Murals in Coit Tower Give View of the ‘30s

Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill is endowed not only with the best 360-degree view of San Francisco, its bay bridges and other natural wonders, but also with a splendid inner lookout on California history in its recently restored Depression-era murals, “Aspects of Life in California, 1934.”

The Diego Rivera-influenced Social Realist frescoes have undergone a three-year restoration and are open to the public after a long period of neglect.

The 27 frescoes and recessed lunette paintings are a time capsule of life in California in the ‘30s, depicting sports and agriculture, home life and heavy industry, labor unrest and newspaper headlines, and scenes from street life, even including an auto accident and a stick-up.

“Aspects” was an extraordinary collaboration of 26 master painters and their 19 assistants in a pioneer federal arts project that followed the completion of the tower--a memorial to San Francisco’s volunteer firemen bequeathed by Lillie Hitchcock Coit--in 1933. Most visitors think the murals are the work of one artist, so skillfully blended were the many talents.

In these days of uproar over federally funded art and the disintegration of Communism, the murals are doubly fascinating, for “Aspects” was controversial when it opened for its supposed Communist undertones.

In one mural, for example, a man reaches for a book by Karl Marx; in another, grim workers demonstrate in a May Day parade. The exhibit closed a few days later while a debate raged, and some of the offending art was actually destroyed.

Coit Tower sits above North Beach and the waterfront, within walking distance of the best Italian cafes in town, cable car lines, the financial district, Fisherman’s Wharf and Chinatown. It is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 5:15 p.m.