Coit Tower Newspaper Mural

A Free Morning to Climb a Hill

A few weeks ago, I found myself staring out the window of my hotel in San Francisco looking directly at Coit Tower and the San Francisco Bay. It’s my favorite view of the city and recalls the strange and beautiful film, “Vertigo” by Alfred Hitchcock.

Many years ago on my first trip to SF, I visited Coit Tower as a tourist and remembered a series of Social-Realist murals inside. I had the vague memory that there was a mural dedicated to newspaper printing and possibly the Linotype. So, with a couple free hours before my flight home, I did what any self-respecting-Linotype-researcher would do: I hiked to Coit Tower with my camera in tow.

Arriving right as it opened at 10:00 AM, there were few tourists around and I had the bottom floor mostly to myself. I quickly took a series of photographs of the mural from many different angles, likely (or maybe not?) confusing the one and only worker at the tiny gift shop.

“Newsgathering” by Suzanne Scheuer

This mural depicting journalism, printing, and typesetting is one of 20 murals on the first floor of Coit Tower. It was painted by Suzanne Scheuer and Hebe Daum after Scheuer had first asked to paint the “industry” mural about oil, because she had a family connection to the petroleum industry but it was given to another artist.

In a 1964 oral history interview (which you can hear the artist’s voice!) Scheuer said that,

“The joke of it is I was first given a choice and I chose the oil industry. I was very enthusiastic to have done that. But I was also very shy and always kept in the background … so I was pushed to newspaper — which was as far removed from my interest or knowledge as anything could possibly be. I went to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper building. They were very, very helpful. I was allowed to go into any department and make sketches there…”

A Tour of the Mural

Looking at this diagram from Wikipedia, the “Newsgathering” mural is number six between “Surveyor” painted by sometimes assistant to Diego Rivera, Clifford Wight and “Library” painted by Bernard Zakheim. The 10-foot by 10-foot mural has a window right in the middle of the composition, but Scheuer made it work.

Starting at the top left and going clockwise, we see:

• Workers stirring the metal pot of liquid lead alloy that feeds the stereotype caster, which makes curved printing plates from flongs
• Compositors at the stone making up the newspaper while another worker is throwing old type and Linotype slugs into a “hellbox”
• Three Linotype machines with operators at two of the machines (Scheuer even got the different-colored keys correct!)
• A person at a telegraph or news wire machine while a woman is speaking on the phone
• Journalists writing and editing copy (while smoking, of course)
• A secretary taking notes from someone who is either taking a statement or dictating out directives
• A giant roll of newsprint below a painted copy of a newspaper
• A newsboy holding up a newspaper while standing in front of a large newspaper press

On the interior stool of the window Scheuer painted a copy of the “San Francisco Chronicle” newspaper with the headline “Artists Finish Frescoes Coit Tower Murals” and is dated April, 1934. How charming and meta.

Nothing More, Nothing Less

So there we are: just a fun, short blog post about a specific mural, in San Francisco, with a Linotype connection (of course).