Coit Tower

Before you look up, feel the wind. On Telegraph Hill it rarely stops. It comes off the bay carrying salt and the faint smell of eucalyptus from the slopes below. Gulls turn above you, foghorns sound somewhere out on the water, and in front of you a pale, fluted column rises straight from the hilltop. This is Coit Tower. For nearly a century it has stood here as a lookout, a memorial, and a gallery of some of the most argued-over art in America.

Start with the hill itself, because the hill came first. In the years of the Gold Rush, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a signal station stood up here. When a ship was sighted coming in through the Golden Gate, the station raised a signal so the merchants below knew a cargo was arriving. That is how the place got its name, Telegraph Hill. It was an early kind of telegraph, one made of wooden arms and flags, long before electric wires reached the city.

Now to the woman behind the tower. Her name was Lillie Hitchcock Coit, and she was one of the most unusual figures of old San Francisco. She was known for wearing trousers when few women did, for smoking cigars, and for playing cards in places polite society avoided. Her deepest passion, though, was firefighting. As a girl, according to the well-known story, she ran to help a volunteer fire company that was short of hands. Those firefighters made her their honorary member.

That company was the Knickerbocker Engine Company Number Five. Lillie kept its badge for the rest of her life, and she remained devoted to the city's firefighters. When she died in 1929, she left part of her fortune to San Francisco. Her wish was simple. The money should be used to make the city she loved more beautiful. The city used part of that gift to build this tower, and part to fund a monument to volunteer firefighters in Washington Square, just down the hill.

Here is the first thing most visitors get wrong. Many people say the tower was shaped to look like the nozzle of a fire hose, as a tribute to Lillie's firefighters. It is a lovely idea, and you will hear it often. But it is a popular tale, not documented fact. The architects, Arthur Brown Junior and Henry Howard, designed a clean, fluted column in the Art Deco style of the time. Any resemblance to a hose nozzle, they suggested, was a happy accident.

Look closely at the surface. The tower is made of reinforced concrete, poured and finished in a soft, unpainted grey that turns cream or gold depending on the light. The fluting runs up the shaft in long vertical grooves. At the top, a ring of arched openings surrounds the observation deck. There is no carving, no statue at the summit, no decoration fighting for attention. That restraint is the point. From the streets below, the column reads as one clear line against the sky.

The tower was completed in 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression. Millions of Americans were out of work, and artists were among the hardest hit. So the second surprise of this place is waiting inside, on the ground floor. Walk in, and the walls are covered with murals. They were painted in 1934 under the Public Works of Art Project, one of the first federal programmes to employ artists during the New Deal, the government's response to the Depression.

More than two dozen artists worked here, alongside their assistants. Most of them painted in true fresco, a technique where pigment is laid into wet plaster so the colour becomes part of the wall itself. Their subject was California at that moment. You will see farmworkers in the fields, dock workers on the waterfront, a busy city street, a newsstand, a library, factories, cattle, and orchards heavy with fruit. Together the panels form a wide portrait of ordinary working life.

Not everyone was pleased. Several of the artists admired the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and some of their work carried pointed political messages. Look for small details. In one panel, a reader reaches for books by Karl Marx. In another, newspaper headlines report labour unrest. In 1934, with a major waterfront strike shaking the city, these images caused an uproar. The opening of the murals was delayed, and at least one detail was painted over. Most of the work, however, survived.

Take your time with the city scene by Victor Arnautoff, often called City Life. It is crowded with people. There is a traffic accident, a robbery in progress, a man reading the paper, fire engines, and shop windows. Some of the faces are said to be portraits of the artists themselves and their friends. Standing in front of it, you are looking at San Francisco as these painters saw it in the hard years of the Depression, down to the hats and the cars.

When you are ready, an elevator carries visitors up to the observation deck, and you will need a ticket for it. At the top, the arched windows frame the bay in every direction. To the east, the Bay Bridge stretches toward Oakland. To the north, Alcatraz sits low on the water. On a clear day, the red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge appear to the west. Below, the pointed Transamerica Pyramid rises from the Financial District.

If you leave on foot, take the stairs down the eastern side of the hill. The Filbert Steps and the Greenwich Steps drop through gardens of flowers, ferns, and trees, past small wooden cottages that seem far from the downtown towers. Listen carefully along the way. You may hear loud, chattering calls and see a flash of bright green. These are the wild parrots of Telegraph Hill, a flock of escaped and released birds that have made this neighbourhood their home.

Before you go, turn back once more toward the tower. Notice how the wind is still moving through the pines of Pioneer Park, and how the concrete has taken on the colour of the hour. Think of Lillie Coit, running beside a fire engine as a girl, and of the painters on their scaffolds in 1934. Their work is still here, inside these walls. And the hill still does what it did in the Gold Rush. It watches the ships come in.