The High Price of Getting a Head: City Hall Busts Cost an Arm and a Leg

The new Milk bust costs about as much as 14,860 gallons…
By Joe Eskenazi
On May 22, something extraordinary will happen. For the first time since 2004, people will march into City Hall with the actual goal of looking at one of the busts gracing the edifice. The last time this happened was four years ago, when Willie Brown earned a City Hall bust (no, not the kind that involves the perp walk).
The new bust is of Harvey Milk – and, make no mistake, it is impressive (there’s the mock-up on the right). It will be unveiled to much fanfare, perhaps attract a stream of visitors for a while and then, it will take its place alongside busts of San Francisco folks you’ve probably never heard of such as Edward Robeson Taylor or Michael O’Shaugnessy.
Especially in a transitory city such as San Francisco (in which the statement “I was born here” earns you a glance akin to the one you’d get if you uttered “I have a third testicle!”) it’s important to salt the city with visual reminders that life did exist here before 2006 or 1997 or WHENEVER YOU CAME!
That being said, when's the last time someone thought, “Hey, let’s go look at the bust of George Christopher in City Hall”? But while the busts blend into the scenery, their price tags do not. The winner of the competition to create the Milk bust received $57,500.
“We came up with that figure after doing research on the cost of bronze, artists’ fees, the cost of similar projects in other cities, the cost of transporting it, installing it, the cost of the stone and how much it would cost to carve text in the pedestal,” explains Jill Manton, the city’s public arts program director.
It warrants mentioning that this money is privately raised – but, still, isn’t that a lot of money for a sculpture that essentially performs the same task in adorning City Hall that, perhaps, a bunch of blue bottles would in your apartment window?













By Benjamin Wachs
In response to Barack Obama's comment at a San Francisco fundraiser that frustrated working-class folk are capable of "antipathy to people who aren't like them," the Clinton campaign is viciously attacking the remarks while at the same time viciously stoking the antipathy of working-class folk to people who aren't like them.