In Sutro Heights, one of San Francisco's most beautiful parks, can be found, almost forgotten, reminders of an elegant and cultured past. Located around the lawns and shrubs are lions, deer and the goddess Diana. These statues are among the remains of the estate of San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro.
His home was surrounded by landscaped gardens, fountains and a conservatory. He generously opened the grounds of this Eden on Sundays to the citizens of his City. His home is gone (demolished in the 1930s) and today his estate is a beautifully situated and well-maintained city park with incredible views of the Pacific. It's located on the bluff above the Cliff House. There are several benches on the parapet at the top of the park where hours can be lost.
The statues remaining in Sutro Heights are actually concrete copies made in the 1980s of the badly-vandalized original statues. The Park Service decided that the four remaining statues (pair of lions, stag and Diana) were so far-gone and so important that it was better to remove them to safe storage and replace them with exact duplicates cast from the originals.
ReplyDeleteTruth be told, these present copies are actually "copies of copies" since all the original statues installed in Sutro Heights in the 1880s were concrete copies of European classics, such as Diana the Huntress, many of which in turn were already copies of Roman or Greek statues.
The head aches about copies of copies of copies of copies.