San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Coit Tower mural model lent voice to preservation
RUTH GOTTSTEIN 1922-2022
Ten years ago, Ruth Gottstein came to San Francisco from her home in the Sierra foothills to see the New Deal frescoes inside Coit Tower, and specifically to see the mural titled “Library” featuring a girl in a sailor suit dress, bobby socks and patent leather shoes.
That girl was Gottstein at age 11. The artist was her father, Bernard Zakheim, and when she saw that his artwork was cracking and chipping, she immediately joined a cause coalescing to do something about it.
She was 89 at the time, and her hearing was going, but she became the face of Proposition B, a 2012 San Francisco ballot initiative that mandated that the city prioritize revenue from Coit Tower tours to restore the historic murals, the tower itself and the surrounding Pioneer Park.
“The power of Ruth was her authentic voice and her ability to bring to the table her life experience in an incredibly effective way,” said Jon Golinger, founder of Protect Coit Tower, which sponsored the ballot initiative.
“She had instant and vivid recall for the events of 1934,” Golinger said, referencing the tumultuous year in which the interior of the newly built Coit Tower was painted in scenes even as the city took the brunt of a West Coast waterfront strike that evolved into a deadly clash between workers and police. “She remembered sounds, smells, and exactly how she felt when the artists were at work.”
Prop. B passed, and at the victory party at Original Joe’s in North Beach, Gottstein was handed a symbolic check from the city treasury for $1.7 million. The Coit Tower frescoes were closed for six months of renovation, and when they reopened in 2014, Gottstein returned for the celebration. It was the last time she saw herself painted on the firstfloor wall.
She died Aug. 30 in Volcano (Amador County), in the home where she lived with her son, Adam Gottstein, who confirmed her death. She was 100 years and 19 days old and almost certainly the last living participant involved in the creation of “Aspects of Life in California, 1934” on the interior walls of Coit Tower, which had been built the year before.
“Ruth was one of those people who lived through the Great Depression and whose memory of those events helped to keep them alive for later generations, including historians,” said Robert Cherny, a San Francisco historian and retired professor of history at San Francisco State University.
Gottstein put that memory to work as the publisher of “Coit Tower San Francisco: Its History and Art,” the only book devoted entirely to the murals, with text by her younger sister, Masha Zakheim, in 1983.
The guidebook was updated and reprinted in 2009. In the publisher’s note, Gottstein wrote about the other great event she witnessed in 1934, the San Francisco General Strike. The streetcar lines were closed by the strike, and Gottstein and her father walked from their home in Haight-Ashbury to join the march up Market Street.
“I vividly recall us watching flatbed trucks careening around the corner of Third and Market streets with frightened looking teenage
National Guardsmen clutching their guns,” she wrote. That resulted in Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, when two striking dockworkers were shot and killed. She watched from the sidewalk as the resultant funeral procession came up Market Street.
She had seen a lot for an 11-year-old, and it stuck with her.
“She was aware, she was loud, and she was an old activist from way back when,” Adam Gottstein said. “She was involved in the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, La Raza and the feminist movement.” When not campaigning or protesting, Ruth Gottstein ran her own publishing house, starting under the imprint of Glide Publications, the nonprofit arm of the Tenderloin church and later under her own imprint, Volcano Press. Among the books she brought to print is “Battered Wives” by Del Martin, published by Glide in 1976 and considered to be the first book published in the United States on the subject of domestic violence.
This month, San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin adjourned the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors in honor of Gottstein, whom he described as a “real-life Wonder Woman.”
Peskin noted that a community-driven effort to achieve National Historic Landmark status for Coit Tower would be in honor of Gottstein, who had helped hatch the idea at her kitchen table.
“She remained one of Coit Tower’s biggest champions and most knowledgeable historians,” Peskin said. “Even after retiring at the age of 95, Ruth’s dedication to literature, activism and public art remained constant until the time of her death this year.” Ruth Zakheim was born Aug. 11, 1922, in Los Angeles. When she was an infant, her parents, Bernard and Eda Zakheim, moved to San Francisco, settling in a house in upper Cole Valley. Bernard Zakheim opened a furniture factory in the South of Market and sold home furnishings to department stores, including the renowned City of Paris.
Zakheim lost the furniture manufacturing company in the financial crash of 1929, but by then he was pursuing art and had studied under famed muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico.
In 1939, when she was 17, Ruth Zakheim married Howard Gottstein, who was in the Army for the duration of World War II. At war’s end, they moved into a cottage on Macondray Lane on Russian Hill. Howard Gottstein went into business by opening Howard’s Dry Cleaning Service, which continued until 1996.
In the early 1950s, Ruth Gottstein read one of Stanton Delaplane’s Postcards columns in The Chronicle extolling the Gold Country town of Volcano in Amador County. She and her husband took Delaplane’s praise of the area to heart, buying a historic brewery built in 1856 that they converted into a residence.
Howard Gottstein died suddenly after open heart surgery in 1981. Widowed at age 59, she never remarried. In 1984 she moved to the converted brewery, where she also housed Volcano Press. It closed in 2016, after publishing 50 titles, mostly covering women’s health and domestic violence.
In 2012, Gottstein toured Coit Tower with Chronicle reporter Erin Allday. When she approached her image on the wall, she expressed the same disbelief as she had when it was painted in 1934.
“I never wore a blouse like that,” Gottstein said. “I don’t know what my father was thinking.”
The clothes she was wearing in the fresco are consistent with Catholic school uniforms, which grated her even more because she attended only public school. Her father was a socialist and put a copy of Karl Marx’s treatise “Das Kapital” in the painting and refused entreaties to remove it. Still, he was able to collect his fee of $619 for four months of work. When the Coit Tower mural project was over, the 11year-old model wrote a letter to the head of the Public Works of Art Project, a New Deal agency, explaining that her father needed more work. That letter, dated April 7, 1934, has made it into at least two history books regarding New Deal art.
“She was a very bold little girl,” said Cherny, the S.F. State historian. “She didn’t tell her father she was writing this letter to explain what her family needed to make it through the Depression.”
That letter helped Zakheim land a larger commission by the Federal Art Project to create 10 murals for the circular walls at Toland Hall, the main auditorium within UC Hall, the UCSF medical school. “History of Medicine in California” was completed in 1938, but its content was later deemed too disturbing and distracting, and it was wallpapered over in the 1940s.
The murals were later uncovered and still there when UCSF announced that UC Hall would be demolished and that either the Zakheim heirs had to find a way to remove the 10 curved panels at their own expense, estimated at $8 million, or they would probably be destroyed along with the building.
Saving “History of Medicine” murals became Gottstein’s last cause, and she wrote what her son described as “a scathing letter” to all 19 regents of the University of California demanding that the murals be preserved. Ultimately, the UCSF administration backed down and had each individual fresco panel airlifted to safety by crane last fall. The artwork is in storage, and UCSF has formed a committee as it tries to figure out where and how to display it.
She was progressive to the end. Her final decision was that she be terramated, the green alternative to cremation. Because terramation is not yet legal in California, her remains were driven by her son to Washington state, where she was turned into human compost.
Gottstein was predeceased by her husband and her daughter, Karen Gottstein. Survivors include sons Dan Gottstein of Mendocino County and Adam Gottstein of Volcano. A celebration of life will be held over Zoom in November.