• 2898 Broadway house
• Notre Dame des Victoires
• 9 Scenic Way house
• 25 Scenic Way house
• 45 Scenic Way house
• Hobart Building
• Call Building
• Double access ramp
• Apartment house
• Palace of Fine Arts
• Abbreviations

An elaborate Dutch-Colonial manor house that contrasts wonderfully with Polk's pastel palace next door (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 96).

This church occupies the site of the city's first French church; it is more significant as an historic center of San Francisco's influential French colony than as architecture (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 15).

Notre Dame des Victoires Church (31) at 566 Bush was designed by Louis Brouchoud in the Romanesque style with baroque features in 1915. The church was founded in 1855 in an area known as Frenchmen's Hill, so-called because it was here that French argonauts pitched their tents. Named to commemorate the victory of the western European powers in the Crimean War, the church houses a very fine organ, built in the city and still in working order (Wiley 2000: 199).

Polk's late Classical style exhibits none of the idiosyncrasies of his early work (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 164).

At the northern end of Twenty-fifth Avenue, enter the gates to Sea Cliff, two developments with sweeping views of the Golden Gate, Mount Tamalpais, and the coastline. Park your car and walk, following Scenic Way to the left. The original development near this intersection was organized through a home owners association in 1904. A second development to the west was begun in 1916. Willis Polk designed 9, 25, and 45 Scenic Way (18) (1914) (Wiley 2000: 386).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 164; Wiley 2000: 386).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 164; Wiley 2000: 386).

An idiosyncratic design rumored to be a favorite of its designer. The Hobart's eccentricity has become increasingly apparent with age, particularly when compared with its immediate neighbors. Shaped to address its polygonal site, the building had its bare flank exposed when a neighboring structure was torn down; the tower now seems to be peering over its shoulder in embarrassment. The ground floor remodeling is sad. Down the block at 562 and 567 Market are two more Willis Polk buildings (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 26).

The 500 block on Market Street contains two works by Willis Polk, 564 Market (24) and the renowned Hobart Building (25) at 582 Market, thought to be his favorite commercial structure. Polk was the most active architect during the reconstruction of the city after the earthquake, designing 106 buildings between 1906 and 1914. He also proposed numerous imaginative additions to Market Street. Two of them, a new civic center at Market and Van Ness, as envisioned in the Burnham Plan, and a triumphal arch and peristyle that would frame the Ferry Building and provide a grand entrance to Market Street, were very ambitious but never realized. Polk was a careful student of context, which is demonstrated in his few remaining drawings and by his work with large-scale photographs of street sites on which he sketched building designs. When Burnham thought that his plan might be implemented after the fire and earthquake of 1906, he rushed to open a San Francisco office under the direction of Polk, who had been trained in his Chicago office. But Polk was a poor manager, a contentious critic of his colleagues, and a lover of public stunts. Burnham closed his office in 1910, and Polk continued to practice on his own. Polk set out to build the Hobart Building, conceived during this difficult period, in record time (11 months), which led to charges of recklessness. The body of the building rises to a flattened oval tower with fine terra-cotta ornamentation in the Renaissance/Baroque manner (Wiley 2000: 163).

From just about any point of view, one of the most successful tall buildings ever built in San Francisco. Located on a mid-block site, it manages to relate both to the diagonal of Market Street in the positioning of its tower and to the north of Market grid in the shape of its base. Its glass commercial base was designed to play the mundane role that should be retained by any street level space in a commercial area. Its rusticated shaft gives the building an urban character that links it in an anonymous but pleasing texture to its neighbors, and the tower gives it a particular romantic quality that distinguishes if from anything else in San Francisco, or from any other American skyscraper. The tower is the building's finest feature in its distinctive oval-with-flat-sides shape, dense terra cotta ornamental detail, corbeled cornice, and two-leveled tiled hip roof. Its expression of the soaring quality of the tower is certainly less literal than that of New York's Woolworth Building (1913), which was considered the last word on the subject at the time, but it is just as successful in another way. The tower long stood out on the skyline of the city and, although now dwarfed in height, is still a conspicuous landmark in its neighborhood and from Second Street, the location from which it was designed to be viewed.

In composition, the building is a three part vertical design with highly inventive use of Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation. In construction, the building is steel frame with reinforced concrete floors, walls, and roof. Its construction was accomplished in the remarkable time of eleven months, a record which, according to the Pacific Coast Architect, "occasioned much comment and some criticism, it being alleged that it was constructed in a reckless manner, one critic expressing the opinion that no greater crime against the public had ever been committed." In the end, however, the building was constructed on time and under budget and served as "a practical demonstration of the value of a preconceived scheme of construction." The particularly fine glass base of the building managed to survive until about the time this survey was begun, when it was grossly remodeled in a glaring white marble by Financial Savings and Loan. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 81).

Originally built for the newspaper industry, the building is anchored at each end by a well-composed and richly detailed Classical pavilion (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 25).

