Coit Tower

A view of the tower taken from Lombard Street. All pics sourced from Wikipedia.

Coit Tower is an integral part of the San Francisco skyline and has always been a staple of it's modern folklore. Located on Telegraph hill, it's (IMHO), a beautiful piece of art deco built at the height of it's popularity in 1933. 

Named after the famous Lillie Hitchcock Coit who was born in West Point, New York, in 1843, she moved to the San Francisco area with her parents. After they died, she inherited a large fortune, and like most notable people from the Bay Area, became a rather famous eccentric for her time. She was known for smoking cigars and wearing trousers long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so. She was also an avid gambler and would often dress like a man in order to gamble in male-only establishments popular in the area. 

A picture of Lillie Hitchcock Coit circa 1862. 

She also quickly gained the nickname "Firebelle Lil", as she loved to chase fires in the early days of the city's history. Before December 1866, there was no official city fire department, and any fires that broke out in the city (frequently due to all the wooden buildings), were extinguished by numerous volunteer fire teams in the area.

She sated that the pivotal moment in her life that enchanted her with the act of firefighting was when she was fifteen, she witnessed the Knickerbocker Engine Co. No. 5 respond to a fire on Telegraph Hill. Seeing that they were shorthanded and struggling to get the engine up the hill; she threw her school books to the ground to help, and called out to other bystanders to help in getting the engine up the hill to the fire. Ever since that day, Coit became the Engine Company mascot and eventually an honorary firefighter. She would always insist on going with the firefighters on every call, much to the chagrin of her parents, frequently riding with the Knickerbocker Engine Co. 5. She was notable for attending with them in all street parades and celebrations that they participated in as well as attending their annual banquets. 

Seeing it lit up at night is especially neat.

Not only was she active in assisting the local firefighting teams in performing their jobs, but she was also known for directly helping when volunteer firefighters were ill or injured, often visiting them in their sickbeds, and when one would die, Coit would send flowers and attended the funerals. She did this throughout the remainder of her life, and after her death, her ashes were placed into a mausoleum with a variety of firefighting-related mementos.

With her passing in 1929, she insisted in her will that one third of her fortune, amounting to $118,000 (over $2 million today) should "be expended in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of the city which I have always loved." With that, two memorials were built in her name using that fortune. One of those being the famous Coit Tower, and the other was a sculpture depicting three firemen, one of them carrying a woman in his arms. The tower was commissioned by Herbert Fleishhacker (the same who made the pools I wrote about), who was the San Francisco Art Commission president and it was designed by architect Arthur Brown.

The other memorial made in her name with her funds located in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park.

Of course, San Francisco being what it is, not everything can be cool, especially in the 1930s when the ugly head of socialism was seeping through everything. So instead of leaving well enough alone by having a monument made for and in tribute to a pretty cool person, FDR had to implement a bunch of socialist art programs as propaganda and less than a year later, the tower had commie mural tributes painted all over it. 

Not only that, but because of all the dickheads doing the BLM riots that burned down all our cities in the time of the infamous commie coof virus, the city also appeased all the communists by removing the prominent statue of Christopher Columbus in June of 2020, that had stood outside the entrance of the tower since 1957. So screw those guys. Thankfully, we still at least have the tower itself to pay tribute to a pretty cool person. 

Sadly, no longer there.