Legion of Honor (museum)

Legion of Honor

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Location	100 34th Avenue, San Francisco, California, United States of America
Coordinates	37°47′02″N 122°30′04″W / 37.78389°N 122.50111°W / 37.78389; -122.50111Coordinates: 37°47′02″N 122°30′04″W / 37.78389°N 122.50111°W / 37.78389; -122.50111
Type	Art museum
Visitors	177,608 (2010)
Public transit access	San Francisco Municipal Railway
Website	http://legionofhonor.famsf.org/

The Legion of Honor (formerly known as The California Palace of the Legion of Honor) is a part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF). The name is used both for the museum collection and for the building in which it is housed. On March 22, 2016, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco announced the appointment of Max Hollein as its director, taking over from Colin Bailey who left for the Morgan Library & Museum after a two-year term. Hollein's tenure began on June 1, 2016.

The Legion of Honor was the gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, wife of the sugar magnate and thoroughbred racehorse owner/breeder Adolph B. Spreckels. The building is a full-scale replica, by George Applegarth and H. Guillaume, of the French Pavilion at the 1915 Panama–Pacific International Exposition, which in turn was a three-quarter-scale version of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur also known as the Hôtel de Salm in Paris, by Pierre Rousseau (1782). At the close of the exposition, which was located just a few miles away, the French government granted Spreckels permission to construct a permanent replica of the French Pavilion, but World War I delayed the groundbreaking until 1921.

The museum building occupies an elevated site in Lincoln Park in the northwest of the city, with views over the Golden Gate Bridge. Most of the surrounding Lincoln Park Golf Course is on the site of a potter's field called the "Golden Gate Cemetery" that the City had bought in 1867. The cemetery was closed in 1908 and the bodies were relocated to Colma. During seismic retrofitting in the 1990s, however, coffins and skeletal remains were unearthed.