War Memorial Opera House
On June 26, 1945, delegates from 50 nations signed the United Nations Charter in the Veterans Building's Herbst Theatre, next door to the War Memorial Opera House on Van Ness Avenue — the Opera House itself had hosted the two months of conference sessions that led to that signing. Six years later, the Japanese Peace Treaty was signed in the Opera House itself. Between these two acts of international diplomacy, and before and after them, the opera house has served its primary purpose: giving San Francisco one of the finest performing arts venues in America. The building carries the weight of both roles. It is a house of music and a house of history, a place where arias and treaties have shared the same civic precinct.
A Monument to Two Wars
The War Memorial Opera House was completed in 1932 as part of a civic complex honoring veterans of World War I. Its Beaux-Arts design, with a grand portico and 3,146-seat auditorium, was intended to give San Francisco a performing arts venue worthy of a great city while also serving as a memorial to those who served. The building sits on Van Ness Avenue across from City Hall, creating a civic center that pairs governmental authority with cultural aspiration. When the Opera House hosted the UN Charter conference in 1945 and the Japanese Peace Treaty signing in 1951, it took on additional memorial significance -- a World War I monument that witnessed the diplomacy that formally ended World War II.
Home to Opera and Ballet
The San Francisco Opera has called the War Memorial home since 1932, and the San Francisco Ballet shares the stage. The acoustics of the auditorium, with its horseshoe-shaped balconies and ornamental plasterwork, favor vocal performance -- the opera house was designed to project the human voice to every seat. Annual opening nights are among the most prominent social events in San Francisco, filling the auditorium with an audience that treats the opera house as a civic institution rather than an exclusive club. The building's location in the Civic Center, adjacent to Davies Symphony Hall and the Veterans Building, creates a performing arts campus that concentrates the city's cultural life in a single architectural precinct.
The Stage as Witness
Few buildings in America have served as the setting for both artistic performances and world-historical events. The War Memorial Opera House and its neighbor, the Veterans Building, together gave San Francisco a role in the founding of the United Nations. Walking into the auditorium, audiences sit in the same hall where diplomats debated the shape of the postwar world over two months in 1945. The stage that has hosted Pavarotti and Domingo also hosted the ceremony that formally restored Japanese sovereignty in 1951. This layering of purpose -- memorial, performance hall, diplomatic venue -- makes the building more than the sum of its architectural parts. It is a place where San Francisco's ambition to be a world city, not just an American one, has been most convincingly realized.
From the Air
The War Memorial Opera House is at 37.78N, -122.42W, on Van Ness Avenue at Grove Street in San Francisco's Civic Center. The Beaux-Arts building is adjacent to City Hall's distinctive dome and Davies Symphony Hall. The Civic Center complex is clearly visible from the air as a cluster of monumental buildings. Nearest airports: KSFO 11nm south, KOAK 9nm east.