User:Blcksx/sandbox

What the structure isn't
In October of 1952, a large bronze version of the seal was placed at the west steps of the California State Capitol in Sacramento. In such a prominent spot, this seal is seen by hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and the size of the seal guarantees that an observer cannot miss the building. Over the years, a rumor about the identity of the building grew and is still told, and runs something like this:

You'll notice the building in the upper-left of the seal, which doesn't appear on any other seal here at the Capitol. This seal was created by prisoners at San Quentin State Prison, who wished to sign their names to it as the artists. However, they were refused by the warden -- they were prisoners, after all -- and in response, snuck the building into this seal as a clandestine signature. It represents the chapel at the prison, and wasn't noticed until it was too late to do anything about it.

Although this 3,400 pound, nearly ten foot wide seal was created by inmates in the foundry at San Quentin, the rest of the rumor is, at best, questionable. Five facts stand in the way of this rumor being true:


 * 1) If the building is taken as San Quentin and if the break in the mountains is taken to be the Golden Gate, then the view must be of the San Francisco Bay Area, looking from east to west.  That places the building on the wrong side of the Gate to be San Quentin.
 * 2) No building in this form, including the chapel, has ever existed at San Quentin.
 * 3) The building first appeared in artistic renditions of the seal as early as 1890, decades before this seal was cast in 1952, and was officially added in the 1937 standardization.  (Thirteen pre-1952 examples that include the building are shown in this article.)  The seals in the Capitol that do not include the building (and there are some that do) were created before 1937.
 * 4) The configuration of the building on this seal is strikingly similar to its appearance in the 1937 standardization, which itself was based on the 1895 Blue Book rendition.
 * 5) Three detailed, post-1952 accounts of the Seal, including a 1960 newspaper article that describes the creation of the bronze Seal at San Quentin, make no mention of the rumor.

The mysterious building
Also in the 1937 seal there is a building on the far left rear hill that has been interpreted in a variety of ways. The building, along with the break in the mountains, may have been added to give San Francisco Bay a stronger claim on its location being the landscape portrayed in the seal. This building first appeared in unofficial versions of the seal in the 1890s, and in most of these, the building was clearly meant to represent Fort Point in San Francisco.

Interpretations as Fort Point