Tag: Architecture
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1500 Mission Street
February 2021 This is what is left of several buildings that once sat on this site. Built in 1925, 1500 Mission was a one-story reinforced concrete industrial building originally designed in the Classical Revival style for the White Motor Company. The White Motor Company was created out of the White Sewing Machine Company. Founded by…
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Detroit’s Renaissance
The Book Building at 1249 Washington Blvd, Downtown Detroit So much has been written about Detroit’s decline, and yet so little has been written about its renaissance. Yes, the outlying areas have a long way to go, but the new construction and renovations happening in the downtown area are staggering. This post by no means…
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Woodward Garden
Woodward Gardens Duboce and Woodward Street Mission/South of Market On January 19, 1873, 12,000 people showed up at Woodward’s Garden in the Mission District to watch Frenchman Gus Buislay and a small boy soar aloft in a hot air balloon. The man who made it happen was Robert B. Woodward. Woodward had made his fortune…
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The Park Emergency Hospital
811 Stanyan Golden Gate Park The Park Emergency Hospital is part of a system of Emergency Hospitals that existed in San Francisco during the early 1900s. There were four of them. Park, Central (in Civic Center and still functioning), Alemany and Harbor (since torn down). This particular hospital has been designated City Landmark #201. Built in…
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The Metropolitan Laundry Company
7 Heron South of Market, San Francisco The lovely trumpet vine on this building is hiding a lot of the detail of the brick work, but the buildings history is the real charm. Built around 1907, this was once part of the Metropolitan Laundry Company and Power Plant. According to the January 8, 1910 Journal of…
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1140 Harrison Street
This nondescript industrial building is about to be torn down for a giant condominium project. I thought it time to get it documented before it disappeared. Part of the SOMA Light Industrial and Residential Historic District, the building has been marked historical due to its age, but that does not prevent it from being torn…
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Lily Pond
125 W. Fullerton Parkway Lincoln Park Chicago, Illinois Chicago’s official motto is “Urbs in Horto,” which translates to “City in a Garden”, much of the garden aspects of this town can be attributed to Alfred Caldwell and his mentor Jens Jensen. Lily Pond is the work of Alfred Caldwell. During the depression, Caldwell worked on…
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Casa de Velazquez
Parque Cespedes Santiago de Cuba Diego Valazquez was the first governor of Cuba. He was a cruel despot by all accounts, but his home, built in 1515 still stands as the oldest colonial-era house on the island. The home is of the Mudéjar style (or Hispanic-Moorish). This style is characterized by its balconies, carved ceilings…
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Parque del Ajedrez or Chess Park
Santo Tomás and Enramada Streets Santiago de Cuba This small corner park was designed by American architect Walter Betancourt. Betancourt was born in 1932 in New York, son of Cuban parents that had escaped to Florida during the Cuban War for Independence. As a child of Cubans, Betancourt vacationed often in Cuba. After graduating with a…
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St. Josephs of San Francisco
1401 Howard at 10th SOMA St Joseph’s Church was founded, at 10th and Howard, in 1861, by Archbishop Joseph Alemany. The church, home to over 300 mostly Irish families, was destroyed in the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. The church we see today was constructed in 1913. By that time, the Irish of the neighborhood had…
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The Acme Brewing Company in San Francisco
762 Fulton Western Addition On March 12, 1917, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin reported: “Six San Francisco breweries, facing financial loss, or insolvency, through proposed legislation regulating manufacture of maltuous drinks, have pooled their interests into one association for the manufacture and distribution of beers and malts. The body is to be known as the Acme-National…
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John Muir Elementary School
John Muir Elementary School 380 Webster Hayes Valley In the ten years between 1920 and 1930 San Francisco erected 49 new school buildings, with a 50th approved in 1931. This was all accomplished just 80 years after the birth of the San Francisco School System. These 50 school buildings represented an investment, at that time,…
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The Art and Architecture of San Francisco’s Universalist Church
1187 Franklin The modern portion the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Francisco was built in the 1960s and designed by Charles Warren Callister of the architectural firm of Callister, Payne, and Rosse. The church is a grand display of architectural beauty in its simplest form. The highlight of the Church is the elegant and historic…
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Chinatown Public Library
1135 Powell Street Chinatown The Chinatown Branch of the San Francisco Public Library started its life as the North Beach Branch. It was changed in 1958. Andrew Carnegie left the City of San Francisco, then under Mayor James Phelan, $750,000 for a main library and branches. One half was for the main library and the…
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Fillmore Car Barn and Powerhouse
Corner of Turk and Fillmore This was one of the first and one of the largest substations built at the turn of the century when street cars were first converted to electric power. The construction date has been documented as both 1902 and 1907. United Railroads owner, the owner of the line when the building…