A richly clad facade in a two part vertical composition with an attic and a giant order in the shaft. The rusticated piers of the base are surmounted by a mezzanine with pulvinated rustication and a fluted Corinthian order, all creating a design of variously textured and articulated levels. The design of the New Montgomery Street end of the building is repeated at the rear on Annie Street. Constructed entirely of reinforced concrete. Originally built as headquarters of the San Francisco Call newspaper; from 1929-1940 it headquartered the Call-Bulletin. Now occupied by Crocker Bank as an office building. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 105).

Willis Polk designed the double access ramp in 1914 when the Livermore family commissioned him to design the houses at 1, 3, 5, and 7 Russian Hill Place, built in 1916 (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 67).

By 1914, Polk was working on improvements in the neighborhood, such as the access ramp at the west end of the 1000 block Vallejo and to Russian Hill Place, which marked the passing of the hilltop's isolated bohemian years (Wiley 2000: 258).

Dunn's Francophilia varied from the tasteful to the extravagant, as demonstrated here (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 85).

James Francis Dunn, architect for a number of fine apartment buildings on Nob Hill, designed the Francophile apartment house at 2411 Webster (19) (c. 1915) (Wiley 2000: 275).

Until 1962, the crumbling stucco of the original building, built for the Panama-Pacific Exposition, gave eloquent if functionless expression to the mood of melancholy that Maybeck desired for his masterful stage set. Then, thanks largely to the generosity and persistence of Walter Johnson, who matched the funds raised by the city, the entire structure was rebuilt in concrete and has acquired uses within such as the Exploratorium, a theater, and an art gallery.

In 1915 Louis C. Mullgardt, who designed the other showpiece of the PPIE, the Tower of Jewels, described the Palace's design as a "free interpretation of Roman forms and a purely romantic conception, entirely free from obedience to scholastic precedent. Its greatest charm has been established through successful composition; the architectural elements have been arranged into a colossal theme...into which the interwoven planting and the mirror lake have been incorporated in a masterful way." Until 1962 the crumbling stucco original of this beloved relic of the Exposition survived in the melancholy state Maybeck said was the right mood for the fine arts. Then, thanks largely to the generosity and persistence of Walter Johnson, who matched the funds raised by the city, it was restored in concrete. The exhibition building behind the rotunda was given a new life as a home for the Exploratorium, an auditorium, and other cultural activities (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 94).

Maybeck summarized his friend's [Polk's] dilemma well. [In 1915] Polk had reserved the choicest project at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, the Palace of Fine Arts, for himself. Then, in a rare gesture of munificence, he gave it to Maybeck. Shortly before the fair opened, Maybeck wrote to Polk that "you have put up a monument to your Ideals [through me] and made a sacrifice for them--there is in you a yearning for the highest Ideal ... and I believe some morning you will wake up to cut out that other side which you seem to consider important."²¹ (Longstreth 1998: 302-303)

Maybeck subscribed to the academic concern for making the plan express "any series of human movements." However, he felt that the plan should also be developed as if it were an elegant piece of jewelry, for the total conception to be beautiful. In Maybeck's mind, these two facets were intimately related. To accommodate the most mundane functions, "canning pineapples, for instance, [the plan] should look like an abstract painting, like the choreography for a ballet."²⁶

The University Hospital was the first of several grand complexes that Maybeck hoped to design. Among them only the Palace of Fine Arts would be executed, and it was literally a gift from his friend Polk.²⁷ Maybeck's earthy demeanor, his dreamlike visions, his lack of interest in business, politics, or even professional advancement made him an improbable candidate for the large commissions he coveted. The promise afforded by his inventive interpretations of the classical language on a grand scale went largely unfulfilled. It was a great loss for San Francisco (Longstreth 1998: 329-30).

The importance he [Maybeck] placed on architecture's emotional content is further revealed in the only lengthy essay he wrote about one of his own buildings, the Palace of Fine Arts. Most of the piece is devoted to explaining the design's "atmosphere" and the sensations it was calculated to generate: "sadness modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence." Shortly before the Palace was constructed, he told William Gray Purcell: "You cannot produce a living architecture as a system of applied logic. Architecture is life-poetry; the logic is not something to be caught by intellectual machinery however clever its cogs and shifts. Architecture is the imprint of a greater logic of Man and Nature which no smart brain can take apart and make simpler."⁴⁹ (Longstreth 1998: 347).

21. Letter from Maybeck to Polk, March 6, 1915, Polk Papers. For background on Polk's securing of the Palace of Fine Arts design for Maybeck, see Kenneth Cardwell, Bernard Maybeck (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City, 1977), p. 141 (Longstreth 1998: 394).

49. Esther McCoy, Five California Architects (New York, 1960), p. 3; Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts, p. 9; and William Gray Purcell, "Bernard Maybeck; Poet of Building," typescript, 1949, CED Docs, p. 3.(Longstreth 1998: 399).

Abbreviations