Craig Cannon was about to load his hatchback with dozens of framed historical photographs. San Francisco As I reached out from the dumpster outside The Westin St. Francis San Francisco in Union Square, SFPD walked by and micked him to scrum.
The artist’s car partially blocked traffic on Post Street, but he quickly complied with the police’s request.
A few minutes later, the Bayview resident returned inside the steel can to retrieve the artwork the hotel had discarded Wednesday afternoon.
Hundreds of works of art were scattered in the trash. There were watercolors of the Ferry Building and Town Hall, and mosaics of outdated advertisements for Stella Artois. There were mirrors (some broken) and candlesticks and the entire door to the accounting department.
The most common piece was the frame that displayed Westin’s exterior and interior side-by-side. His seven-year employee at the hotel, Ricardo Negrete, was tasked with loading the works of art into yellow bins and moving them to trash bins. He told his SFGATE that he was glad the garbage dump divers were interested.
“Personally, I have no intention of throwing this away,” he said. “They said it was time to get rid of them and introduce new art.
Negrete said Westin renovated the main building a few years ago, and vintage artwork adorns the hotel’s corridors and was seen throughout the historic building.
“I want more people to see this,” Negrete added, walking off to pick up the next stack of collectible artwork that was destined for the landfill.
When Negrete returned with stacks of fresh items, Cannon was there to stir them up. He picked up a watercolor painting of the Ferry Building and packed countless frames into his car.
Cannon saw an online post about the trash can while en route to Cafe Trieste in North Beach to retrieve a forgotten debit card. He plans to clean up the frames of his dual images and replace them with his own artwork depicting snapshots of the city before painting the illustrations.
“Now I can do back and forth,” he said. “These frames are gold to me.”