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A huge scale model of the City by the Bay made by artists during the Great Depression will go on display later this year.
After years of searching and an attempt to locate the model in Ingleside, the San Francisco Scale Model Project announced that a home has been found for the 1,500-square-foot wooden model of San Francisco.
The San Francisco Scale Model is expected to be put on display at the forthcoming Art + Water arts venue in Pier 29 this winter. It will be the first time in over 80 years that the 125 sections of the artist-made model will be shown together.
“The model found a natural home with us through one of the SF Model champions, Stella Lochman,” Art + Water co-director Rebecca Teague said. “Our location on Pier 29 and our mission of opening up arts and culture to the wider Bay Area made it an easy fit, and the conversation grew from there.”
The model was created in the 1930s by the Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, a New Deal government program designed to stimulate the economy by putting artists to work.
Admirers over the decades have sought a permanent home for the model beginning in 1940, when its display room in City Hall, where it was on display, was repurposed during World War II, forcing the model into storage.
It had spent some time on display with short stints across the city in 2019 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and at San Francisco Public Library branches, where corresponding neighborhood-related portions were on view.
In 2023, plans to bring the model out of UC Berkeley’s storage and to City College of San Francisco were proposed by the college’s Women’s and Gender Studies instructor Leslie Simon, who said that the college tried to exhibit it in Smith Hall in 2020, but plans changed due to the pandemic.
In 2024, students and faculty were given a presentation on the model’s history and what it would take to bring it out of storage.
“We can say how thrilled we are that the dream that began with sections of the Model showing in the neighborhood libraries in 2019 is now being realized because of the visionary folks at Art + Water, headed up by writer Dave Eggers,” Simon said.
Toward the end of May this year, the model’s project team received a generous challenge grant, according to a news release, that funded the model’s move from storage to Art + Water.
However, dundraising is not complete. The project team is seeking gifts of $5,000 or more that will go toward the $120,000 installation. There will also be a launch in Summer-Fall 2026 for a public crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for signage and interpretation.
“The model belongs to the story of San Francisco, and bringing it to Pier 29 is part of our larger commitment to creating open, welcoming spaces where art, history, and the public meet,” said Teague, Art + Water’s co-director. “We want people to feel invited in, to revel in the magic of this city, and to leave with the sense that we are all in this together.”
