Coit Tower (also known as the Coit Memorial Tower) is a 210-foot (64 m) tower in the Telegraph Hill neighborhood of San Francisco, California, overlooking the city and San Francisco Bay. The tower, in the city's Pioneer Park, was built between 1932 and 1933 using Lillie Hitchcock Coit's bequest to beautify the city of San Francisco. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2008.[1]
The Art Deco tower, built of unpainted reinforced concrete, was designed by architects Arthur Brown Jr. and Henry Temple Howard. The interior features fresco murals in the American fresco mural painting style, painted by 25 different onsite artists and their numerous assistants, plus two additional paintings installed after creation offsite.
The structure was dedicated to the volunteer firemen who had died in San Francisco's five major fires.[3] A concrete relief of a phoenix by sculptor Robert Boardman Howard is placed above the main entrance. It was commissioned by the architect and cast as part of the building.[4]
Although an apocryphal story claims that the tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle[5] due to Coit's affinity with the San Francisco firefighters of the day, the resemblance is coincidental.[6]