• Pacific Coast Stock Exchange
• San Remo Hotel and Restaurant
• 35 Lopez Ave. house
• City Hall
• Southern Pacific Building
• California Palace of the Legion of Honor
• St. Vincent de Paul
• Erlanger house
• Townhouses
• Hallidie Building
• Abbreviations

This mausoleum-like block is a 1930 remodeling of a temple-front structure that had housed the U.S. Treasury. The monumental pylons in front have cast-stone sculptures by Ralph Stackpole. The trading hall interior has a curvilinear grill made of thin metal strips laid endwise on a frame to form a lightweight ceiling beneath the air plenum, an ingenious way of creating an apparently changing depth of field that the same architects used in Oakland's famous Paramount Theater. The tower next door has a restrained Moderne entranceway and a notable lobby. The City Club now occupies the upper floors that originally housed the Stock Exchange Club. Tours of this exceptionally fine interior with a mural by Diego Rivera and numerous artworks by local artists can be arranged through the Mexican Museum at Fort Mason (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 31).

Even as the Russ Building was going up, commercial buildings were moving toward Deco-influenced modern designs, such as James Miller and Timothy Pflueger's Pacific Coast Stock Exchange (47), which is one block east of Montgomery on the corner of Pine and Sansome. The Stock Exchange started out as a U.S. Treasury Building, designed by Milton Dyer in 1915. Ironically, it was the collapse of the stock market that led to the building's remodeling as a stock exchange in 1930 after the Treasury Department moved out. For the Stock Exchange, Miller and Pflueger, emerging as the city's leading architects, streamlined a rather conventional neoclassical building, giving it more modern lines by adding massive corners to interrupt the Doric Colonade. The granite figures in front are by Ralph Stackpole. The skylight over the trading floor features innovative metal louvers to filter the natural light (Wiley 2000: 168).

A pleasant and understated remodeling that enhances the old North Beach character of this building (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 52).

Start at the San Remo Hotel (1) (1906), home to the restaurant Emma, at 2237 Mason near Francisco. A.P. Giannini, founder of the Bank of America, built this hotel to replace one that burned in 1906. Its first occupants were Italians who worked at the nearby canneries. The original waterline was here. The foot of Meiggs Wharf began near 444 Francisco, a condominium in the first block to the right as you walk north on Mason (Wiley 2000: 332).

A Prairie style house with Sullivanesque ornament by an architect whose best known work is in Stockton. Another good Prairie style house is at 343 Montalvo (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 173).

Polk and some of his peers--architects such as Bernard Maybeck, Arthur Brown Jr., George Kelham, Albert Pissis, and Julia Morgan--the second generation of San Francisco architects, turned to Chicago, New York, and particularly to designs inspired by Paris's Ècole des Beaux-Arts. After the American Civil War when architectural training consisted for the most part of an apprenticeship, a number of leading American architects traveled to the Ècole to complete their formal education. The Ècole employed a very strict educational approach that began with the study of the great buildings of Greece, Rome, and the Italian Renaissance. The emphasis was on the design of monumental public buildings within this classical tradition. Hence, the description of Beaux-Arts influenced architecture as neoclassical or part of the American Renaissance.

And thus its imitative strain. When one examines San Francisco's famous Beaux-Arts Civic Center, this becomes readily apparent. City Hall, considered a Beaux-Arts masterpiece in the French High Baroque tradition, closely resembles the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, which serves as Napoleon's tomb (Wiley 2000: 131).

City Hall (4) (1915) is the true masterpiece of the Civic Center (see illustration on page 131). The design was actually rendered by Arthur Brown Jr., John Bakewell serving as the managing partner in the firm. Brown, who was a student of Bernard Maybeck and a graduate of the Ècole des Beaux-Arts, took his ideas from the Church of Les Invalides in Paris, which was built in the seventeenth century and then became Napoleon's tomb. The 308-foot-high dome was designed so that it would be taller by about a dozen feet than the capitol dome in Washington. The sculpture is by Henri Crenier, and much of the interior design was done by Jean Louis Bourgeois. Skilled craftsmen were imported from France and Italy to work on City Hall as well as a number of buildings being constructed for the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The central staircase surmounted by the dome is truly inspiring. Brown designed the structure around two light courts that open onto skylights over ceremonial chambers. The southern chamber houses a small city museum. The spectacular legislative chamber of the Board of Supervisors at the top of the stairs is paneled in Manchurian oak and is open to the public at meeting times. The mayor's office and connectied meeting rooms on the Polk Street side of the building on the second floor are also paneled in Manchurian oak, but are less accessible to the public. Tours are available (Wiley 2000: 213).

