PLANNING TO EXPAND, SF MOMA REACHES DEAL WITH SAN FRANCISCO CITY GOVERNMENT

The city of San Francisco and SF MoMA have reached a land agreement that is critical to the art museum’s planned expansion.

Under the agreement, announced today by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, the city will give SF MoMA the existing fire station on Howard Street. In exchange, the museum will build the city a state-of-the-art fire station on Folsom Street, a deal that essentially translates to a ten-million-dollar gift from museum leadership to San Francisco, the mayor’s office said.

Securing that property was a prime hurdle to SF MoMA’s expansion, though the museum’s chairman, Charles Schwab, said back in September that he expected the city and the museum to reach precisely this agreement. Conversations between the parties were already advanced, Schwab said at the time—just after the museum said that it had reached an agreement to display the thousand-piece contemporary art collection of Don and Doris Fisher.

SF MoMA said earlier this month that it had raised $250 million of a planned $480 million campaign. One hundred million dollars of the money raised will go to double the museum’s endowment. The museum declined to say how many donors gave the $250 million or to share specifics on who the donors were, but Neal Benezra, director of SF MoMA, said the donations came from “core museum leadership.”