Tag: Architecture
-
Caduceus
110 Sutter Street Financial District This was originally designed in a skeletal Chicago School manner by the important but little-known firm of Hemenway and Miller and remodeled with an overlay of Beaux-Arts details by architect E. A. Bozio. **** This slightly stuffy, but excellent article, written in 1979, explains the building and its environs perfectly.…
-
Tudor Revival and Craftsman Style Firehouse
1088 Green Street Russian Hill The SFFD History site says: After the 1906 Earthquake and Fire, Newton J. Tharp was named city architect and was charged with rebuilding city government buildings. He designed this firehouse along with a number of Beaux Arts-style firehouses. Located on top of Russian Hill, this firehouse was designed to conform…
-
Underwriters Fire Patrol
147 Natoma SOMA/Financial District According to the History Department of the SFFD: On May 24, 1875, the City’s insurance companies joined together to organize and fund the Underwriters Fire Patrol. The UFP was like a fire department; it had its own firehouses, alarm system and firemen whose only task was salvage practices. The patrol worked…
-
Stefan Novak and Redwood
Clipper and Diamond Heights Blvd Noe Valley/Twin Peaks This piece titled Redwood Sculpture, was done in 1968 by Stefan Novak. Mr. Novak and his family are very private people, so there is little information regarding the artist. He was an instructor in the architecture department at UC Berkeley. He was born on August 22, 1918 and…
-
Engine Company #13
1458 Valencia Street Mission Built in 1883, this is the City’s oldest standing firehouse. In the heart of the Mission District, this rare brick firehouse in the Victorian Italianate style has a front surface made entirely of cast iron detail. Such buildings are very rare in San Francisco with most clustered in the Jackson Square…
-
Wally Heider Recording Studio
245 Hyde Street The Tenderloin The blue building hidden behind this tree (the fourth film vault) has a prominent place in San Francisco Music history as well. In early 1969, Wally Heider opened the San Francisco Wally Heider’s Studio at 245 Hyde Street. Heider had reportedly apprenticed as an assistant and mixer at United Western Recorders in Hollywood, CA,…
-
Film Vaults of the Tenderloin
245-259 Hyde Street The Tenderloin I have driven by this area with these stunning Art Deco/Art Moderne buildings all in a row, and never pursued the history. An evening of beers at the Brown Jug with Mark Ellinger and my eyes were opened. Originally theaters purchased the films they showed their patrons. Then Harry,…
-
Grain Silos in San Francisco?
696 Amador Street off 3rd Street / Pier 90/92 Bayview/Hunters Point These abandoned silos on Pier 90/92 formerly stored grain that was brought in by rail and then loaded from the silos onto ships for export. These operations were discontinued following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Pier 90/92 was created in 1918 by the State Harbor Commission.…
-
Alemany Emergency Hospital
35 Onandaga Avenue at Alemany Mission Terrace / Outer Mission This beautiful building was once the Alemany Emergency Hospital. There were no other emergency rooms other than San Francisco General Hospital before 1966, therefore the County was responsible for all emergency care and all emergency ambulance transport. Emergency care was provided throughout San Francisco…
-
Fire Station #8 a WPA gem on Bluxome Street
36 Bluxome Street SOMA South of the Slot Fire Station Number 8 was built in 1939 as a result of the WPA The San Francisco Fire Department was a big beneficiary of W.P.A. The Department’s 1974 Historical Review noted, “One of the few advances made by the Department in these lean years resulted from the…
-
St Markus Kirche
St Marks Cathedral 1111 O’Farrell Street Fillmore/Japantown/Western Addition Germans starting flocking to the San Francisco Bay area during the gold rush of 1849 . The dedication of the present church building in 1895 marked three decades of effort by German immigrants to establish Lutheranism in California. Rev. Frederick Mooshake from Goettingen University arrived in 1849 to…
-
Fishermen’s and Seamen’s Chapel
Fisherman’s Wharf Pier 45 Inner Harbor Built in 1979, this charming little chapel is a memorial to the memory of Bay Area fishermen who’ve lost their lives at sea. It’s also something of a touchstone for San Francisco’s mostly Italian, mostly Roman Catholic fishing community, which traces its origins to Sicilian immigrants from the early…
-
California Masonic Memorial Temple
1111 California Street Nob Hill Designed by Albert Roller (April 20, 1891 – July 12, 1981) the California Masonic Memorial Temple was dedicated on Sept. 29, 1958. An icon of mid-century modernist architecture, the structure is located at the top of Nob Hill across the street from Grace Cathedral. It is a testament to simple lines,…
-
U.S. Custom House Sculpture
555 Battery Street Financial District U.S. Customs House Most of the granite sculptures on the U.S. Custom house were done in-situ by unknown artists. The roof top sculpture, however, was done by Alice Cooper. Alice Cooper (April 8, 1875 – 1937) was an American sculptor. Born in Glenwood, Iowa, and based in Denver, Colorado, Cooper studied under Preston…