The Civic Center is not only a crowning achievement of City Beautiful Movement design in this country (along with the Washington Mall and the great turn-of-the-century fairs), but also the only really first-rate example of French High Baroque Revival carried out in detail and with loving care. The City Hall itself is the jewel, inside and out--don't miss the rotunda. Although the other buildings are Depression products they do not show it. The Opera House is modeled on Garnier's Paris Opera and has a circulation system nearly as impressive. The Veterans Building, erected without a clear program, was later occupied on the upper floors by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It recently had its small auditorium restored as a recital hall. The other Civic Center buildings follow the general plan set forth by the advisory commission headed at first by John Galen Howard and later by Bernard Maybeck, and listing among its members Willis Polk, Ernest Coxhead, G. Albert Lansburgh, John Reid, Jr., Frederick H. Meyer, and Arthur Brown, Jr.(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 117-18).

The new City Hall, built between 1913 and 1916, is San Francisco's greatest ornament. Occupying two blocks bounded by Van Ness, McAllister, Polk and Grove Streets, it faces the Civic Center Plaza to the east, but has an imposing entrance on Van Ness as well. Built in the French Renaissance style, its walls are of California granite rather than the traditional limestone, which would not stand up well in salt air.

Although its estimated cost of $3.5 million seemed excessive in that day, the citizens were willing to foot the bill as a matter of civic pride. President Taft, on a visit to San Francisco, declared it to be "The City that Knows How," and San Franciscans firmly intended to live up to the accolade.

Rising from street level to a height of 308 feet, higher than the Capitol Building in Washington, the dome of copper, ornamented with heavy gold leaf, was said to be patterned after the dome of Les Invalides in Paris. Figures in the pediments at the front and back of the building were the work of Jules Crenier, while the medallions and other interior decorations were done by a French sculptor named Evan, who was so unpopular with some of the workmen that tools and bits of masonry occasionally fell in his path from the dome above. The handsome French paneling of the mayor's office and the press room was the work of Laroulandie, a young Frenchman who soon after lost his life in the battle of the Argonne.

Thanks principally to the genius of architect Arthur Brown, Jr., the proportions and ornamentation of this building present a beauty seldom if ever surpassed, even by the original European masters of the French Renaissance. John Bakewell, Jr., the supervising architect, dealt with the temperamental crew and found solutions to the practical problems which constantly arose, allowing the inspired dream of the design to become a reality.

Philip Johnson, one of America's leading contemporary architects, was once asked if he could name an American building which he would like to claim as his own work; his instant reply was "The San Francisco City Hall." We can perhaps be thankful that the Beaux Arts disciplines of proper scale and use of ornamentation, having been thrown out the window by the post-World War II practitioners, are again being revived.

True to the unity demanded by apostles of the Beaux Arts school, the Civic Center, fronting the City Hall's eastern façade, was surrounded by buildings designed in a compatible spirit, even though each of the encircling structures was designed by a different architect. No displays of non-conformist eotism here! Admirers of the Civic Center are often heard to remark, "Thank Good the earthquake came in 1906 instead of 1956!"

