California Golden Bears

20 August 2009

The new semester begins next week. I set out at lunch today to photograph some of the bear monuments on the campus. Here are some of the results. These door handles are on the Student Union building on Sproul Plaza.

The tiniest bear on campus -- maybe only 6 inches tall -- sits in a small architectural feature on South Hall, which is the oldest extant building on campus, dating from 1873. (But the bear looks like it can't possibly be that old.) I had heard about this bear a few years ago. I pass by South Hall often and would regularly try to find this little fella, but without luck. Finally, I did a google image search on "bear South Hall Berkeley" and found an image that pointed to where the bear was. With that information, I could find it. It's about 20 feet above the ground, which makes it hard to find and hard to photograph.



The Beckum bears, shown above, sit in the plaza between Bechtel and McLaughlin Halls. Here is a bit about their history, quoted from an article on the campus web site: "Bronze Russian black bear sculptures ... were created originally by beaux-arts sculptor Edmund Schultz Beckum about 1915, commissioned by a Russian insurance company and installed first at the company's U.S. headquarters in Connecticut. When the headquarters were demolished, a UC Berkeley alumnus acquired the bears and donated them to the campus in 1987."



These two roly-poly bears sit in the Haas School of Business. They are the youngest of the bears in this post, having been created in 1991 by Dan Ostermiller. The sculpture is called Les Bears.

Finally, the bear below was a gift of the Class of 1929. It sits perched on a tower high above Lower Sproul Plaza.