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The hill
Telegraph Hill once had an observation deck that signaled ships
In 1849 the site became home to a two-story observation deck. Information about incoming ships was broadcast to city residents by an optical semaphore system. An electrical telegraph replaced it in 1853 and was destroyed by a storm in 1870.
The bequest
A bequest to add to the beauty of the city paid for the tower
Lillie Hitchcock Coit, a wealthy socialite who loved to chase fires, left one third of her fortune to the city. The tower is often wrongly said to honor the volunteer firemen. Their memorial is the statuary in Washington Square.
Engine Co. 5
At fifteen, Coit threw down her school books to haul a fire engine
At the age of fifteen she saw the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 respond to a fire call on Telegraph Hill when it was shorthanded. She called out to bystanders to help get the engine up the hill, and she became the company's mascot.
The tower
The tower is Art Deco concrete and was dedicated on October 8, 1933
The tower, built between 1932 and 1933, is of unpainted reinforced concrete. A concrete relief of a phoenix by Robert Boardman Howard is above the main entrance. A story that it resembles a fire hose nozzle is apocryphal, and the resemblance is coincidental.
210-foottower on Telegraph Hill
The murals
22 onsite artists painted the interior murals in the New Deal
The murals are in the American Social Realism style. They formed the pilot project of the Public Works of Art Project. After Diego Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural was destroyed, the Coit Tower muralists protested by picketing the tower.
22onsite artists, plus their assistants
Day 1, afternoon
It comes after Chinatown. Then Lombard Street.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Coit Tower, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.