The story of the San Francisco Maritime Museum, a hidden San Francisco gem, is not just one of architecture and design although that is what pops when you walk in the subterranean Ghirardelli Square-adjacent entrance. Looking out over the historic seafaring vessels of the Hyde Street Pier and the crescent shaped beach a visitor is struck by the graciousness of this temple to the history of West Coast Maritime History, rich with exhibits that speak of the life of the people who made their living at sea. Built in 1939 jointly by the WPA and the City of San Francisco as a bath house, the museum is part of a National Park Service Maritime Historical Park that highlights the city's connection to the sea. The museum, over 20,000 square feet, is.an astonishing example of the power of the federal government when it’s functioning as it should be and could be a model for a new federal program that could enlist the help of the many talented but struggling artists during the time of Covid.  This enlightened project came to fruition over more than four years under progressive American artist HilaireHiler who not only did the phantasmagoric first floor murals of the Lost Cities of Atlantis and Mu but was also a costume designer and color theoretician, a polymath who had befriended Henry Miller Anais Nin and Hemingway at the Jockey Club in Paris where he had been the host. His glorious ceiling Prismatarium” is an ode to color theory in which he proposed that color and the human psyche interact to enhance creativity. Other artists like Sargent Johnson, a black sculptor who did the tile murals who had been associated with the Harlem Renaissance and Richard Ayer who supervised the second floor murals and flooring and who engaged vibrant Shirley Staschen, who had also done the WPA murals at the nearby Coit Tower, were also enormously talented. This treasure is a model of public engagement which is on scant display today under the current administration.