350 Bush
Financial District
The history of the Mining Exchange can be read here, as this is a follow up post regarding the “historic restoration” of the building that took place in 2018.
The City of San Francisco has a policy that allows developers to put up a history vignette in place of actual historical restoration. Walking into the building, in the left hand wing is a television screen with lovely photos of San Francisco and an attempt at an artful history review. It fails.
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The most important aspect of the restoration was the the terra-cotta facade, the missing pieces, the ornamentation above the arch, were recast by Gladding McBean, the original creator of the tympenum sculpture.
The plaster walls of the old trading hall have been replicated, and the detailed ceiling has been restored.
All this is publicly accessible — you can walk through the trading hall and the tower’s lobby and emerge on Pine Street but it is sadly not a welcoming space or a properly restored space.
The central hall was originally designed to hold hundreds of traders, complete with a catwalk at the mezzanine-level trading floor and a chalkboard along one wall to keep track of stock fluctuations.
Now this marvelous open space sits empty except for four round columns along the edge.
Photos of the Miners Exchange in its heydey, photos from the SFPL.