Brooks Hall (originally Civic Center Exhibit Hall, nicknamed Mole Hall and Gopher Palace) is a disused event space underneath the southern half of Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco; a parking garage occupies the space under the northern half.
It was built in the late 1950s for $4,500,000, and dedicated on April 11, 1958. It was named after Thomas A. Brooks, a chief administrative officer of the City and County of San Francisco, who retired the same year the building was dedicated.
Design and construction
The concept of an exhibition space under Civic Center Plaza was advanced in a 1953 report written by city planners which called for the first reinvention of the Civic Center since the original 1911 design and also predicted what would become Moscone Center. Funding for the project was provided largely through $3M authorized by Measure A, passed by San Francisco voters in November 1954, and planning for the new space began in 1956.
Excavation for the site began on September 17, 1956, and citizens were encouraged to take plants from Civic Center Plaza for their personal use. The discovery of prior paving and building foundations on the site slowed construction, which had been scheduled to take 18 months after excavation was to be completed in February 1957, and Mayor George Christopher presided over the dedication ceremony on April 11, 1958, when the exhibition space was dedicated for Brooks. During construction, the local press dubbed the new space "Mole Hall" or "Gopher Palace", nicknames that profoundly irritated Mayor Christopher and which made headlines from coast to coast. The three-story subterranean parking garage immediately north of Brooks Hall was built starting in 1959; the two structures are separated with a seismic joint wide and a tunnel connects the two structures.
Brooks Hall was built with a tunnel underneath Grove Street, connecting the exhibition space to its neighbor to the south, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Drainage was one of the major challenges in building the underground space; at the time of construction, the water table was only below the Civic Center Plaza surface, and the excavation for Brooks Hall went to a depth exceeding . To keep the site dry, five wells were drilled deep along the north and west edges of the site and water was continuously pumped out of the site at a rate of per well.
The foundation consists of a large, thick concrete slab measuring floating on fill and sand. The overall dimensions of Brooks Hall itself are including mechanical spaces and offices, and overall height is , measured floor-to-floor. Inside, the ceiling has a vertical clearance of to the floor; square concrete pillars measuring on a side are spaced on centers to support the space. Forced air ventilation is provided; air may be heated (using steam from city plants) or chilled (using a chilled water system); aboveground, the ventilation structures near one playground are the most visible sign of Brooks Hall. The roof of Brooks Hall is covered with soil varying between deep. A report published in 1998 estimated the weight of Brooks Hall alone may not be sufficient to resist the buoyant uplift without the soil covering. The prime contractor for Brooks Hall was Theo G. Meyer & Sons; the architects were Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons collaborating with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; engineering was provided by H.J. Brunnier and DeLeuw, Cather & Co.
History
At the opening ceremony, Mayor Christopher bragged that the site had already been booked for 74 days in 1958, 104 days in 1959, and 117 days in 1960. However, just six months after opening, Saul Poliak, an innovator in industry trade shows, called Brooks Hall "distressingly inadequate" and had left "San Francisco unprepared for major conventions and exhibitions" while providing some faint comparative praise: "Your chief competitor out here is Los Angeles, of course, and right now they’re in worse shape than you are."
Notable exhibitions
One of the first shows booked at the new exhibition space was the 1958 American Medical Association convention. For that show, Wallace Laboratories had commissioned artist Salvador Dalí for an eye-catching piece to promote its new tranquilizer, Miltown. The result, Crisalida, a long walk-through cocoon-shaped gallery made from parachute silk intended to display the journey from anxiety to calm, made headlines nationally, including coverage in Time.