War Memorial Opera House

The Opera House is owned and operated by the City and County of San Francisco — its own calendar of events says so on the masthead — and the city has been maintaining it, and arguing about how, since it opened. The War Memorial trustees' statements of activities read like a caretaker's ledger: toilet facility improvements, repairs to the main gold curtain, new carpeting, an increase of lighting, all set against what the trustees describe as the urgent need of a building then thirty-two years old and the want of sufficient funds to keep it. That prompted a full study. A 1965 report on the rehabilitation and modernisation of the War Memorial Center, prepared for the trustees by Public Structures with Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, inspected the Opera House and Veterans Building together and set out to provide facilities for opera, symphony, ballet and theatre — and for the art museum and the veterans' organisations — comparable to any in the country and at reasonable cost. The building has never only been a theatre: the school district held its teachers' institute here in 1939, and a 1975 environmental report for a new performing arts centre describes the parking lot immediately south of it that would become Davies Symphony Hall. Two current contracts cover the roof and the lifts, agreed at $6.80 million and $607,576, of which $342,000 and $70,787 have so far been paid.