The huge Civic Auditorium, begun in 1913, was hurried to completion in time for the 1915 Fair by John Galen Howard, architect of the University of California at Berkeley. To the east was the new Public Library, begun in 1916. Its architect, George Kelham, included a grand staircase, in keeping with the splendid one in City Hall. Modern architects deplored it as an extravagant waste of space; no such sin was to be committed in the new library built at Larkin and Fulton Streets, completed in 1996, and designed by architects James Freed and Cathy Simon. The new library has two styles: a "classical" façade, with metal tubes representing columns, fronts the Civic Center Plaza, intending to match the other buildings in the set. The façades facing Grove and Hyde Streets are in the stripped-down "modern" style, perhaps on the theory that no one would be able to see both styles at the same time. Anyone standing at the corner of the Civic Auditorium, at Grove and Larkin Strets, is reminded of the old cliche applied to late Victorian buildings, which had "Queen Anne fronts and Mary Anne behinds."

In the 1930s, Arthur Brown designed a Federal Building for Washington, D.C., and he seems to have reproduced the same structure for the Federal Building on the San Francisco Civic Center. With its rusticated lower floor and handsome lanterns, it does justice to the other structures around the plaza. The State Building, on the north side of the plaza, is in the compatible Italian Renaissance Style. Badly damaged in the 1989 earthquake--a reminder that the site was originally marshy ground--it has recently been renovated and reopened.

After a long, drawn-out battle in which some politicians argued that it was undemocratic to spend city funds on an opera house, the War Memorial Opera House was completed in 1931, thanks to substantial private donations. Arthur Brown designed the Opera House and the neighboring Veterans' Auditorium in the French Renaissance style, clearly displaying the architect's mastery of understated elegance. Linking the two buildings is a small park with a fine grillwork fence, patterned after one in the Place Stanislaus in Nancy.

Brown deliberately omitted a grand staircase in the Opera House because he felt that patrons would only use it as a showcase for their jewels and costly gowns. Yet the splendid lobby makes an elegant setting for just such a display on opening night, an event which attracts hundreds of ticketless people who stand outside to see the opera-goers make thier entrances. On this and other gala occasions the buildings of the Civic Center are magnificently lighted, as if to show that San Francisco still is the city that knows how (Alexander and Heig 2002: 363-66).

A vast Renaissance palace built to house one of the city's first major corporate headquarters (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 37).

Number One Market Street (5), one of the first post-1906 corporate headquarters buildings, was designed by Bliss & Faville for the Southern Pacific in 1916. Walter Bliss and William Faville were graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home of the country's first architectural school, and worked for McKim, Mead & White. In 1898 they set up shop in the city, using Bliss's connections to local society to become one of the leading firms serving the well-to-do and the corporate elite. Accomplished if unoriginal architects, they produced some of the finest neoclassical buildings in the city. The Southern Pacific (SP) gutted the Market Street building in 1976 and, with the Del Monte Corporation, constructed two towers on Mission Street, designed by Welton Becket and Associates, that are connected to Market Street by a glazed atrium and gallery. Since then the SP was sold to the Union Pacific and no longer occupies the building, marking the disappearance via corporate merger of the city's most historically notorious corporation. The renovated building is being shared by Del Monte, a historic San Francisco agribusiness giant, and Scient Corporation, a representative of the new "dot com" business world (Wiley 2000: 158).

A major Market Street landmark, long prominent as the first large building visible to Bay commuters leaving the Ferry Building, located at the end of the important view down California Street. Also one of the earliest major corporate headquarters buildings in the city. In composition, a three part vertical block with differentiated end bays and Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation. A steel frame building with brick curtain walls and glazed terrra cotta details concentrated in the arcaded base and the giant order beneath the cornice. The building is crowned with a small tower, following the example of the Merchants Exchange Building. The interior was designed with wide corridors for the noon hour rush, and flexible partitions for changing work patterns.

Rather than demolish its fine old building for a new one, in 1976 the Southern Pacific Company (with the Del Monte Corporation) completed a pair of towers at the rear of the block. They are designed by Welton Becket and Associates, called One Market Plaza and are connected to the old building by a glazed mall. Although not so successful as architecture, the planning of the project included the consideration of urban values and has resulted in a complex which is more beneficial to the city than most recent Market Street office developments. Rather than another empty plaza, the complex includes a more realistic generator of pedestrian activity in its mall, and at the scale of the city, its pair of towers are among the most attractive of the existing recent crop south of Market on the skyline. A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 77-78).

