March 22, 2024, marked a mouthful for San Francisco State University: its quasquicentennial. That’s a 125th birthday, which is what SF State — founded by the California legislature on March 22, 1899 — is celebrating this year. We’re getting into the act by highlighting University history throughout this issue — including the 10 favorite little-known SF State facts here.
Photo courtesy of Special Collections/J. Paul Leonard Library
The first graduating class was teeny
The class of 1901 consisted of three dozen students, all women. The first male student was admitted in 1904. The University — then called the San Francisco Normal School — was located in a two-story building atop Nob Hill. To put this in perspective: Today’s main campus is 144.1 acres, and more than 4,000 graduates participated in the 2024 Commencement ceremony at Oracle Park.
You can get a swanky three-course meal (prepared and served by students)
The Vista Room is a fully functional restaurant and a teaching and learning lab managed by the Department of Hospitality, Tourism and Event Management in the Lam Family College of Business. Students gain practical experience with food service, hospitality and service management. Visit the fourth floor of Burk Hall to enjoy contemporary California cuisine with an emphasis on responsibly sourced ingredients and sustainability. The dining room seats visitors from 11:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., and closes at 1:50 p.m. Reservations are highly encouraged. Learn more at cob.sfsu.edu/vistaroom.
Decades of poetry history are preserved on campus
For 70 years, the Poetry Center has presented and documented the work of contemporary poets and related artists. Its poetry reading series, one of the first in the United States, started in 1954 and included poets like William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Langston Hughes. In 1995, the center began audio recording readings and has since expanded to video recordings. The American Poetry Archives, the center’s companion project, has approximately 5,000 hours of original recordings.
You can peruse a museum without leaving campus
Explore SF State’s Global Museum next time you’re in the Fine Arts building. University collections on display are from Africa, Oceania, the Americas and Asia, as well as from ancient Egypt, including a rare triple-nested sarcophagus. Students, faculty and staff in the Museum Studies Program design exhibits, produce educational programs and maintain the collections. The gallery is free and open to the public, with the current exhibit “Craft or Commodity?” on view Tuesday through Thursday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (closed for campus recesses and holidays).
Photo by Ashok Kumar/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
Swifties Studies is a thing
In the Experimental College (EXCO), SF State undergraduates can teach classes about nearly anything. Fall 2024 classes include everything from veterinary medicine and genealogy to Black science fiction and, yes, “Taylor Swift and the Art of Songwriting.” Through EXCO, students are mentored by a faculty director who helps them choose a subject, develop a curriculum, recruit students and lead the course. The original program ran from 1965 to 1969 as an outgrowth of the counterculture and activist movements of that time. It was revived in fall 2017 and has been thriving ever since.
You can travel through Bay Area history without leaving your desk
SF State’s Bay Area Television Archive stores more than 135,000 videos from Bay Area television stations, with countless historic treasures that are known and others that have yet to be discovered. It includes clips about the civil rights movement, the Zodiac Killer, old-school hip-hop and much more. Footage from the archive has been used in more than 1,000 documentary, television and community projects. Staff Archivist Alex Cherian has preserved 6,000 hours of footage at the archive and digitized 350 hours (6% of the total collection) since 2007.
The greenhouse is full of super-rare plants … and you can visit them!
Nesocodon mauritianus, only found in the wild on cliffs near waterfalls on the island of Mauritius, is one of 800 to 1,000 species in the greenhouse in the northeast corner of campus. The greenhouse has office hours on Tuesdays, and students are invited to the greenhouse’s twice-yearly plant sale.
There’s a 200-year-old piano in the Library
Built in 1808, the Clementi Fortepiano was donated to the University in the 1960s and today is safely tucked away in a temperature-controlled room of the J. Paul Leonard Library. While its basic mechanism is comparable to a modern piano, it’s smaller (shorter keyboard, smaller keys) so its sound is distinct and better suited for more intimate performance spaces of its time. School of Music Professor Victoria Neve was told that there are only five instruments of this make and vintage on record. While there may be more fortepianos on the planet, the likelihood of them working is small. Neve often incorporates the instrument into her teaching. The Clementi Fortepiano is one of many treasures in the Frank V. DeBellis collection, which is filled with artifacts of Italian culture.
The University has its own tearoom
The Toshiko Mishima Memorial Tea Room is housed in Humanities 117. It was donated to the University by the Japanese company Adachi Industry in 1992. It’s named after former Japanese Program Coordinator Toshiko Mishima. Over the years, it’s been used for classes, meetings and public Japanese tea ceremonies (chanoyu). Most commonly, it’s used for classes such as “JAPN 401: Topics in Japanese Culture: Tea Ceremony and Tea Culture,” which will be offered in spring 2025 by Professor of Japanese Midori McKeon.
SF State is home to the world’s longest continuously running webcam
FogCam has been keeping an eye on Karl the Fog since 1994. Currently situated in the Business building, it captures and displays grainy images of the Quad every 20 seconds. Beyond a few location changes, the webcam and operation hasn’t changed over the decades — which only adds to the project’s charm. It all started as a project by Instructional Technologies Department students Jeff Schwartz and Dan Wong. When they announced that the project was being shut down in 2019, everyone from The New York Times and NPR to the BBC picked up the story, fueling internet calls to save the project. The alums made a deal so that the University would take over the FogCam around the project’s 25th anniversary. It’s now operated by the University’ Academic Technologies Department.
Features
I, Alli Gator
Learn the evolution of a reptile that has become synonymous with SF State, as written in your fabulous Gator mascot’s journals over the years.
Strike Sparks
Gator heroes of the LGBTQ liberation movement are receiving long-due recognition courtesy of research by an SF State professor and his students.
In Conversation with Annette Bening
Annette Bening (B.A., ’80) dives into her reflections on college and conquering fears with SF State Magazine columnist Ben Fong-Torres (B.A., ’66).