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Home, Sweet Watery Home
The New Steinhart Aquarium

Keith Howell

On September 27, 2008, the California Academy of Sciences, the oldest scientific institution in the West, begins the next chapter of its storied life. That is opening day for the new, state-of-the-art building, designed by architect Renzo Piano, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. It holds four intertwined components under its living roof: a museum, planetarium, research center, and aquarium.

Although the research activities are the least well known to the public, they formed the genesis of the institution and gave rise to the Academy’s name. In the midst of the Gold Rush, several individuals, excited by their physical surroundings and all the new animal and plant species there, came together to organize and record their discoveries. Soon afterwards a “museum” began with a cabinet of curiosities in a back office.

During the 19th century, many of the leading scientists who came through San Francisco were associated with the Academy: geologist Josiah Whitney, surveyor and astronomer George Davidson, ichthyologist and first Stanford president David Starr Jordan, and proto-environmentalist John Muir, who began the Sierra Club under its roof.

As the organization grew, it moved from place to place until real estate tycoon James Lick provided impressive accommodations at 833 Market Street. It was a beautiful setting, dominated by a staircase, wrought-iron galleries, and a stuffed mastodon. Unfortunately, at 5:12 a.m. on April 17, 1906, it all came to a crashing end. The Great Earthquake reduced the building to rubble, while its precious collections were all but destroyed in the subsequent fire.

As the trustees cast about looking for a place to rebuild, the Academy’s most famous curator, botanist Alice Eastwood, prevailed upon Golden Gate Park Superintendent John McLaren, who generally disliked the idea of buildings in his park, to allow the new Academy to be rebuilt in his domain.

The Beaux-Arts Halls of Mammals and Birds opened in 1916; the more classical Steinhart Aquarium came seven years later. It was the dream of Sigmund Steinhart, who provided the initial funds, and his brother Ignatz, who set the process in motion. Both brothers died before the building’s completion. Under the terms of their wills, the aquarium had to be a part of the Academy, with operating costs paid by the City of San Francisco. The annual allocation was $20,000. (The City now contributes around $4 million a year.) For a time, before the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, the Academy, and especially the aquarium, was the most popular attraction in town. Over the next 70 years, every child within a 50-mile radius of San Francisco visited at least once on a school excursion.

As the Academy expanded, a further nine buildings were grafted on to the earlier structures. But the years took their toll. The saltwater pipes corroded, the roof leaked, and the ventilation system put the aromatic bone preparation room too close to the store. Visitors complained. Moreover, the buildings were still too small. When the size of its footprint permitted by the City was maxed out, there still wasn’t enough room for the Academy’s collections. As other facilities throughout the West, especially universities’ biology departments, changed their priorities to focus on molecular structures of species rather than their morphology, collection rooms became laboratories, and many of their acquisitions--butterflies, skeletons, artifacts--were transferred to the Academy.

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