de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA

In Chapter 8 of Dark Mural, Nicole Tang Noonan recalls how she got her start as an art historian.

"When Mom took me to the de Young Museum, about ten blocks from our house, I didn’t want to leave. I started crying when she said it was time to go home. When we got home I used my crayons to make copies from memory of paintings I had seen at the museum so I wouldn’t forget them. When I was older, I took art lessons and started studying art, but the real lesson from my childhood was that copying and thinking about a picture could make me feel better."

Today the de Young occupies an ultra-modern building that opened in 2005. Were she a real person, Nicole would have been a teenager at the time.

But during Nicole's childhood, the de Young occupied a building created for a world's fair in 1894,  converted into a permanent art museum in 1895, and expanded and repaired several times throughout the twentieth century. It is described as having "a pseudo–Egyptian Revival style."
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Since the new building is on the same site as the original at the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, Nicole could easily have walked to both from her family's home in the Inner Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.