Brooks Hall (originally Civic Center Exhibit Hall, nicknamed Mole Hall and Gopher Palace) is a disused event space underneath the southern half of Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco; a parking garage occupies the space under the northern half. It was built in the late 1950s for $4,500,000, and dedicated on April 11, 1958. It was named after Thomas A. Brooks, a chief administrative officer of the City and County of San Francisco, who retired the same year the building was dedicated. Design and construction The concept of an exhibition space under Civic Center Plaza was advanced in a 1953 report written by city planners which called for the first reinvention of the Civic Center since the original 1911 design and also predicted what would become Moscone Center. Funding for the project was provided largely through $3M authorized by Measure A, passed by San Francisco voters in November 1954, and planning for the new space began in 1956. Excavation for the site began on September 17, 1956, and citizens were encouraged to take plants from Civic Center Plaza for their personal use. The discovery of prior paving and building foundations on the site slowed construction, which had been scheduled to take 18 months after excavation was to be completed in February 1957, and Mayor George Christopher presided over the dedication ceremony on April 11, 1958, when the exhibition space was dedicated for Brooks. During construction, the local press dubbed the new space "Mole Hall" or "Gopher Palace", nicknames that profoundly irritated Mayor Christopher and which made headlines from coast to coast. The three-story subterranean parking garage immediately north of Brooks Hall was built starting in 1959; the two structures are separated with a seismic joint wide and a tunnel connects the two structures. Brooks Hall was built with a tunnel underneath Grove Street, connecting the exhibition space to its neighbor to the south, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Drainage was one of the major challenges in building the underground space; at the time of construction, the water table was only below the Civic Center Plaza surface, and the excavation for Brooks Hall went to a depth exceeding . To keep the site dry, five wells were drilled deep along the north and west edges of the site and water was continuously pumped out of the site at a rate of per well. The foundation consists of a large, thick concrete slab