the Pacific. [Applause.] In 1951, the San Francisco Maritime Museum was born.   

[12:17] The Museum became a popular destination, but the years would be hard on the building. In 2006, it closed for a federally funded renovation, including the repair of water leaks that threatened to destroy the artworks. On the third floor, making matters worse, murals had been painted over, [sounds of circular saw and hammering] and walls were constructed, covering, and sometimes destroying, the original artwork.  

[12:46] [Sounds of cart wheels on floor.]  It took two years of painstaking work by conservator Anne Rosenthal and her team to return the room to its original form. Every surface was examined inch by inch, the layers of paint removed, [extended background music] original colors determined by colorimetry, [sound of machine whirring] and the paintings meticulously restored and, where needed, recreated. [Background music.] 

[13:29] Why was the artwork in this room held in such little regard? What it might come down to is the museum needed exhibit space and America was in a frenzy of modernization. And these eccentric, abstract murals from the 1930s weren’t considered worth saving. [Background music.] 

[13:53] Today, the graceful form of the Aquatic Park Building still overlooks swimmers and rowers in the cove. A building outside of time... [sea gull squawking] With its restoration, indifference and neglect have been replaced with a new appreciation for the building as a masterpiece of the WPA, once again fulfilling the goal of its creators that it be operated entirely for the public good. Its architecture, murals, sculptures, and mosaics live on as a monument to a vital chapter in the creative history of San Francisco and a perfect storm of talent, courage, imagination, and a civic commitment to public art.