Palace of Fine Arts, Bernard Maybeck, photo by Tom Gibbons.Last year the Maybeck Foundation signed a groundbreaking contract with the Recreation and Park Department of the City and County of San Francisco. The Department owns Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts and has for decades struggled with its maintenance. The Foundation became the private fund-raising partner for the Palace of Fine Arts restoration. Since signing the contract, it raised over three million dollars for the Palace and has advised the Department on a Historic Structures Report and Restoration Master Plan. A National Register application has just been approved by the State.
“It is a huge effort in tough financial times. But we are off the ground and moving forward rapidly,” says Foundation Executive Director William Marquand. “San Franciscans love the Palace—that’s the bottom line.” Restoration work on the Palace lagoon and grounds is scheduled to start in late 2004.
Originally designed by architect Bernard Maybeck for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, the Palace’s poetic classicism is comprised of four main components: the freestanding colonnade and rotunda, the gallery building, and the landscaped lagoon.
The Palace is the site’s only memento from the 1915 Expo. Thanks to the decades of dedication of prominent citizens such as Phoebe Hearst, the Palace was saved and at first served as a park, tennis facility, and storage. In the 1960s, a citywide movement, unprecedented in scale in the U.S., helped fund the reconstruction of the main structures. Maybeck’s plaster and wood buildings were given new life in concrete. Yet funding fell short. The broad sweep of classical columns and pediments on the gallery façade were omitted.
The 1960s reconstruction efforts coincide with the growth of the preservation movement in America. Although the Palace of Fine Arts efforts were outside of other preservation movements in San Francisco, it was an early example of a large-scale project gaining funding largely through community support.
Many problems face today’s Palace. The reconstruction left no maintenance endowment, which, compounded by years of heavy use, has hastened the decay of the site. Standard repairs such as a seismic retrofit, vegetation, and graffiti removal are compounded with the erosion of the lagoon edges and the rapid deterioration of the rotunda ceiling due to leaks. Long-range goals for the Palace include the establishment of an endowment for its maintenance and the reconstruction of the gallery façade.
Author Sara Shreve is studying architectural preservation as a graduate student at Cornell University.
Originally published 1st quarter 2004 in arcCA 04.1, “Press Check.”
