An outside firm has been hired to perform an audit of the 98 statues and monuments in SF, and recommend which ones should be removed or altered if they "no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for.”

You may recall that a statue at Civic Center called “Early Days” was removed in 2017 over its depiction of a Spanish vaquero standing over a Native American, a depiction that did not age particularly well. And then of course there was that Christopher Columbus statue by Coit Tower that was vandalized so many times that the city just tore it down and threw it into storage in June 2020. This was during the George Floyd protests, when several statues in Golden Gate Park were also toppled by protesters because of their subjects’ association with colonialism, slavery, or historical genocide.

And now the Chronicle reports that the City of San Francisco has commissioned an audit to determine whether any SF statues should be removed, or maybe just given disclaimers or content warnings.

“These monuments no longer represent the values that we say the city stands for,” SF Arts Commission senior project manager Angela Carrier said at a meeting last week, per the Chronicle, saying that SF's overall collection of 98 statues and monuments shows “a concentration that talks about power, privilege, white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism.”

This all sounds like a lovely and progressive idea. But progressivism, meet San Francisco bureaucracy. The bottom line here is nothing will be replaced or changed anytime soon.

The above image showing the locations of all 98 statues in SF (and the image is somewhat cropped) is from a May 2023 report from a 13-member San Francisco Monuments and Memorials Advisory Committee. And they take 70 pages just to conclude that there should be an “equity audit” of the statues.

Okay, so now we are at that “equity audit” stage, with the audit being performed by independent firm HR&A Advisors. And it’s being funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, so at least the city is not spending its own money on this (yet).

HR&A Advisors will then hold three public meetings in October, and make their final recommendation by January 2025. But Mayor Breed and the SF Board of Supervisors will have their say in this too, so there will be many opportunities for political grandstanding. Then there probably won’t even be a solid recommendation document until 2026, and that’s not taking into account any protests or legal appeals that might come up.

But it is well-known that SF has very few statues of women. We did recently add that statue of a woman in jogging gear at the Embarcadero, and there is a giant Burning Man statue of a nude woman likely coming to Union Square in June. But those are both temporary installations, and will not be considered in this audit.  

Related: Sir Francis Drake Statue Removed From Larkspur Ferry Landing In Marin [SFist]

Image: @Yoyohko via Twitter