Great to have a dedicated Sutro Question & Answer Forum! Good luck and much success to the initiators.

My question: What happened to the statue "Triumph of Light" that A. Sutro inaugurated in 1887, and that was supposed to be the geographical center of the City?

-- Shirley Chao (paochiun@thinklink.com), February 06, 2001

Answers

I'm not sure what happened to the statue. (I keep thinking about researching the topic.) However, the base of the statue is still here on Mt. Olympus (or was the last time I looked.) At the top of Masonic (southern end), you will find a street called Upper Terrace. Head down that Street in a sw direction (away from Buena Vista Park) and you will find that it ends in a circle around a little park with the statue base in it. The base of the statue is very large, about 20 feet tall I would guess, and it looks out towards the South of Market area.

-- Joe Humphreys (jhum@who.net), February 24, 2001.

There is a book in the SF history Center of the Library about the statue. I read somewhere that the statue fell into neglect and destroyed by the element

-- Craig Smith (palmedo@aol.com), August 07, 2001.

The statue was there into the middle of this last century, but as it had suffered vandalism - and private residences had since been built around the tiny park where the base is, the city simply removed this formerly more public attraction.

If anyone is interested in looking into the matter, the Mayor's office leaves that task to the Arts Commission, and they count on the Department of Public Works to pick up broken statues.

My own research on the stature is available at this web site: http://www.digitalcity.com/sanfrancisco/vtours/main.dci?page=statues Click Here: Digital City: San Francisco - Bay Area Att

-- Hamilton Barrett (Mimereader@aol.com), August 14, 2001.

I lived on Downey Street in 1954-55 and as a kid we used to go up to what we called "Statute Hill". At that time the slope was accessible from Ashbury Street, which curved around the base of "Statue Hill". There was little development so we kids could easily follow trails either up to the top, where the complete statue stood on its base, or contour around the side of the hill and enjoy the greatest view in the neighborhood. It was many years later that I discovered that "Statue Hill" was actually Mount Olympus.

-- Angus Macfarlane (aamacfarlane@earthlink.net), October 22, 2001.