245 Market Street
Financial District / Embarcadero
The seventeen story Pacific Gas and Electric Company General Office Building, designed by Bakewell & Brown and built between 1923 and 1925, is one of a series of skyscrapers built during the 1910s and 1920s which imparted to San Francisco its downtown character. This character of large ornamented classic buildings is fast being lost with newer modern style buildings. 245 Market was also one of the first steel skyscrapers built in San Francisco.
The building was enlarged in 1945-1947 to the design of Arthur Brown, Jr. The addition, which has its own address at 25 Beale Street, is fully interconnected with the main structure and functions with it as one building.
Reflecting Beaux Arts and City Beautiful precepts of harmony, the building was designed to be compatible with the adjacent Matson Building (on the left)
Similar to other Chicago School skyscrapers built during the 1910s and early 1920s, the primary elevations are divided vertically into three major divisions – separated by horizontal divisions relating to those of the Matson Building.
The lower divisions are ornamented with a classical arcade, rising through two stories. The fourteenth and fifteenth floors, capping the structure, are articulated by a giant order of applied Doric columns with full entablature which is very similar to the base of the dome on San Francisco’s City Hall. The shaft, or central portion of the elevations, is expressed with paired windows lighting each structural bay.
Rams heads ornament the lower stories of the building.
Bakewell and Brown’s first commissions included the interior of the City of Paris department store (Now Neiman Marcus) and the city hall for Berkeley, before entering the competition for the 1915 San Francisco City Hall for which they are best known. Brown also designed the city’s War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building, the former in collaboration with G. Albert Lansburgh. Browns work shows his training in the Beaux-Arts tradition.
In addition, Bakewell and Brown designed several homes in the Arts and Crafts style championed by Bernard Maybeck.
Bakewell and Brown also designed the Byzantine-inspired Temple Emmanuel (1926) at Lake St. and Arguello Blvd.
The building was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and underwent a comprehensive seismic retrofit and historic rehabilitation completed in 1995.
The lamps adorning Civic Center architecture are as remarkable as the buildings themselves, and except for the Veterans Building and War Memorial Opera House, the lamp designs for each building is unique. I shot an entire series about Civic Center lamps when I first started documenting the central city in 2003. Seeing your photo of a Veterans Building lamp makes me want to get out and re-shoot the entire series.
I love the carvings and the lamp!