ART : Forever De Young. Or Is It? : Problem: San Francisco’s 100-year-old museum is in dire need of repair. Solution: Demolish and rebuild. As long as the city can find $90 million to pay the bill.

The M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park celebrated its 100th birthday last week.

Museum patrons marked the occasion on Thursday at a $375-a-ticket, black-tie dinner and preview of an exhibition of Claude Monet’s late paintings of Giverny, loaned by the Musee Marmottan in Paris.

Two days later, the public was invited to a free “Centennial Saturday” including musical performances, children’s activities and a drawing for airline tickets to European art centers.

The venerable institution’s fans have much to celebrate. Although the De Young began life as a cabinet of historical curiosities, dubbed “the city’s attic,” it now boasts an expansive collection of American art, including pre-Columbian and Native American material and 100 paintings bequeathed by John D. Rockefeller III. And as San Francisco’s primary venue for traveling exhibitions, it is the city’s most popular museum.

But the De Young’s building hasn’t grown old gracefully and because of it, the museum now stands at a crossroads. Battered by earthquakes and trussed up in an undignified cage of steel and concrete, the Spanish Colonial Revival structure is unlikely to survive many more birthdays.

According to a study commissioned by the museum, the building needs a $61-million seismic upgrade. Faced with that costly prospect, museum officials have launched a campaign to tear down the museum and build a new one in the same location at an estimated cost of $89 million, plus an additional $6.8 million for an underground garage. But that would require passing a city bond issue and raising private funds--neither of which will be easy.

“It’s a dramatic conclusion, but once we got into it, we found problems everywhere we looked--concrete, hollow walls, ceilings, electrical,” said Harry S. Parker III, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a city-owned organization comprising the De Young and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park.

Unlike the Legion of Honor’s historic building--which has been closed since 1992 for a $33-million renovation and seismic upgrade--the De Young’s building is a melange of additions and modernizations, Parker said. A seismic retrofitting would require gutting 80% of the interior.

“Once you gut the De Young, there isn’t much left,” he said. “It has been stripped of its ornamentation and changed over the years. There’s very little you can point to and say, ‘This is original.’ ”

Built for the Midwinter International Exhibition of 1884 and opened as a museum the following year, the De Young’s first home was torn down in 1929. The present structure was built in several stages from 1917 to 1925, then expanded from 1928 to 1930 and again in 1955. A wing was added in 1965 to house the Asian Art Museum, an independent institution that is scheduled to relocate to the old Main Library in San Francisco’s Civic Center.

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Parker and the De Young’s trustees decided to advocate a new building after a committee of board members studied three options: renovation, a combination of renovation and new construction, and demolition of the existing facility and construction of a new museum. The committee voted unanimously on Feb. 28 to endorse the demolition/rebuild option, and the full board accepted their recommendation on March 16.

The plan will be presented at a public meeting on April 26. Then the board is expected to vote on a resolution endorsing the project and to begin the process of placing a bond initiative on the ballot for the November, 1996 general election. Plans call for a $61-million bond, the cost of a seismic upgrade. The rest of the funds would be raised privately.

So far, opposition to the board’s proposal is largely a matter of “nostalgia and sentiment,” according to Parker. The building has devotees because it is familiar and invokes pleasant memories, he said. “We’ve had some plaintive letters about losing all the nice old buildings, but you have to wonder how closely the writers have looked at them,” he said. “With all that’s gone on, we in California have gotten more sophisticated about the price of earthquake rehab. You’d better be sure you have a building that’s worth the expense.”

He expects resistance to the notion of building a garage under the proposed new museum. Unlike residents of Los Angeles who can’t imagine a future without cars, San Franciscans tend to think that automobiles will be phased out, he said. And instead of viewing a garage as a way to lessen traffic congestion in the park, “people here believe that if you build a garage, they will come,” he said.

No architect has been hired and no building plans have been developed, but Parker anticipates a new museum that would incorporate features of the present building such as the tower, tile roof and cornices. The existing museum is a 230,000-square-foot structure, including 90,000 square feet occupied by the Asian Art Museum. The new De Young would be 20,000 square feet larger, but it would have a smaller footprint because a two-level basement would be added. The top floor of the basement would be used for museum storage, operations and offices, while the bottom floor would be for parking, Parker said.

The question of the De Young’s fate is only part of a thorough upheaval among San Francisco’s museums.

In January, the Museum of Modern Art opened a new building in the Yerba Buena District, a burgeoning downtown art center. The renovated California Palace of the Legion of Honor is scheduled to reopen Nov. 11. The Mexican Museum is anticipating a move in 1998 from Fort Mason Center to Yerba Buena in a new 50,000-square-foot facility to be designed by architect Ricardo Legorreta, and the Asian Art Museum is scheduled to open in the Civic Center in 1999.

“Nothing much happened to museums here for almost 50 years,” Parker said. “There was an incredibly long period of stasis, but suddenly everything sprang into action.”

He credits the changes to three factors: damage suffered in the 1989 earthquake, the development of Yerba Buena and the arrival of a new generation of art patrons.

He expects a tough fight on a bond, however. “The fact that the Asian Art Museum passed an issue is encouraging, but the two situations are different,” he said. “Theirs was phrased as a save-the-old-Main-Library issue. It was a preservation bond issue; ours is a rebuild issue.”

The De Young bond is expected to go on the ballot at presidential election time in 1996 and Parker is banking on fortuitous timing.

“We hope that people will be thinking about improving education and cultural growth,” he said.