Art: Palace Saved

Two months ago a memorial show of the works of the late great Architect Bernard Maybeck at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor reminded San Francisco of the melancholy fact that Maybeck’s most romantic work, the lofty pink-tan stucco Palace of Fine Arts, erected as a temporary building for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, was rapidly becoming a moldering relic (TIME, April 6). The plaster was chipped, paint had flaked away, and holes had been opened by wind and weather in the roof of the great rotunda. Last week San Francisco Multimillionaire (calculating machines, lumber) Walter S. Johnson, 74, donated a handsome $2,000,000 to save and restore Maybeck’s old palace.

With a matching $2,000,000 promised by the state, Johnson hopes that the Palace of Fine Arts will once again glow with its old splendor, become as much a symbol for San Francisco as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris. Says Johnson: “It’s a building with a soul; it refused to die.”