• Sheraton Palace Hotel
• 3233 Pacific Ave. house
• Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Cathedral
• Chinese Telephone Exchange
• Roos house
• Heineman Building
• Citicorp Center
• 1526 Masonic Ave. house
• Commercial building
• Wells Fargo Bank
• Abbreviations

The airy opulence of the newly restored Garden Court in this block-size hotel captures the spirit of William Ralston's first Palace Hotel of 1873, long the west coast's finest. The warm brick exterior, stitched like a tapestry with terra-cotta ornament and crowned with a fancy cornice, dignifies the whole block. The recent remodeling added a new section to the hotel and, best of all, restored the original ceiling heights and the grand public rooms (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 24).

When he [William Chapman Ralston] decided to build a new hotel, he hired architect John P. Gaynor, who had come to San Francisco from New York in the 1860s, and sent him east to study the construction of the Sturtevant House and the New Windsor Hotel in New York, and the Palmer House and Grand Pacific in Chicago. Gaynor's design was bigger than any of these, filling two acres. Ralston's Palace Hotel, on which workers began construction in 1874, was the capstone of this era's magnificence, surpassing anything the city had ever seen. Probably no San Francisco building has ever matched the Palace for sheer grandeur in scale or exuberance of detail. True to the bumptious, chauvinistic spirit of the adolescent town, San Franciscans declared the Palace to be the world's most magnificent hotel. They were probably right (Alexander and Heig 2002: 193).

In the boastful '70s, every American believed his city or state to be the crossroads of God's universe, but few could compete with San Francisco when it came to civic pride. Whatever the shortcomings the young city had at that date--and it had many--San Franciscans needed only to take visitors into the Palace's seven-story marble-columned court, large enough to permit a turnaround for carriages, to make their point. They could marvel at the four elevators, the 365 slanted-bay windows, the 800 guest rooms with 15-foot ceilings. If this alone was not sufficient, the visitor could sample the hotel's superb cuisine, prepared by thirty world-renowned chefs. Even the place settings were magnificent: the china was Haviland and the plate was Gorham. W. & J. Sloane of New York had opened a branch store in San Francisco just to supply the Palace's acres of fine carpets. Most strikingly, at a time when San Franciscans still needed to import most of the refinements of life, Ralston had established factories in San Francisco to supply the splendid furniture, linens, and even mattresses for his Palace. Even the carriages which drove into the courtyard may have come from the carriage factory which Ralston had established locally.

In the building's first years, San Franciscans could take their guests to the Palace's lavish bar, or relax in one of the elegant lobbies while pointing out some bonanza king whose wealth exceeded that of an Arabian sultan. Of course, it was "the thing" for a gentleman of affairs to take a large suite at the Palace when business called him to San Francisco.

For 31 years the Palace Hotel enjoyed its world fame. When the 1906 fire swept down Market Street the Palace held out for a time, thanks to two huge water cisterns, built for just such an emergency. Then, when the water supplies had been used up in fighting neighboring blazes, the magnificent hotel succumbed.

After the disaster the Sharon estate, still the owners, spent $100,000 to tear down the solid, fire-blackened brick walls of Ralston's Palace Hotel. Sharon's son-in-law, Francis Newlands, commissioned a New York firm, Trowbridge and Livingston, to design a new "earthquake-and fire-proof Palace Hotel." George Kelham, a young member of the firm, was sent to San Francisco to supervise the work. He stayed on, to become one of California's leading architects.

In 1909 a stunning new Palace held its grand re-opening. The guest rooms no longer boasted fifteen-foot ceilings, but the lobbies and public rooms were undeniably handsome. Best of all, the old carriage court had now become the Palace Court, with a magnificent art-glass ceiling. Many believe it is the most dazzalingly beautiful public dining room in America. After 90 years of use, the hotel, now owned by a Japanese conglomerate, has undergone a complete, careful renovation. William Ralston's dream, in modified form, is ready for the 21st Century.

