Coit Tower
— a pale column the fog finds first.
Not only on a wall.
“A pale concrete column on Telegraph Hill, finished in 1933 with money Lillie Hitchcock Coit left to the city she'd spent her childhood chasing fire engines through. The shape is plain: fluted, two hundred and ten feet of art deco, set in the small park at the top. From the observation deck the body of San Francisco reads at one glance: the bay, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge. Inside the base, twenty-seven painters of the Public Works of Art Project covered the walls in 1934 while the country was still in the Depression. The frescoes are still there. People go up for the view and stay for the murals.
Coit Tower, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Coit Tower stands on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, two hundred and ten feet of unpainted reinforced concrete set inside Pioneer Park. The hill rises to roughly two hundred and seventy-five feet above San Francisco Bay, in the Italian-American neighbourhood of North Beach, and the tower's observation deck takes in Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, and the Bay Bridge in one slow turn. The structure was funded by a bequest from Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a San Francisco socialite who left the city about a third of her estate for civic beautification when she died in 1929. Construction finished in 1933. The site is administered by the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The tower is the work of Arthur Brown Jr., the San Francisco architect also responsible for the dome of City Hall and the War Memorial Opera House. The exterior is plain art deco, fluted at the crown, and Brown denied the persistent rumour that the shape echoes a firehose nozzle in tribute to Lillie Coit's affection for the city's volunteer firemen. Inside the base, twenty-seven painters worked through the spring of 1934 on a continuous fresco cycle commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal art programme of the New Deal. The murals depict California life during the Depression in a style that takes after Diego Rivera, and they remain almost entirely unchanged today.
The tower is open daily except major holidays, with admission to the ground-floor murals free and an elevator fee for the observation deck. The site is reached by car up Telegraph Hill Boulevard from North Beach, or on foot from the Embarcadero by way of the Filbert Steps and Greenwich Steps, which climb past private gardens and the wild parrots that nest in the cypresses on the eastern face of the hill. Parking at the top is limited, and the line for the elevator on a clear weekend afternoon can run forty minutes. The quietest hour for the murals' natural light is usually the hour after opening, before the bus tours arrive.