-
The Hayward/Kohl Building
400 Montgomery Street Financial District The Hayward/Kohl Building was designed by Percy & Polk (George Percy and Willis Polk both of whom have been written about on this site many times before) for Alvinza Hayward. Hayward made his fortune from the Eureka Gold Mine in California and the Comstock Silver Mine in Nevada as well as investments in timber, coal,…
-
Knights Templar Building
2135 Sutter Street Western Addition This steel reinforced building with brick exterior walls trimmed in lots of terra cotta was designed by Matthew O’Brien and Carl Werner in the architectural style known as the Jacobean Phase of Medieval Revival. It was built in 1905 and 1906-1907. The building has been home to two institutions, the Knights…
-
Jo Mora and the Don Lee Cadillac Building
1000 Van Ness Tenderloin This sculpture sits over the entryway to the Don Lee Cadillac Showroom. The sculpture is the creation of Jo Mora, who has been in this website before. This doorway pediment consists of a central shield bearing the Cadillac insignia framed by an ornately carved, stylized border with a lion’s face…
-
The Don Lee Building
1000 Van Ness Avenue Tenderloin This magnificent building was built in 1921. Designed by Weeks and Day it is the largest and one of San Francisco’s most architecturally significant auto showrooms. As the private automobile became a standard commodity of middle-class American life, hundreds of manufacturers rose to meet the demand. Within this increasingly competitive…
-
55 Stockton Street – Looking up
55 Stockton Street Union Square / Market Street This building, designed by Heller Manus Architects in 1989 stands at a very busy corner one block off of Union Square. If you look closely you can see 14 figures drumming or holding spheres. * According to the Smithsonian Institute, these figures were done by Tom Otterness.…
-
The Insurance Exchange
Insurance Exchange Building 433 California Street Financial District Turning 100 years old this year, the Insurance Exchange was designed by Willis Polk. This highly ornamented building is complimented by its sister building the Merchant’s Exchange next door. The highly decorated exterior of the building, flanked with majestic Corinthian columns and topped with a very detailed…
-
The Masonic Temple – 25 Van Ness
Masonic Temple 25 Van Ness Civic Center Walter Danforth Bliss and William Baker Faville were the architects of this, the second Masonic Lodge in San Francisco. The first lodge, at 1 Montgomery Street, was built in 1860 and burned down in the 1906 fire. In 1911 the Masonic Temple Association, headed by William Crocker, laid a…
-
The Sentinel a Flat Iron Building that Makes its Mark
916 Geary North Beach The Sentinel Building, also known as Columbus Tower, sits at the corners of Columbus Avenue, Kearny Street and Jackson Street. The building is a classic Beaux-Arts flatiron. Flatiron buildings were structures built primarily between 1880 and 1926. Most flatirons were built in either the Beaux-Arts or Renaissance Revival architectural style that…
-
The Tanforan Cottages
214-220 Dolores Mission District Not far from Mission Dolores are a pair of homes considered to be the oldest in the Mission District and among some of the oldest in San Francisco: 214 and 220 Dolores Street. The Mission District, originally Mission San Francisco de Asis, was the sixteenth in a chain of twenty missions stretching from San…
-
Sutro Heights Park
Point Lobos Avenue Land’s End Copy of the original lion that stood at the Sutro Heights entry gate. (Photo credit: UC Bancroft Library) Adolph Sutro (1830-1898) was one of San Francisco’s most beloved mayors and esteemed citizens. Originally from Prussia, he amassed millions in the Comstock Lode (Nevada Silver Rush of 1859) by designing and…
-
The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange
301 Pine Street Financial District 301 Pine Street-one of the historic buildings that comprised our financial system on the West Coast-began its life in 1915 as a sub-treasury building for the United States Treasury. In 1930, when the San Francisco Financial District was fast becoming the Wall Street of the West, the “gentlemen of the…
-
The Movie Palaces of Mission Street
The Mission District Before Netflix, streaming videos and television, most people got their entertainment at a vaudeville/movie theater. These “palaces” were places to see and be seen. The Mission district was the home to at least five theaters whose marquees still can be seen amongst the graffiti and signage that marks the street. Of these…
-
Jackson Brewery an Old San Francisco Tradition
Folsom and 11th SOMA There have been over 79 breweries in San Francisco’s history, most of them either lost to the 1906 earthquake or in the two years following the 1919 passage of the 21st amendment. These lost brew houses included the North Star Brewery at Filbert and Sansome, the Globe Brewing Company at Sansome and Greenwich and the…