Academy the basis for future museums
Natural history gave way to fine art — Exploratorium shows city’s spirit
It must have been a chaotic morning at the California Academy of Sciences building on Market Street after the earthquake hit in 1906. Books knocked off shelves, broken glass everywhere and an inferno that would destroy 50 years’ worth of collections quickly closing in.
Museum Director Leverett Mills Loomis exited the building in time to save his life, but not before grabbing two birds and stuffing them in his trousers.
“The water bird collection (in the new Academy museum) was begun anew with the two type specimens snatched from the fire by Loomis, one in each breeches pocket,” The Chronicle reported in 1908. “The Guadalupe petrel were the only survivors of the bird collection of nearly 25,000 specimens.”
In a city where it’s difficult to get anything built, erecting a museum has historically been a challenging endeavor. But there have been plenty of men and women who went ahead anyway, and the culture has benefited greatly from their trials. Enduring earthquakes, fires, recessions and bureaucracy, San Francisco has grown into a unique and thriving museum town.
The first San Francisco museum in newspaper records, the Pacific Museum, opened in 1852. Forced to compete with brothels, saloons and the other cheap vices available to miners along the waterfront, the museum at Clay and Kearny streets held attention spans with a 1,500-pound live grizzly bear.
Boasting the largest collection of living wild animals ever exhibited on this coast (plus “a full brass band in attendance every evening”), the Pacific Museum also employed one of the city’s first cultural celebrities — trapper and Barnum-style storyteller John “Grizzly” Adams.
“It is generally believed that the grizzly bear kills his prey by hugging it to death. Mr. Adams says this is not the case,” the San Francisco Bulletin reported in 1858. “He says they invariably catch (their prey) about the shoulders, and gnaw into the neck until the arteries are severed and the victim dies. Adams has witnessed the operation.”
San Francisco’s museums from the era often had a freak show quality. Even the most science-y sounding of the 1800s museums, Dr. Jordan’s Great Museum of Anatomy, had a sketchy infomercial vibe. The frequent advertiser in The Chronicle for 20-plus years ran a side business promising “any contracted disease positively cured by the oldest specialist on the coast.”
Staying mostly behind the scenes in the mid-1800s, the Academy of Sciences was building the foundation for the future of San Francisco museums. The collection of scientists and scholars worked initially without a public space, producing comparatively dry and grizzly bear attack-free news. (“The crustaceans have been placed in dustproof drawers and a small portion of the collection classified by Dr. Trask,” read one of a handful of reports covered by The Chronicle.)
The Academy opened its first museum in 1874, moving to Market Street in 1891. Woodward’s Gardens in the 1870s opened a museum to display his natural history collections and paintings. And as the 19th century came to a close, Chronicle Publisher M.H. de Young was scheming to open the city’s biggest museum yet in Golden Gate Park.
De Young was the driving force behind the California Midwinter Exposition of 1894, a world’s fair that threatened the status quo in Golden Gate Park, adding several large buildings and untold pedestrian traffic on boss gardener John McLaren’s pristine lawns. To gather support from City Hall, de Young pledged to turn over the museum to the park department when the Expo was over.
In coverage that took up the first three full pages of deYoung’s newspaper, the March 23, 1895, opening of the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum was described in magical terms. Water company President Charles Webb Howard was reportedly so enchanted, he
waived the museum’s outstanding $6,000 water bill.
“Instantly there was a good-natured scramble past the bronzed sphinxes standing near the main entrance and within twenty minutes the building, large as it is, was choked from the main floor to gallery,” The Chronicle reported. “Many who had come to criticize were quick to congratulate the promoters of the enterprise, and there were others who frankly promised assistance in making the departments more extensive.”
Suspicion of the positive coverage was warranted. De Young by that point was skilled at promoting a cause that benefited himself, his newspaper and his advertisers. (Among the opening day galleries in the de Young Museum: a collection of cereals and nuts provided by the Produce Exchange.)
But his pro-museum influence was huge, and he got The Chronicle behind every future museum campaign, including the Academy of Sciences’ move to Golden Gate Park in 1916, and the Legion of Honor art museum, a gift from the Spreckels family, which opened in the 1920s.
Once San Francisco became a museum town, every generation has produced patrons of the art who step forward and make it even better, from James Lick to the Fisher family.
Two from the 20th century deserve special notice:
Ignatz Steinhart: The San Francisco banker had been promising cash throughout the early 1900s to establish a museum, in part to honor his dead brother Sigmund. The San Francisco Examiner and park preservationists fought the move, accusing deYoung and aquarium supporters of trying to “make a Coney Island out of Golden Gate Park.”
When Steinhart died in 1917, his will was a love letter to San Francisco, making it clear that he wanted the citizens, not distant family members, to benefit from his banking fortune.
I am “a widower, unmarried, and under no promise or obligation of any kind to marry any woman. I am also without any issue in or out of wedlock,” Steinhart wrote. “Should any person or persons claim to be an offspring of mine, I hereby devise and bequeath to each of said person or persons the sum of $5.”
Along with dozens of other charities — Steinhart paid the entire Children’s Hospital $75,000 debt — he gave $250,000 to the museum, more than three times as much as his greatest pledge while he was alive.
Grace McCann Morley: The first director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (which became the Museum of Modern Art) was a one-woman fundraiser, organizer and advocate to bring art to every citizen of San Francisco. She brought Matisse to the museum the year after it opened, and later hosted the first U.S. museum presentation of Jackson Pollock. Meanwhile, she visited every school, civic club and women’s group that would have her, with topics such as “Why modern art?” and “You the artist in the home.”
When Morley left the museum in 1958 to start a second career in India, her gift included four portfolios filled with dozens of works from local artists she had inspired.
While the earlier museum-builders often made reference to New York and Paris counterparts, The San Francisco Museum of Art ushered in a new era of diverse and more focused museums that reflected the growing diversity, progressive values and daring spirit of San Francisco.
Perhaps no museum represents all of the above more than the Exploratorium, founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, brother of atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Early newspaper reports referred to the museum under construction as the Palace of Arts and Sciences. But it opened with Oppenheimer’s nickname for the project — he had been describing the space as an “exploratorium” since it was introduced.
“Even though I distrust artificial words,” Oppenheimer said in 1968, “this is one that fits the subject.”
The Exploratorium began as a grassroots project, with just $45,000 in first phase funding. While it was low budget in the beginning — a projection on bed sheet here, an exhibit made out of recycled bike parts there — the infectiousness and sincerity of the organizers helped turn everything into magic. The Exploratorium moved in 2013 from its Palace of Fine Arts warehouse to a more picturesque home on Pier 15. But it retains the hands-on unpretentious vibe that inspired other local museums of the past 40 years.
An incomplete list: El Museo Mexicano (1975), the Contemporary Jewish Museum (1984), Cartoon Art Museum (1984), GLBT History Museum (1990), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts
Meanwhile, the de Young and Academy of Sciences opened new museums, in 2005 and 2008. Both had bold designs, and opened to mostly positive reviews. And they helped to justify the hype that de Young presented more than a century earlier, when he declared San Francisco a budding museum town.
“The opening of the new museum in the Park was an event that will be noted in future histories of San Francisco,” a Chronicle editorial read, buried in that huge 1895 edition. “‘Great oaks from little acorns grow.’ And big museums generally have small beginnings, so not much is hazarded when the prediction is made that the … fair collection thrown open to the public yesterday will in time expand to such proportions that the fame of San Francisco’s museum will be worldwide.”