Paradoxically, the rambling frame palazzo Ralston built at Belmont, with its silver doorknobs and mirrored ballroom, still stands today, housing the College of Notre Dame. It is the sole visual reminder of Ralston's many contributions to San Francisco. The mansion in Belmont, and scores of San Francisco mansions yet to come, mirrored the dashing self-confidence, the individualism and the vigorous inventiveness of the Victorian Age in America (Alexander and Heig 2002: 193-94).

The Palace Hotel (29), the building that brought George Kelham to San Francisco to supervise its construction, stands on the southwest corner of Market and New Montgomery. It was designed by the New York firm of Trowbridge and Livingston and opened in 1909. This Palace Hotel, a modest but handsome and well-proportioned neoclassical structure, replaced William Ralston's famed hotel, which he had touted as the biggest and best of everything in the West, after it was destroyed in 1906. The interior follows the style of the original hotel with the exception of the Garden Court, which replaced an interior courtyard that served as a carriage entrance. There are vaulted ceilings, plenty of gilding, and Austrian leaded crystal chandeliers. The Garden Court features imported marble columns and a lovely art glass ceiling. Maxfield's, a redwood-paneled bar, was built to showcase Maxfield Parrish's Pied Piper of Hamlin (Wiley 2000: 164).

Originally just the Palace Hotel, the post-fire successor to William Ralston's 1873 Palace. The first Palace building was the center of San Francisco's social life and the image of luxury throughout the west.

The finest feature of the present building is its magnificent skylit Garden Court, an example of Parisian opulence equal to almost any contemporary space in Paris. The exterior is certainly less exuberant but nevertheless quite successful in its creation of a warm textural element along Market and New Montgomery streets. In composition, the building is a three part vertical block with differentiated end bays and restrained Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation. The steel building was constructed in 1909 with additions in 1915, 1919, and 1925. The architect was the important New York firm of Trowbridge and Livingston who sent George Kelham to San Francisco as supervising architect on this project. After completion of the hotel, Kelham stayed in San Francisco and opened his own office. Leonard Schultze, later of Schultze and Weaver, was also involved in this project. Warren G. Harding died here in 1923. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 83).

Return to Pacific and turn left. Continuing west on Pacific, you will find a large cluster of shingled houses designed by the practitioners of the First Bay Tradition (44) located ideally on the edge of the Presidio forest, which nicely complements their wooden exteriors. Ernest Coxhead's houses are 3151 Pacific (1912), 3255 Pacific (c. 1910), remodeled by Polk), 3234 Pacific (1902), Bruce Porter's home, and 3232 Pacific (1902, remodeled in 1959), one of his best known. Polk also remodeled 3203 Pacific, and Maybeck designed 3233 Pacific (1909). Samuel Newsom designed 3198 Pacific (1898). Julia Morgan showed her affinity for the new Shingle Style with 3377 Pacific (1908), and Esherick added a modern commentary on the tradition with 3323 Pacific (1963). Albert Farr was the architect for 3333 and 3343 Pacific (Woodbridge & Woodbridge 1992: 97; Wiley 2000: 278-79).

One of the city's many notable wooden vernacular churches, this one replaces an earlier church destroyed in 1906 (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 68).

The site of San Francisco's first newspaper, the California Star, later became the home of the country's only Chinese telephone exchange. Outmoded by the 1950s, the exchange closed and the building interior was remodeled for its new occupant, the Bank of Canton (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 45).

The Bank of Canton (20) (1909) at 743 Washington was once Chinatown's telephone exchange. Furnished with teakwood chairs inlayed with mother of pearl and tables lacquered black, and fitted with windowpanes made of imitation oyster shell, it was one of the most sumptuous buildings in Chinatown. Calls were placed through operators who knew the name of every Chinatown resident with a phone and the numerous dialects used in the community (Wiley 2000: 188).

