In Hot Water : San Francisco Motel Pool Mural Proves Too Colorful for State Law

Visitors to the Phoenix Inn may think the 45-foot egg-shaped pool of water in the motel courtyard is a swimming pool.

It looks like a swimming pool. It’s filled with water and it even has the telltale chlorine smell of a swimming pool.

But a sign posted beside it declares, “This Is Not a Swimming Pool. This Is Art.”

The confusion is all because of a piece of Pop Art on the pool bottom.

No one is allowed to swim in the motel pool because of a state law requiring all pool bottoms to be painted white for safety reasons.

Chip Conley, 29, owner of the newly refurbished Phoenix Inn, didn’t know about that law in January when he commissioned New York artist Francis Forlenza to paint a mural on the pool bottom.

“We didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into,” Conley said. “It’s a good rule for a large public pool, but it’s silly to apply this to all situations.”

Conley has enlisted the help of San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and is hoping to get the state Legislature to pass a bill exempting his pool.

The mural, titled “My Fifteen Minutes/Tumbling Waves,” features white and pale blue 6s and 9s on a navy blue base, with dabs of yellow and red scattered about. The painting is dedicated to Pop Art pioneers Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol and also includes a tribute to the pop culture figure of Bob’s Big Boy.

“If either of those guys walked in here today, they would say, ‘Hey, this is art,’ ” said Forlenza, who quotes Warhol’s saying, “Everybody is famous for 15 minutes.”

Conley said the mural is just right for the hip image he has brought to the 44-room Phoenix since taking over the motel in the city’s ethnically diverse, low-income Tenderloin district in 1987. Built in the 1950s, the motel used to be known as a place that offered X-rated movies and catered to prostitutes. Phoenix visitors now include pop stars such as Linda Ronstadt, Sinead O’Connor and Tracy Chapman. It displays 250 pieces by local artists with paintings in every room and a sculpture garden in its central courtyard.

“You go to most hotels in America and you have really bad art on the walls,” Conley said.

Forlenza, who has done several murals in Long Island homes, had been working on the project for two months and the mural was nearly complete when he and Conley discovered the painted pool was in violation of state law.

City heath officials, fearing liability if anyone is injured, will not approved a permit for the swimming pool. Under the law, decorative designs that might be mistaken for people are specifically prohibited, said Lorraine Anderson of the San Francisco Environmental Health Department.

“We’re not able to allow an exemption in this project,” Anderson said. “There’s not much room for negotiation on this.”

But Forlenza said his pool design looks “nothing like people.”

“They say the shapes look like people, (but) my friends don’t look like Gumby,” Forlenza said.

For now, the city will not force Conley to paint over the mural as long as he calls it “art.” But Forlenza and Conley envisioned the project as an interactive piece where viewers could literally immerse themselves in art.

Instead, they have found themselves immersed in politics.

Conley, who has been active in the Tenderloin neighborhood surrounding the Phoenix, first sought help from Supervisor Terence Hallinan, a supporter of many small arts organizations.

Last month, Hallinan agreed to set up a pool-side lunch with Mayor Agnos at the Phoenix to allow the artist to present his case. At the lunch, the mayor became so enamored of the pool, according to Agnos’ spokesman Art Silverman, that he asked his driver to bring his portable phone and invited Assembly Speaker Brown to join them.

Brown, who happened to be driving in the neighborhood, also was impressed with the pool, and offered to help Conley save the artwork.

Bob Scarlett, a legislative counsel to the Assembly Speaker, said he is looking into legislation to exempt the pool from state law.

In 1988, the Legislature passed a similar exemption for the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, where the pool was painted by well-known British artist David Hockney in a bid to revive the 63-year-old hotel’s sagging fortunes.

Since the luncheon, city health officials have indicated some kind of compromise for the Phoenix Inn might be worked out. Conley has offered to take extra safety measures if the city lets him keep the underwater mural, promising to maintain 24-hour surveillance and to cover the pool from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m.

Now back in New York, Forlenza is heartened that his mural might be saved but said he remains leery of bureaucrats. His lesson in politics has inspired his next project.

“I’m planning an (art) installation on the scary influence of government on artists,” he said by telephone Monday. “Big Brother shouldn’t determine what is art.”