Randall Museum

Museum

Randall Museum (museum, run by the Recreation and Park Department): $1.2M paid to contractors for work here, $250.4M budgeted for its department in FY2025, 2,161 employees on the payroll, 4 city documents at the Internet Archive, every figure linked to its source. The Josephine Randall Junior Museum sits on Corona Heights, and the department's annual reports of the mid-1980s catalogue what it offered: programmes for young people in the natural sciences, art, crafts, rockets, computers, birdwatching, a boat club, an airplane club, live animal displays and basic mechanics, with films shown daily in the museum's own theatre. Its improvements have come from unusual sources. In 1986 the Recreation and Park Commission approved transferring money from the Llewella Lewis bequest to the Bureau of Architecture for a master plan and improvements to the museum. The Open Space Acquisition and Park Renovation Fund's priority lists then carried it twice — a $20,000 allocation, and an environmental centre, garden and pond given first priority in December 1991. The museum has also had to defend its setting: a 1986 commission report describes negotiations between neighborhood residents, park staff, city planners and developers over the development of three lots along Museum Way, in an attempt to reduce view blockage and traffic congestion beside the museum. The building was rebuilt from the inside under a $3.5 million permit — new geology and zoology exhibits, the live animal exhibit, a science lab, multipurpose room, lobby and offices, an added elevator and accessibility upgrades — with a further $150,000 for a STEM lab and toddler room and $400,000 for a single-storey public restroom. Source: SF Controller open data and the Internet Archive.