Lincoln Park occupies the top of the Point Lobos Headland. Like Lone Mountain, it once had a cemetery (aptly called the Golden Gate) where the golf course is now. Near the first tee an arch from a Chinese tomb commemorates this piece of the past. Matchless views of the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin Headlands, and the city to the east delight those who walk along the north edge of the park. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, an art museum devoted largely to 16th- to 18th-century European painting and a Rodin sculpture collection, was given to the city by Adolph and Alma de Brettville Spreckels as a memorial to the W W I dead. The building is a modified copy of the Parisian palace of the same name, here given a country rather than a city setting (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 164-65).

Alma Spreckels could not have picked a grander site for her beloved California Palace of the Legion of Honor (26). It was originally the city's potters' field; many of the first remains interred here came from Yerba Buena Cemetery, which was dug up to make way for the old main library in the Civic Center. The cemetery became a way station for Chinese who were temporarily buried here before their remains were returned to the mother country. John McLaren built the Lincoln Park Golf Course (27) in 1909. For the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (1924), architect George Applegarth copied the design of the French pavilion at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The pavilion was modeled after the Palais de la Legion d'Honneur in Paris, which Napoleon acquired in 1804 as headquarters for the Legion d'Honneur. The glass pyramid in the museum's courtyard--à la I.M. Pei's pyramid in front of the Louvre--provides light for the undergound galleries that were added during a retrofit designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and John M. Y. Lee & Partners in 1994.

The centerpiece of the collection, which focuses on European art, is Spreckels's fine collection of Rodin sculpture. The museum also houses the Achenbach Foundation--an excellent collection of drawings and printed materials covering 500 years and including works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Goya, Whistler, and Picasso--put together by advertising executive Moore Achenbach and his wife before they gave it to the museum in 1951 (Wiley 2000: 379).

The exaggerated scale of the fake half-timbering, the gabled gambrel roofs, and the tower of this huge church make it unusual among the many Roman Catholic churches designed by this firm in the city. It is stylistically related to the smaller-scale San Anselm's in San Anselmo (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 81).

Continue west on Green to the corner of Steiner, where stands the lavishly detailed St. Vincent de Paul (21) (1916) by Shea and Lofquist (Wiley 2000: 350).

The clients wanted a medieval English manor house, but the product resists classification. The design reveals Maybeck's compositional skills and his ability to manipulate eclectic elements with originality (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 173).

Maybeck also designed the Erlanger House (16) at 270 Castenada on the left, just past the intersection with Lopez, "to suggest the idea of an English character in California," as he put it. He was referring to then-popular Tudor Revival homes inspired by British architects associated with the Arts and Crafts movement. A masterpiece, the exterior is a collection of gables and dormers with exquisitely detailed windows. Inside is a grand living hall done in redwood (Wiley 2000: 386).

The Livermore family commissioned [Polk] to design the houses at 1, 3, 5, and 7 Russian Hill Place, built in 1916. The plan of the block is scenographic, with the ramps converging on a central access to the heart of the block, while the flanking side streets, Russian Hill Place and Florence Street, are lined with houses that define a keyhole view and shield the block's interior. Polk's Russian Hill Place houses make two important contributions: on the Jones Street side they form a subtly articulated wall closing off the street and on the upper side they become cottages lining a brick-paved country lane. Polk's use of overscaled Classical detail is particularly effective here (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 66)

Credited as the first use of the glass-curtain-wall, the facade of this building is more curtainlike than almost anything since. The elaborate cast-iron cornice, which resembles a Victorian window valance, contributes to the impression that the glass grid is a curtain. The fire escapes recall pull cords (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 26).

Polk's most famous commercial design is the Hallidie Building at 130 Sutter Street (1917). The all-glass façade, generally recognized as the introduction of the glass curtain wall which has become a cliche of modern architecture, was actually an effort on Polk's part to create an attractive façade within a low budget, and quickly. the glass façade was hung, curtain like, away from the actual structural frame of the building, in a separate frame of elaborate cast iron, with ornate fire escapes at either side. The ornamental iron fretwork relieves the cold severity of an all-glass wall, and the result is highly decorative. The Hallidie Building was commissioned by the University of California, and has always been painted in blue and gold. It was renovated in 1979 by Kaplan, McLaughlan and Diaz, architects (Alexander and Heig 2002: 339).