Chinatown, formerly housed in brick commercial buildings dating back to the 1850s, was leveled [by the 1906 earthquake and fire], and city fathers hatched a plan to move all the Chinese to Hunter's Point. Fortunately a completely new Chinatown grew up on the old site before the plan could be carried out, the only change being to rename Dupont Street as Grant Avenue. One unique new structure was the Chinese Telephone Exchange, a jewel-like pagoda of red lacquer and gold leaf, which today houses a bank.

Old Chinatown, with its rich, colorful history, was totally obliterated in the 1906 disaster. The Chinese telephone exchange, built in 1912 on Washington Street near Grant, was a major architectural contribution to the rebuilding of the city. Inside, rows of telephone operators like Harriet Ng (right) had to memorize 2,300 Chinese names, many very similar, and to speak five different dialects in order to connect callers to their parties within seconds (Alexander and Heig 2002: 366-67).

Maybeck's own brand of English Tudor lavished on a major house (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 39).

Maybeck's most lavish city residence, for which he designed all the interior appointments including furniture. The half-timbered English Tudor mode is enlivened by Maybeck's personalized Gothic details in the roof brackets and balcony railing (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 99).

Maybeck's first dozen years of practice, up to about 1908, established the tone of his career. For several years thereafter, he attained greater synthesis with the buildings that would eventually make him famous: the Chick and Roos houses, the First Church of Christ Scientist, and the Palace of Fine Arts. Each of these projects, in a different way, offered a masterful resolution, but this time period was an interlude. For the remainder of his long career, the search continued, often in a more fragmentary vein (Longstreth 1998: 354).

Maybeck's superb English Tudor house at 3500 Jackson Street, built in 1909 for the Roos family, has a manorial Gothic great hall and beautifully executed carvings... It is considered Maybeck's tour de force (Alexander and Heig 2002: 337).

In 1909 Leon Roos, owner of Roos Brothers clothing store, set out on his honeymoon, leaving architect Bernard Maybeck with a commission to build a house at 3500 Jackson Street. The result is regarded as a Maybeck masterpiece, a curious blending of Tudor style half timbers, carved Gothic decorations, and dizzying roof lines, with a suggestion of Japanese influence. The house, impeccably maintained, has remained in the Roos family for 92 years. Its drawing room, in the lower, right-hand section in this view, is one of the most beautiful rooms in San Francisco, with a superb view of the bay (Alexander and Heig 2002: 257).

On the northwest corner of Laurel and Jackson is Maybeck's striking masterpiece, the Roos House (45) (1909). The house was given to Elizabeth Roos by her father, the owner of the Orpheum Theatre Company. Roos also owned the Roos Brothers clothing store. The house appears modest in size but is actually 9,000 square feet. Designed in the Tudor style, it features fantastically carved ornamental woodwork on the exterior, a forest of redwood paneling inside, and numerous light fixtures, lanterns, and fireplaces designed by Maybeck. Even the foundation--lattice of heavy wooden beams attached to wooden piles to secure the house in an earthquake--is an original (Wiley 2000: 279).

Wedged into a 20-foot lot next to the Shell Building is one of Downtown's true gems. Designed by George Applegarth, another Beaux-Arts graduate, the Heineman Building (18) at 130 Bush was built as a belt, tie, and suspender factory in 1910 and is reminiscent of the pre-1906 downtown when light manufacturing shared space with office workers. The gracefully rounded windows are separated by hammered copper paneling and topped with a Gothic parapet. Prismatic glass was used to direct light into the workspace (Wiley 2000: 161-62).

