Book Signing Event with Jim Haas, The San Francisco Civic Center: A History of the Design, Controversies and Realization of a City Beautiful Masterpiece

The San Francisco Civic Center with its French Baroque domed City Hall is the largest collection of monumental municipal building in the United States. Created by Mayor James Rolph and design by UC Berkeley architect John Galen Howard, the Civic Center represents one of the best manifestation of the early twentieth century American City Beautiful Movement. However, the information presented to the world, the region and local citizens about San Francisco rarely mentions it. Although more than a billion dollars has been spend to restore the Civic Center buildings damaged by the 1989 earthquake and to build three new ones, the surrounding area was neglected.

James Haas, who has devoted nearly thirty-five years to advocacy for the renewal and completion of Civic Center addresses this ignorance and neglect in his new book The San Francisco Civic Center: The History of the Design, Controversies and Realization of a City Beautiful Masterpiece by telling the story of the 150 year history of Civic Center describing the personalities, the politics and the dreams up to the present. He also played a crucial role in much of the recent development in the area including, after twenty years of effort, convincing Mayor Edwin Lee in 2014 to direct the Planning Department to prepare a public realm plan for the area. The final draft of that plan has been recently released to the public for discussion.

The Chamber is pleased to sponsor a discussion by James Haas (a Chamber member) of some themes from his book which will lead to a short presentation of the draft Public Realm Plan by Nicholas Perry of the Planning Department and Willett Moss of CMG Landscape Architects who oversaw the preparation of the Plan. This will be a great opportunity to understand better our civic treasure as well as to see the exciting future in store for it.