San Francisco’s Japanese Tea Garden pagoda unveiled after its first restoration in a century

To hear those bells ring again “you’ll be taken away,” promised Lucy Fisher of the Friends of the Japanese Tea Garden.

Even if there is not enough wind to make the chimes ring, the sight of the pagoda may be sufficiently inspiring. After two years and a painstaking $1.1 million restoration, the pagoda will be unveiled Wednesday, marking the first time the famous San Francisco structure has been restored from its base on a concrete plinth to the tip of its spire.

“It would have been easier to tear down the pagoda and build a new one,” said Steven Pitsenbarger, chief gardener at the Japanese Tea Garden.

Instead, only the parts that were rotten-through were removed and replaced.

“The goal was to build something that will last another 100 years,” said Pitsenbarger as he climbed around on the scaffolding under the white wrapper on a recent afternoon. “This thing is not coming down.”

Given that that pagoda was never intended to be an outdoor structure, the fact that it survived its first 100 years is astonishing. It was purely decorative, constructed of temporary materials to rest inside the Palace of Food Products at the 1915 Exposition.

The Palace of Food Products was torn down at fair’s end, but the ornate pagoda was too fine to junk, so then-park superintendent John T. McLaren had it hauled into the tea garden. He also salvaged the temple gates of the Palace of Food.

The gates were also installed in the Tea Garden and stood until 1965 when they were completely reconstructed. The pagoda had a new roof put on that same year — a shingle roof only intended to last about 25 years. This one lasted 55 years before restoration of the pagoda was finally scheduled. The scaffolding went up around it and the wrapping enclosed it just in time for the pandemic lockdown of March 2020.

“The shingles on the top roof had deteriorated to the point that the paint was holding it together,” Pitsenbarger said. “You could squeeze the wood and it would crumble in your hands.”

There are five stories to the pagoda, which meant five levels of roofing had to be removed. The replacement shingles were milled of redwood and cedar reclaimed from old water tanks at Camp Mather, the city-owned summer camp in the Sierra.

The copper and brass on the hinges and decorative accents were all original. Each replaced piece had to be custom built. The job, done in-house by the Recreation and Park Department’s carpentry team, took nearly two years.

“There was a lot of investigation that had to be done because no one had ever touched it,” said John Cunha, who ran the park carpentry shop during the pagoda’s restoration. Much of the investigation involved the paint, which had been lead-based to give it a glossy shine.

Crews in hazmat suits had to be brought in to do the remediation. Then the paint had to be matched with water-based latex. The color is Shiaru, a shade of vermilion used in Japanese temples.

The pagoda is 36 feet tall, but it sits atop a five-foot concrete foundation with a 12-foot spire at the top. That adds up to 52 feet, and its placement on a hill gives it extra elevation.

It can be seen from the Music Concourse and from the Botanical Garden, and if those copper bells ring in the wind it can be heard, too.

“The Japanese believe that plagues travel through the wind,” said Pitsenbarger, “and the reason for the bells is to fight off plague.”

Wednesday’s pagoda unveiling will mark its debut since the city dropped the $13 admissions fee for San Franciscans. But the job is not yet complete. In October, stonemasons from a quarry in Japan will be coming to install a facing of rock around the concrete plinth that the pagoda sits on. The project’s second phase will include reconstruction of the long wooden bridge that serves as the pagoda’s main approach. The area around the pagoda will receive fresh landscaping. This phase will cost an additional $1 million and be completed in the fall of 2023.

Photo UK53D2DM pagoda0928.4

The Tea Garden has been open throughout construction of the pagoda, and in April it became free to San Francisco residents. This has tripled attendance of city residents from the comparable time period in 2021.

“You see this huge white thing when you go in and you can’t imagine what it is,” said Tanako Hagiwara, the great granddaughter of Magoto Hagiwara, the landscape architect for the Tea Garden.

“Knowing that the pagoda has been redone and it is available to see, I think more people will come in,” she said.

There is pride at stake. Before COVID-19, the Japanese Tea Garden was the most heavily paid-admission park in the system. But in fiscal 2021-22, with the pagoda wrapped in white plastic, it was surpassed by the Botanical Gardens for the first time.

The Friends of the Japanese Tea Garden want to earn back that top spot, and an unwrapped 5-story temple that can be seen and maybe heard from the Botanical Garden across the street should do it.

“If you say ‘Japanese Tea Garden,” Fisher said, “people think of the pagoda.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SamWhitingSF