For whom the bell tolls: monument
Repairs needed for design flaws in Spanish Civil War veterans memorial
All that’s left of a monument on San Francisco’s waterfront to honor American veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War is a steel skeleton.
The rest of the 40-foot-long memorial dedicated just 10 years ago was quietly hauled away last month for major repairs, a victim of flawed design and neglect.
“I’m actually glad they took it down. It was unacceptable,” said Marina Garde, executive director of the New York-based Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, which donated $400,000 to erect the monument and for many years paid for its upkeep.
“We wanted the monument to be taken care of,” she said, “but the city didn’t do it.”
The San Francisco Arts Commission, which is responsible for the Lincoln Brigade monument and 400 other monuments and statues, says the city did its best. The monument has to be repaired because the original design had a serious flaw that caused portions of it to fade and crack.
Garde said the problems were with the design and also with neglect, because the city was slow to make repairs. She called the slow pace of repairing the monument “a nightmare.”
The damaged portions are the heart of the monument. They were 44 panels made of onyx stone that told the story of the Lincoln Brigade in words and pictures — how 2,800 American volunteers fought against fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. The reporter Martha Gellhorn was quoted on one panel: “They deserved our thanks and respect, and got neither.”
Peter N. Carroll, a Stanford teacher who is chairman emeritus of the Lincoln Brigade Archives, called it “a beautiful monument.”
Though it may have been beautiful, the design, by Ann Chamberlain and Walter Hood, didn’t hold up. The words and pictures were engraved on onyx, which produced a translucent look in the sunlight, a reminder of the Spanish landscape, Hood said.
It was striking, but changes in temperature, even in San Francisco’s mild climate, caused the onyx to crack, said Allison Cummings of the Arts Commission.
Hood thought the moisture in the air on the waterfront was also a factor. He said he had tested the material in a mockup of the monument in his Oakland studio, without problems. “But the San Francisco location was different,” he said.
The onyx panels began to fail six or seven years after the monument was dedicated. Cummings said the city removed the cracked panels, one by one. By 2016, eight years after the monument was installed, a third of the panels had been taken away.
Cummings said then that the monument would be repaired in six months if all went well.
By this summer, two years later, only half the panels were still in place, and some of those had been damaged by graffiti. The monument looked so unsightly that Garde said it was “an insult to the memory of the Lincoln Brigade.”
The Arts Commission then decided to remove all the panels and recreate the monument using laminated glass instead of onyx. It has contracted with Hood to do the work.
All the panels were removed by late July. The only part left is the steel frame, which looks like a piece of construction equipment.
“Is this a monument?” asked Fran Herman, who was visiting the Embarcadero with her children last week. “It looks like a piece of the Bay Bridge.”
The long delay in removing and repairing the monument is frustrating to the Lincoln Brigade Archives. “The Arts Commission is very nice,” Garde said, “but the city is so slow. It’s moving slowly, but it’s moving. It’s been a nightmare.”
Hood said the restoration should be finished in the first part of 2019. The project will cost about $140,000, with the city and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives each paying half, Cummings said.
What’s left of the Lincoln Brigade monument is still on its original site, just behind the Vaillancourt Fountain, across the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building. Though Cummings insisted that the decline of the monument was not due to neglect, the area was in a forlorn state last week.
The back end of the fountain was adorned with blue graffiti. Pigeons roosted on the fountain and their droppings were all over the skeleton of the Lincoln Brigade monument. There was a small homeless encampment under the nearby palm trees.
“It’s a mess,” said Herman, who was passing by. “The city never cleans up anything.”
Carroll, the chairman emeritus of the Brigade Archives, said he will be pleased to see the monument restored, no matter how long it takes.
“It will be a big deal,” he said. “These men and women proved that there is a time and a place to stand up for an ideal, to stand up and take a risk. And history proved them right.”