State museum takes its show on the road
California Historical Society to sell its S.F. building and mount traveling exhibits
The California Historical Society, which painted its headquarters on Mission Street the same color as the Golden Gate Bridge to announce a lively exhibition schedule, is now selling that building and hitting the road.
To stay afloat, the nonprofit statewide educational organization, which was founded in 1871 in San Francisco, is liquidating its main asset, a remodeled 1922 hardware store around the corner from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
In an interview Sunday, Executive Director and CEO Alicia Goehring told The Chronicle that too much of the society’s financial resources are tied up in the building — and that those resources would be better spent on its mission of reaching a statewide audience through partnering with local outlets.
“We are going to leverage what we have always done in San Francisco, in order to provide resources to local historical societies throughout the state,” Goehring said from her home in Noe Valley. “The concept is to turn the exhibitions we do in San Francisco into traveling exhibitions and reach a lot more people than we do now.”
Goehring said there are more than 500 local and cultural history organizations throughout the state, ranging from the Del Norte County Historical Society at the Oregon border to the Lemon Grove Historical Society in San Diego County, and she expects exhibitions mounted by the historical society to visit them all.
“You might also see our exhibitions in an airport or a bank lobby,” Goehring said.
Goehring said the historical society will maintain a presence in San Francisco, and she hopes to find a smaller storefront to rent for the gallery and bookstore within the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. But the vast research library could be at a second location and the administrative office in a third location, maybe a downtown office building. Storage of the collection, which eats up half its space, could be in a fourth location somewhere in the greater Bay Area.
This will scatter a unique onestop resource that includes 2,400 square feet of gallery and bookstore space on the ground floor. Up a grand staircase is a research library and reading room, which offers access to 4,000 books, among a collection of 1 million items. The historical society charges a $10 admission fee for its galleries, but library use is free. It has a budget of $2.3 million, supported mostly by donations.
Since 1979, it has been the official state historical society, but that designation has never come with annual funding. What has kept it stable this long is its real estate. In 1956, it purchased the Whittier mansion in Pacific Heights and later expanded to a second home next to it, to accommodate the library. In 1993, the Pacific Heights properties were sold to move downtown to the former E.M. Hundley Hardware, which had some cultural significance as headquarters for Nancy Pelosi’s first congressional campaign. That building was gutted and rehabilitated.
When charismatic historian Anthea Hartig was named executive director in 2011, she embarked on a bold campaign to raise the profile of the venerable historical society. To start with, she had the building painted international orange, to link it to the 75th anniversary celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge.
With her flair for the dramatic, Hartig had the first 5gallon bucket delivered directly from the bridge authority.
A corresponding exhibition was mounted in the historical society’s gallery, and members were invited to dress in period clothing for the grand opening. Hartig arrived wearing a glamorous outfit from the 1930s, with hat and fur, in an openair 1937 Cadillac that had crossed the bridge on opening day. That was her statement that the fustiness of the old historical society had been dispensed with.
“I told the board, when they hired me, it was relevance or death for the organization,” Hartig later told The Chronicle.
For an exhibition on Spanish colonialism, Hartig had an entire wall from the 1840s home of early settler Juana Briones delivered into the gallery by forklift. When the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love was celebrated, in 2017, the historical society was the sponsoring cultural agency.
Along the way, $20 million was raised, and the annual operating budget quadrupled. But Hartig never felt anchored to her orange building. The most successful exhibition she organized was at the Palace of Fine Arts, to illustrate the 100th anniversary of the PanamaPacific International Exposition, in 2015. Attendance was estimated at 100,000.
One year later, Hartig secured a $1 million grant from the state library to study the feasibility of relocating the historical society to the Old Mint building at Fifth and Mission streets. Those wheels were slowly turning three years later, when Hartig was recruited to become the first female director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
“My hiring proved that the quality of exhibitions at CHS was Smithsonianworthy,” Hartig said by phone from Washington, D.C. After a nationwide search, her replacement, Goehring, was hired away from the Wisconsin Historical Society in September.
“Alicia will write the next chapter in the historical society’s long history,” said Hartig, who left the board in January. “I’m a true believer in their emerging statewide vision, as the Golden State needs its history now more than ever.”
Six months after Goehring began, the historical society was closed by the coronavirus, upending the normal schedule of two major exhibitions a year. But there have been no layoffs. The 14member staff has put together an online exhibition called “Tell Your Story,” which invites people to send in photos and share their experiences in the pandemic, to provide a historic record.
The enormous research library has been available throughout the pandemic through email and phone queries. The onsite collection is so large and delicate that Goehring predicted that it will take up to 36 months to move.
“You can’t just throw everything into the back of a pickup truck,” she said. “We have books in Spanish from the 16th century and documents like the petition for legal recognition of Black Californians, from 1862.”
No asking price has been set on the building, which is listed with Colliers International, as 18,470 square feet on three floors. The building has historic status and probably cannot be torn down without review.
Goehring said the dream lives on to convert the long dormant Old Mint into a California History Museum and Community Center. But that could be years away.
“Our vision does not depend on whether the mint project becomes a reality for us,” Goehring said. “We are going to move forward with our statewide approach. That’s why we are called the California Historical Society.”