The Hallidie Building (41), Polk's 1917 radical masterpiece, is across the street [from the Hunter-Dulin Building] at 130 Sutter. A careful examination of the neighborhood (for example, the 1908 Bemiss Building (42) by George Applegarth at 266 Sutter) reveals that other architects were moving in the direction of the glass curtain wall building. Polk hung a glass wall in front of the structural frame of the building, finishing the façade with exquisitely patterned railings, fire escapes, and a Gothic cornice. The ornamentation suggests influences from William Morris and Art Nouveau. The building looks backward--toward elaborate ornamentation characteristic of the late Victorians, of which Polk was a vociferous critic--and forward to the unadorned glass wall, which Walter Gropius had already successfully developed in Germany. The local chapter of the American Institute of Architects is located here. With his sense of context, Polk designed the Hallidie Building to fit with the French Banking Building (43) at 110 Sutter. Splendid Survivors describes the buildings on this block of Sutter and the next block west "as a capsule history of downtown San Francisco architecture, which has come together in an aesthetically highly successful group."⁵⁴ (Wiley 2000: 167).

More than "the world's first glass curtain walled structure," for which it is well-known, the Hallidie Building is a superb work of urban architecture. Like the best such architecture anywhere, it is drawn from its surroundings, and in turn, it speaks to and ennobles them.

Within a radius of two blocks, there are at least half a dozen earlier buildings which can be viewed either as prototypes or sources of inspiration for the Hallidie Building. Foremost among them is the Bemiss Building of 1908, at 266 Sutter (R235)--a glass front building in the bare minimum of an iron frame with a cantilevered historicist cornice. The Rose Building (W. & J. Sloane Co.) of 1908, at 216-220 Sutter (R231), is one of the best extant representatives of a once-common San Francisco compositional type which placed an implied masonry "architecture" above a 2- to 4-story glass curtain wall base. The best of the local architects, includinbg the Reid Brothers, in the case of the Rose Building, and Polk himself, in the case of the Frederick's Building (278-298 Post, R168), had worked with this type. For the remarkable cantilevered Gothic cornice, Polk need have looked no further than 200 Kearny (at Sutter, R97), of 1908 in the same block, or the Flatiron Building of 1913 (540-548 Market at Sutter, M37). Moreover, the building is in the traditional three part compositional format with differentiated end bays, defined humorously by Gothic fire escapes.

The building responds to its environment by taking common elements in its neighborhood and recombining them in a new way which overwhelms the others in the intelligence of its conception, but still relates to them in its constituent parts and in the working out of the idea. As it is executed here, with the glass curtain wall hung a foot beyond the reinforced concrete structure of the building, it is as beautifully and clearly expressed as any glass curtain wall built since. The composition is arranged like so many of its neighbors--which are also curtain walls, but whose implied masonry walls lend better visual support to the ever-present fire escapes and cornices. The unusually overscaled iron cornice, here, heightens the contrast of structure and ornament which is present everywhere in San Francisco--and heightens the joke.

While he makes fun, however, Polk simultaneously utilizes these same vernacular elements to relate the building to its neighbors in the traditional way. He recognizes the contradictions in the architecture he teases, but he also recognizes its strengths. As the last building built on the block, the Hallidie tied a diverse group together into a superb whole. In addition to the relation of its design to the architecture of the downtown area in general, it related specifically to its block in scale, massing, height, color, and structural expression in a complex dialogue. For all his outrageousness, Polk was too sensitive to the city and too much a part of the traditions of the day ever to have purposefully designed a building out of harmony with its setting. The building is very much related to the larger body of Polk's work, the best of which always responded to the vernacular in inventive ways--whether in shingled houses or traditional office buildings. The building is named after Andrew Hallidie, inventor of the cable car, and it was built by the Regents of the University of California A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 170).

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