Although not the only twenty-foot-wide tall building in downtown San Francisco (see the Chamberlain Building at 442-444 Post--R174, and the Roullier Building at 49 Kearny--R90), the Heineman Building is probably the most successful. Seen by itself it is a richly detailed hybrid composition with Gothic ornamentation executed in cream glazed terra cotta. The verticality of the tall narrow structure is ably expressed in the thin Gothic ribs of the shaft culminating in a heavy top story crowned by finials. A penthouse in the same style is set back behind the plane of the street. Seen in its context, as a narrow projecting bay between two much larger and flatter facades, it manages to more than hold its own without being disruptive to the texture and scale of the street. Steel frame construction. Now called the Liberty Mutual Building. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 191)

Originally the London Paris National Bank. The erection of the Citicorp tower turned it into the most atmospheric atrium in town (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 32).

One Sansome Street at Market and Sansome (22) is a neoclassical building (1910) designed by Albert Pissis for the London-Paris National Bank, added onto by Kelham, and gutted to become the entrance portico to the undistinguished Citicorp Center (1984) by Pereira and Associates at its rear. This is one of several examples of the creative or reductive--depending on your point of view--integration of banking temples into modern structures. A 30-ton remnant from the façade of the Holbrooke Building, which stood on the site of the Citicorp Center, has been incorporated into the Citicourt Café on the ground floor. Note the wall display about the history of the site on the left as you enter the café. Inside the portico on the right is a statue, the Star Figure, which is a reproduction of a parapet ornament sculpted by A. Sterling Calder for the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Pissis was the first of the late-nineteenth-century architects to bring the results of a Beaux-arts education to San Francisco. Born into a French family in Mexico, he started by designing conventional Victorian homes until he won the competition to design a new Hibernia Bank at Jones and Market. Pissis's work quickly drew the attention of the new generation of architects who were enamored with classicism (Wiley 2000: 162-63).

A subtle composition in staggered roof planes and voids where the balcony and entrance stair occur. Maybeck's deft touch in a modest shingled house (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 131; Wiley 2000: 322).

A good example of a Neoclassical commercial building in which the "architecture" was designed to ride above the changing shop fronts (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 6).

An outstanding example of the characteristic retail area type with a glass commercial base and offices above, located at an extremely important Union Square corner. The building was designed by Willis Polk for D. H. Burnham and Co. Because its glass base is largely intact this building displays, better than most, the purposefully unconnected relationships of commercial base to "architectural" top by even the best known and most respected of local architects. The simple glass base was designed to display merchandise and was expected to be remodeled. The "architecture," therefore, was kept up a couple of stories, out of harm's way, where it would survive countless changes of fashion as the permanent expression of a timeless architectural tradition. It was literally above the seasonal change of merchandise and storefront remodelings.

In composition, this building is a two part vertical block with an attic and a giant order in the upper zone. Its ornamentation is Renaissance/Baroque. It is of reinforced concrete construction. The building presents a rich and suitably monumental design to Union Square, and bears an important visual relationship to the City of Paris as a similar corner building in a similar style. The open ironwork attic level balcony appropriately suggests another level of human activity (even when it isn't there) on the city's most urban square. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 153).

The Wells Fargo Bank (21) (1910) across Grant [from Emporio Armani (20)(1919) at 1 Grant Ave. by Bliss and Faville] is by Clinton Day. The interior of white marble with pyrite highlights and green marble tiles on the floor is suitably elaborate (Wiley 2000: 197).

The winning design in a competition for the Union Trust Co., at an extremely important Market Street intersection. A competition entry was also submitted by Frederick Meyer. Together with Security Pacific Bank across the street (M13) and the Phelan flatiron (M67) on Market, this forms probably the best of the remaining Market Street intersections. The two banks in particular serve as an imposing gateway to Grant Avenue.

In composition, the building is a modified temple without a pediment. Ornamentation is derived from classical antiquity. Its layered facades have carved granite ornament setting back to dark iron window framing. This treatment adds a rich textural element to the design which suitably enhances its prominence in an area where most buildings are more two dimensional in effect. The curving Market Street facade further enriches the building's relationship to a complex intersection. The classical interior is faced in white marble with gold highlights. The Wells Fargo Bank signs have been sensitively integrated into the original design. A steel frame building. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 87).

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