• 166 Arguello Blvd. house
• Georgian Revival house
• 3333 Pacific Ave. house
• 3343 Pacific Ave. house
• Merchant's Exchange Building
• California Volunteers' Memorial
• Pershing Hall
• Rieber house
• 160 Prospect Ave. house
• 2698 Pacific Ave. house
• Abbreviations

The younger Newsoms designed this high, narrow, vaguely Elizabethan house (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 102).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 87).

Though not a showcase for idiosyncratic design like the next block [3200 block Pacific Ave.], the houses in this block quietly affirm the strength of the [First Bay] tradition (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 97).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 97).

Two buildings [Merchants Exchange Building, Insurance Exchange Building] with similar wall compositions and surface treatment. The Merchants Exchange (rebuilt after the fire) served as a local model for later buildings in the financial district: the Matson and PG&E buildings on Market Street. An interior, skylit arcade leads to the old Merchants exchange hall, attributed to Julia Morgan. Mimicking a Roman basilica, the hall is lavishly detailed and bathed in a natural light. The seascape paintings are by William Coulter. In the old days, merchants assembled in this hall where news about the ships coming into the harbor was transmitted to them from the lookout tower on the roof (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 28).

Polk's name appears just under that of Ernest Graham, the office manager, in the title blocks of the working drawings for the Merchant's Exchange Building in San Francisco, suggesting that he was in charge of the project (Longstreth 1998: 392, n. 13).

No observer bent on taking in the most glorious buildings in the city should overlook the Merchants' Exchange, at the southest corner of California and Montgomery Streets. Built in 1902 on the design of Daniel Burnham and Willis Polk, it was one of the tallest buildings in San Francisco, standing out in post-fire photos as a gutted pile above the ruined financial district. Julia Morgan designed a handsome new interior after 1906, and the building was splendidly restored in the 1960s. In the bank at the end of the lobby visitors may enjoy the superb maritime murals by William Coulter, a leading artist of his time. The paintings had been plastered over for decades (Alexander and Heig 2002: 371).

Architecturally and historically one of the major landmarks of the city. Designed in 1903 by D. H. Burnham and Co.'s representative in San Francisco, Willis Polk, and rebuilt by Polk after the fire. One of the earliest big buildings of the great downtown building boom that began before the earthquake, and an extremely prominent building on the skyline for its first few yearts, until the city grew up around it. This is the third Merchant's Exchange Building in San Francisco's history and it has long played a central role in the commerce of the city. Messages of incoming ships were originally sent to the belvedere on the roof and relayed to the merchants in the great hall below who could then rush to the docks to meet them.

Architecturally the building represented the most up-to-date stylistic treatment from one of Chicago's most important architectureal firms. Its design has served as one of the major prototypes for later downtown office buildings from the immediate post-fire period up to the mid-1920s. The Matson (M30), California Commercial Union (F85), Financial Center (F87), J. Harold Dollar (F26), Hobart (M45), and P. G. & E. (M2) buildings are among the most prominent whose designs follow the Merchant's Exchange in one or more major ways. It was the first San Francisco building to use a large textured curtain wall treated as rusticated masonry with single or paired windows. This distinctive wall treatment which was used over and over again downtown has been extremely successful as a consistent but variable element in downtown street facades. The ornamental belvederes on many later downtown buildings recall the original one on the Merchant's Exchange. The three part composition, with columns defining the base and capital, was followed with greater and lesser degrees of elaboration. The building provided a basic vocabulary for designing buildings which were simultaneously great urban designs and individually interesting.

The interior was just as fine as the exterior but unfortunately not as successful as a prototype. The building is entered through a marble lobby with exquisite bronze elevator doors. The lobby passes under a skylight open to a large central light court to the old Merchant's Exchange space. The great marble columns and superb murals by William Coulter have recently been restored for the Chartered Bank of London. Evidence that would confirm the widely held belief that Julia Morgan was the designer of the Exchange has been inaccessible to historians. Upstairs, the Commercial Club of 1916 was designed by Walter Ratcliff, and the Club Bar was designed by William P. Day in 1935. In construction, the building was an early San Francisco example of modern "fireproof" steel frame construction with Roebling system cinder concrete slab floors. A (Corbett 1979: 198).

The tallest building in the financial district at the time of the 1906 earthquake was the Merchants Exchange, 465 California Street. This fifteen-story, steel-frame structure, with Tennessee granite and brick sheathing, was designed by Willis Polk in 1903; it traces its ancestry back to a three-story brick building of 1851 located about two blocks north on Battery Street. The original Merchants Exchange furnished a library and meeting room and posted information on arriving ships and cargoes. The latter-day skyscraper was intended to provide some of the same services to the business community.

The great hall of the Exchange, now modified as a bank office, is still decorated with some of the best and most appropriate San Franciscan murals--paintings executed by William Coulter, a leading maritime artist of his place and time. Other touches of period architectural art can be seen in the bronze eagle heads and lamps of the exterior, designed by Julia Morgan. Miss Morgan can also be credited with the inspiring interior appointments.

The days are gone when the merchants of San Francisco gathered there over one thousand strong to approve the plans for the 1915 Exposition or to condemn the 1934 general strike, and the Merchants Exchange is now just another building. But the great glass-roofed foyer and the adjacent meeting hall are reminiscent of that former era (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 81).

A superior equestrian statue [on a base by Willis Polk] by the city's greatest outdoor sculptor [Douglas Tilden], this is perfectly placed at the head of Dolores's stately row of palms, although the surrounding buildings don't give it much help. Gilbert Stanley Underwood's mighty fortress for the U.S. Mint (1937) destroyed the scale of this important intersection (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 136).

At the head of Funston is Pershing Hall, a Classic Revival brick building (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 162).

This large house follows the rim of the hill with unusual grace. The angled stair window is an interesting element of the design (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 268).

An unassuming design whose visual interest is concentrated in an elegant entrance composition. It is slightly altered by a second story bedroom addition (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 226).

The sons and successors to the original Newsoms, who designed often flamboyant High Victorian houses, here follow the turn-of-the-century trend to Classicism (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 84).

Abbreviations