The Women's Building

This article is about the community center in San Francisco. For the arts and education center in Los Angeles, see Woman's Building.

The Women's Building

File:Front Women's Building.jpg The front of the building in 2006.
Location	San Francisco, California, United States
Coordinates
Type	Community center
Genre(s)	Women's movement
Opened	1979
Website
http://www.womensbuilding.org/

The Women's Building in 1998/1999.

The Women's Building is a women-led non-profit arts and education community center located in San Francisco, California, United States, which advocates self-determination, gender equality and social justice. The building has served as an event and meeting space since 1979, when it was purchased by the San Francisco Women's Center. The building is shielded from rising real estate costs in the Mission district because that group has owned the building since 1995. The four-story building rents to multiple tenants and serves over 20,000 women a year.

The structure was built in 1910 and was originally known as Turn Hall because it was part of the Turnverein exercise movement.

Building history

The San Francisco Women's Center began in 1973. By 1974, it hired its first full-time employee and had moved into a small storefront office. In 1976, its difficulty in locating a venue for the national conference on Violence Against Women it was organizing with other women's groups led it to search for a permanent space. Through 1978 and 1979, it raised funds to put down an initial $10,000 deposit, and then a $115,000 first payment towards the $535,000 purchase price of the building at 3543 18th Street.

In the first year of operation, the Women's Building was targeted by two attacks: an arson fire that caused $50,000 worth of damage, and a pipe bomb set off on the front steps of the building.

In 1997, the Women's Building underwent a major renovation prompted by mandatory seismic retrofitting. In the course of that effort, it evicted the Dovre Club, a bar that had been in the corner of the building on 18th and Lapidge Streets since 1979. The original owner of that bar had an oral agreement with the Women's Center that the bar could stay in place during his lifetime; after his death in 1997, the bar made an effort to stay in place but ultimately relocated.

The Mural

File:Women's Building - mural on side 2.JPG

Part of the mural on the side of the building, in 2015

Painted by seven women artists including, Juana Alicia, Miranda Bergman, Edythe Boone, Susan Kelk Cervantes (cofounder of Precita Eyes Muralists Association), Meera Desai, Yvonne Littleton and Irene Perez along with their helpers and volunteers in 1994, the mural titled MaestraPeace covers both the outside of The Women's Building as well as the interior entrance hall and stairway. It features images of feminine icons from history and fiction, and the names of more than 600 women written in calligraphy. According to the San Francisco Women's Center, "This spectacular mural is a culmination of a multi-cultural, multi-generation collaboration of seven women artists, and a colorful work of art that sings to our community."

Many of the original artists returned to the building for an update in 2000, an expansion to the inside of the building in 2010, and a major $130,000 restoration in 2012. That last restoration included a treatment process designed to preserve the colors of the mural for another 100 years.

See also

• Women, Culture, and Society

External links

• The Women's Building official website
• San Francisco Landmark #178 from Historic Sites and Points of Interest in San Francisco.
• Part of Pacific Standard Time exhibition having to do with the Women's Building
• Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Women's Building records