A 71-year-old lode of San Francisco history is looking for a home.
It’s a three-dimensional scale model of San Francisco, built of wood by the Works Progress Administration and presented to the city in 1940. It was an extraordinary freeze-frame of what San Francisco looked like just before World War II, and it measured 41 by 37 feet when it resided at City Hall.
Do you really mean a complete 3D model of San Fransisco? Wow. Can you show us that here?
Yes, it does exist, but most of it is in storage at the University of California, Berkeley. The northeast quadrant (downtown SF) is used by Prof. Peter Bosselman of the City and Regional Planning Department at Cal for teaching purposes, and is housed in Wurster Hall on campus. We would like to see the whole thing reunited and on public display. Unfortunately, there’s no photo of the complete model today, but some historic photos of it exist. See our original news post on the model to see the photos (click on the image for a full-size picture)