War Memorial Opera House

Stand for a moment on the pavement of Van Ness Avenue and look up. Pale grey stone rises in front of you, cool to the touch even on a warm afternoon. Traffic hums behind your back, buses sigh at the kerb, and yet the building seems to hold its own kind of quiet. Pairs of tall columns stand along the front like a line of patient guards. This is the War Memorial Opera House, and it has been waiting for an audience since 1932.

The name is the first clue to its story. This is not only a theatre. It was built as a memorial to the men and women who served in the First World War. Veterans' groups and music lovers spent years arguing over what such a memorial should be, and who should control it. The answer was a pair of buildings: this opera house, and its near twin to your right, the Veterans Building. Between them lies a quiet garden court, set back from the street behind iron gates.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. This is widely described as the first opera house in the United States owned by a city. In older cities, opera houses were usually private ventures, paid for by wealthy subscribers who owned their boxes. San Francisco took a different path. Public money and public donations built this house, and the city still owns it today. In a sense, every San Franciscan is a part owner of the building in front of you.

The architect was Arthur Brown Junior, the same man who designed City Hall, the great domed building across the street behind you. Turn around, and you can see how the two speak the same architectural language. Both follow the Beaux-Arts style — a grand, ordered approach to design taught in Paris, built on symmetry, classical columns, and careful proportion. Brown wanted the whole Civic Center to feel like one composed space, not a scatter of separate buildings.

The opening night came in October 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. Many Americans had lost jobs and savings. Even so, the city filled the new hall for a performance of Puccini's Tosca, an opera of love, jealousy, and political cruelty set in Rome. Picture the scene. Evening gowns and dark suits, motorcars lined along the avenue, and a city choosing to celebrate music in a very hard year.

Now step closer to the entrance. Notice how the arched doorways pull you inward, and how the scale shifts as you pass from the street into the lobby. Inside, the vestibule has a high, coffered ceiling, divided into deep square panels, and warm gilded detail. The design slows you down. It is meant to separate the noise of the city from the stillness of the auditorium, a few steps at a time.

The auditorium itself seats more than three thousand people, arranged in a broad horseshoe of tiers. Above the seats hangs a large chandelier, shaped like a burst of light, in the streamlined geometry of the Art Deco era. That is a small surprise. Outside, the building looks backward to ancient Rome. Inside, the lighting looks forward to the modern age of the 1930s. Two eras meet under one roof.

The building's most dramatic chapter had nothing to do with opera. In the spring of 1945, as the Second World War was ending, delegates from fifty nations gathered in San Francisco to create the United Nations. Many of the main sessions of that conference took place here, on this stage. The UN Charter itself was signed next door in the Veterans Building in June 1945. A memorial to one world war helped give birth to a plan for preventing the next.

History returned six years later. In September 1951, the peace treaty between Japan and most of the Allied nations was signed in this opera house. It is often called the Treaty of San Francisco. It formally ended the war in the Pacific and restored Japan's independence. So within a few years, the same stage that hosted Tosca also hosted the end of one of the largest conflicts in human history.

The ground beneath you has tested the building too. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake shook the Bay Area hard, and the opera house was damaged. The repair was long and careful. In the mid-1990s, the building closed for a major seismic strengthening and renovation, while the companies performed elsewhere. Engineers added structural support hidden inside the walls, so that the historic interior could look as it did, while standing far stronger.

Today the house is home to two companies. The San Francisco Opera performs here, mostly through the autumn and summer seasons. The San Francisco Ballet takes the stage for much of the rest of the year, and its winter Nutcracker has become a local family tradition. The ballet also has a strong claim of its own: it is often credited with staging the first full-length Nutcracker in America, back in 1944.

If you come for a performance, arrive a little early and walk the lobby levels slowly. Look at how people gather — friends meeting by the stairs, students in their best clothes, long-time subscribers greeting each other by name. The house is grand, but the crowd is a real cross-section of the city. Across the street, Davies Symphony Hall, home to the city's orchestra, completes a small district of music around these few blocks.

Before you leave, step back to the edge of the pavement once more. Let your eye move from the columns of the opera house, across the garden court, to the Veterans Building, and then over your shoulder to the dome of City Hall. Notice how the stone of all three catches the same light. This was a city trying to say something about memory, peace, and public life, in stone. As you walk away, listen. Somewhere inside, someone may be rehearsing.