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Hellenism in San Francisco
This plaque sits, somewhat neglected in an ivy bed at the corner of 3rd and Folsom Streets at the Moscone Center. I, like so many people, have seen it, read it, and continued on my way. I began wondering what was behind it. The Greek immigrant community was one of the largest and most conspicuous…
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Compton’s Cafeteria
Corner of Turk and Taylor Tenderloin Funny how a plaque can stop you and educate you about something you may have known nothing about, and at the exact same time leave out so very very much of the story. If you were to hear about this event during those times you would have been told that…
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83 McAllister
This is the Methodist Book Concern. The book concern, established in 1789 in Philadelphia, was the oldest publishing house in the United States and used Abington press as their trade imprint. It is now the United Methodist Publishing House and it is the largest general agency of The United Methodist Church. The Methodist Book Concern furnished reading…
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Native Sons of the Golden West
414 Mason Street Union Square The Native Sons of the Golden West Building on Mason street is an eight story, steel frame structure, with a highly ornamented façade of granite, terra cotta and brick. Around the two main entrances to the building are placed medallions of men associated with the discovery and settlement of California.…
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Vivande
670 Golden Gate San Francisco In 1993 Vivande Restaurant opened a second, larger and moral formal restaurant at 670 Golden Gate Avenue. They wanted to recreate the front door of the famous house designed by Federico Zuccaro in 1591 just of the Spanish Steps in Rome. Michael H. Casey, of course, put his own spin on…
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Selling the Sizzle not the Steak
Palace Court Subdivision Las Vegas Nevada Around 1996 Robert Symons hired Michael H. Casey Designs to manufacture 2 guard houses for Queensridge. This was a potential housing development in the Las Vegas Desert. Michael always said they were to sell the sizzle, not the steak, as there was nothing there at the time. The guard houses were…
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Chimney Rock Winery
Chimney Rock Winery 5350 Silverado Trail Napa Valley, California 1989 This was our first big job as Michael H. Casey Designs. The winery, at the time was owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hack Wilson. The Wilson’s had been the Coca-Cola distributors in South Africa and they wanted to bring the Dutch-Cape style architecture of Mrs.…
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South Hall
South Hall University of California, Berkeley South Hall is the oldest extant building on the University of California campus. The entryway, originally in wood, was completely restored in GFRC (Glass Fiber Reinforced Concrete) in 1996. The architect on the project was Irving Gonzales and the General Contractor was BBI. Michael H. Casey Designs was hired to completely…
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1940 Packard Building Comes Back to Life
865 The Alameda San Jose, California This photo shows the Packard Buidling in 1940. Notice the wonderful sculptural detailing over the windows and the doors. As often happened during the 1960’s and 1970’s many buildings were stripped of their ornamentation to reflect the modernism trend that was sweeping the country. In 2009 the engineering firm…
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The Rialto Building
116 New Montgomery South of Market I became intrigued with this building when a friend showed me this Black and White photo in the lobby of the Rialto. (Note: the round building on the left is the Crossley building) The Rialto is an eight-story H-shaped plan with center light courts. It has a steel frame…
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San Francisco Flower Market
San Francisco Flower Market 6th and Brannan SOMA With the face of San Francisco changing so very rapidly right now, I thought I would take a look at a block of buildings that has been a stalwart in the South of Market area serving an single industry, the San Francisco Flower Market. There are…
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EL Granada Apartment Building Goes Back to Its Roots
EL Granada At Sather Gate 2510 Bancroft Berkeley, California The Granada was built by Patrick O’Brien in 1904, and had been passed down in the family ever since. He built it so that everybody in the family would always have a roof over their heads, and so the building would always support the family. Like so…
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Cosmo Cocktails
20 Cosmo Place Lower Nob Hill/Tenderloin This unassuming building has been providing fine drinks, food and happiness to San Francisco’s since 1951. Trader Vic’s opened in Cosmo Alley in 1951. The restaurant was built from an old corrugated parking garage. Passing along the narrow walk way through a tropical garden, customers entered the rustic…
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Eng-Skell
1043 Howard Street SOMA It is hard to believe that in a world of corporate mergers and gentrification of neighborhoods, that the original company that built this wonderful deco building still occupies it. In 1900 W.A. England and H.D. Skellinger founded the Eng-Skell Company. The company made flavoring extracts for the bakery and bottling trades…
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Ford Elementary School Lunette
Ford Elementary School 2711 Maricopa Avenue Richmond, California Sally Swanson Architects of San Francisco designed a new $19 million energy-efficient school to replace the outdated original Ford Elementary School in Richmond, California. The new school’s design is a modern interpretation of the Mission Style. The school’s framework, a repeating 30-foot grid, creates the flexibility for the educational programming…