Art: Lily the Vamp

Oh, pure and true and kind in all thy ways!

Not less a servant of thy Lord

Because thy ways are little in accord

With the suave blandness of these silken days.

Thou, self-contained yet tender,

What carest thou for popular power or praise ?

—Rev. Alfred Todhunter.

It was in 1886 that the flowery rector of San Francisco’s St. John’s Episcopal Church indited these lines to the recently widowed Lily Hitchcock Coit, already such a civic adornment that her photograph was entombed in the cornerstone of the new City Hall. This week all the public dignitaries of San Francisco and a few rheumy veterans of its honored Volunteer Fire Companies will climb to the top of Telegraph Hill to pay a last honor to Lily: the public dedication of a gleaming 181-ft. concrete shaft erected in her honor. At its base will be the thing Lily loved best in the world: the rickety, brass-trimmed Knickerbocker Fire Engine No. 5.

It is often a great solace to sedate socialites to have their pioneer ancestors safely framed on the dining room wall rather than seated at the dining room table. Because Lily died in 1929, because there are many conservative souls who vividly recall her goings on, because the memorial was erected with her own money, and finally because its site is the most prominent in all San Francisco, for many months there was agitation against erecting the tower at all. At the last minute the Park Commission bowed to the extent of changing the name from Coit Memorial Tower to Coit Tower. But no lady ever more richly deserved a lighthouse.

She was born in West Point in 1843, christened Eliza Wyche Hitchcock, which she soon changed to Lily for euphony. Her father, a doctor, followed the Gold Rush with the high title of “Medical Director of the Pacific Coast.” Lily, aged 7, sailed around the Horn with her parents. Her first view of San Francisco was a graphic lesson in the value of a fire department. The town had just been burned out; most of the citizens lived in tents. Most of her time she spent about the San Francisco fire houses learning to polish nozzles, cut washers, braid drag ropes.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Lily and her Virginia mother departed for Paris, but in 1863 she was back in San Francisco to receive the greatest honor of her career, election as full member of Knickerbocker Fire Co. No. 5.

San Francisco’s fire companies were not only a potent political force, like those of New York, but the equivalent of the city’s swankest clubs. Lily soon was as ardent a vamp as ever answered a midnight alarm or kept his rubber boots at the head of the bed. She was married about this time to Howard Coit (no relation to Cleveland’s or Buffalo’s Coits), then the leather-lunged Caller of the old Mining Exchange, but matrimony could not keep Lily out of the fire house. She answered every alarm, smoked, drank and played poker with the boys. She signed all her letters “Lily Hitchcock Coit—5.” “L. H. C.—5” was embroidered on her chemises, and wherever she was on Oct. 17 she would drink a toast in iced champagne “to the Birthday of Number 5!” Oct. 17 found her once in Palestine, with champagne but no ice. She had snow brought down from the Lebanon Mountains to do Knickerbocker No. 5 justice.

Lily (5) was one of the first ladies in San Francisco to try the advantages of a peroxide bleach. Her husband objected, so as a woman of spirit she shaved her head and ordered a trunkful of wigs, red, green, blue, one to match each of her gowns. Her husband and father both died in 1885.

In 1903 occurred a tragedy which kept her from California for more than 20 years. Alexander B. Garnett, a deranged Confederate veteran whom she had dismissed for obscenity in a whist game, attempted to shoot her in the Palace Hotel. A Major J. W. McLung who struggled with the man was shot and killed. The trial and all the life of Lily Hitchcock Coit were a boon to California journalism. On the advice of friends she went abroad, and abroad she stayed almost continuously until 1924.

Then she went back. There were no vamps in the fire houses, there was scarcely a fireman in San Francisco who could harness a horse. In 1925 she suffered a stroke, spent her last four years speechless in Dante Sanatorium. July 20, 1929 she died, childless. Her fireman’s badge was buried with her.

Contrary to popular impression, money for the Coit Tower was left not for a personal memorial but to the city Art Commission “to expend the same in an appropriate manner for the purpose of adding to the beauty of said city, which I have always loved.” Architect Arthur Brown Jr., designer of San Francisco’s City Hall, designed a monumental lighthouse, a fluted column rising from a severely simple base, its apex pierced with galleries for an observation platform. From its tip will blaze a flame that no fireman can quench, fed by city gas.