• Transbay Transit Terminal
• Rincon Center (former post office)
• 3655 Clay St. house
• Goldman house
• Office tower
• Crown Zellerbach Building
• Industrial Indemnity Building
• Sun Yat-Sen Statue
• Alcoa Building
• Standard Oil of California
• Abbreviations

Designed to handle the Key System trains that ran across the Bay Bridge from 1939 until 1958, this is now a bus terminal. The functionalist Moderne box encloses a well-designed circulation system. The construction of this terminal signaled the demise of the Ferry Building as the prime gateway to the city (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 33).

Timothy Pflueger and Arthur Brown Jr. collaborated on a functional Moderne design for the Transbay Terminal (46) (1939)... The terminal was built as a turnaround for the Key System railroad, which brought commuters across the Bay Bridge from the eastern suburbs. Today it is a bus terminal (Wiley 2000: 233).

The functional successor to the Ferry Building. When electric trains began arriving here over the Bay Bridge, use of the Ferry Building dropped to almost nothing overnight, and the Transbay Transit Terminal took over as the primary gateway to the city. This terminal also had the advantage over the Ferry Building of a more central location. According to the Architect and Engineer in January 1939, "Convenience to passengers was the governing motive in the design of the terminal. To this end the structure was developed less as a typical railroad station than as a system of enclosed ramps and stairs so arranged as to provide minimum walking."

The Terminal Building is an 870-foot long flat slab with a 230-foot long central pavilion. The construction is reinforced concrete, faced with California granite. It is extremely simple in design and without ornament except for aluminum trim. Its most extravagant features are the seven handsome 2-story windows which extend across the front of the building. In composition, the building is an enframed pavilion with end bays, wings, and a base. Inside, it consists of a basement garage, street level waiting room, a mezzanine and tracks on a third level. The tracks were removed as electrified trains gave way to buses in the late 1950s. San Francisco has long-range plans for replacing this building with a larger one. B (Corbett and Hall 1979: 100).

Often called PWA Moderne, the minimalist Classicism employed by the Public Works Department is well represented here in symmetrical massing and a colonnade reduced to barely projecting piers capped by a narrow lintel. The WPA murals inside are notable. In 1989 the post office building became the frontispiece for a mixed use development that features a large, midblock atrium with a fountain that rains from the ceiling. The residential towers that front on Howard Street are handsome additions to the dull assortment of towers in SOMA (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 36).

Across Steuart is the Rincon Center and Towers (4). The old Rincon Center post office, designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, ws built in the Moderne style by the Public Works Administration in 1939-40. It is the site of significant murals by Anton Refregier (1948) depicting the history of the state and the city. Refregier, a Russian-born leftist, set out to create a series of paintings based on the Works Progress Administration guide to San Francisco. Forced to make dozens of changes--deleting references to a successful strike and improving the physical appearance of Native Americans (judged to be too thin) and a priest (judged to be too fat), for example--Refregier needed seven years to complete his work. Fain and Johnson of Pereira Associates designed Rincon Towers (1988) to include the post office as a forecourt. Behind the post office thre is a large central attrium where a fountain, surrounded by various eating establishments, rains from the ceiling (Wiley 2000: 222).

Example of Bay Region Modern informality (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 103).

A straightforward wooden box that balances the barnlike informality of vertical siding and double-hung windows with delicate railings and concrete sonotube columns. The L-plan creates an elegant side garden court and processional entranceway that is sheltered from the street (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 100).

Walk west on Jackson and turn left on Spruce. As you approach Washington, note the Goldman House (47) (1951) on your right, which sits on the corner of Washington and Spruce. You are entering another enclave of the extended Haas family, which owns Levi Strauss. Rhoda Goldman is a Haas. The delicacy of the framing and the expanses of glass give Esherick's design an airy, see-through look (Wiley 2000: 279).

The Bay Region blending of informality and elegance is shown here in the unexpected but successful combination of barn siding and double-hung windows with delicate iron work and a formal entry (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 39)

By contrast [with a 1951 townhouse by Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons] the Esherick house deals equally and formally with the Bay view and the position of the house on a corner lot. The L-shaped plan creates a private garden and processional entranceway culminating in a two-story, glazed entrance and stair hall. The vertical emphasis of the focal space is carried throughout the living areas. The stark simplicity of the form is lightened by a generous use of glass--welcome in foggy San Francisco--on the south and east elevations (Woodbridge 1988: 184-85).

The 3700 Washington Street property was formerly the site of the Charles Stetson Wheeler (1863-1923) home. The house was evidently built by J. C. Newsome for O. D. Baldwin who sold it to Wheeler in the late 1890s. The original brick retaining wall is extant and was used as the base of the house designed by Esherick house.

Wheeler was born in Fruitvale, California and earned an A.B. degree from UC Berkeley in 1884 at the age of 21. During the course of his distinguished career, he handled many historic trust cases. In 1898, the Wheelers built a country home they called "The Bend" designed by Willis Polk at the foot of Mt. Shasta on the McCloud River. During the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, he was a member of the Committee of Fifty and served on the Relief of the Hungry subcommitte headed by Rabbi W. W. Voorsanger. He was appointed to fill unexpired terms of two UC Regents (1902-06; 1911-12; and 1912-23). He twice declined appointment as chief justice of the California State Supreme Court. He nominated Hiram Johnson for President of the U.S. in 1920.

In the early 1890s, Wheeler was the attorney for James Graham Fair, who envisioned a development project connected to the State Belt Railway via a tunnel under Fort Mason on Black Point and built by Fulton Engineering and Shipbuilding Company. Fair's project (now the Marina District) occupied the marsh and tidelands in the shallow cove stretching from Black Point on the east to a low-lying area once known as Strawberry Island on the west. It was completed after his death by the SF Bridge Co. in preparation for the 1915 Panama Pacific World Fair (C. Walton: personal communication).

One of the early postwar office towers. The metal bolts on the piers were added later for seismic safety (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 35).

The first of the city's glass-curtain-walled towers in the first and best of the tower-plaza settings. Expensive walls like those of the tower, where the air-conditioning console is set in to permit the glass to extend unbroken from the floor to above the ceiling, will never be done again. The sames goes for the elegant but extravagant placement of the elevators and stairs in their own mosaic-clad tower outside the office block. The playful round building, originally a bank, is an integral part of the gently sinking plaza with a fountain by David Tolerton (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 31).

The Mechanic's Monument Plaza provides an excellent point from which to view the Crown Zellerbach Building (16) (see illustration on page 139). This 1959 building by SOM and Hertzka and Knowles was one of San Francisco's first flirtations with the International Style--a modern glass, steel, and aluminum high rise with no surface ornamentation. The architects also broke with the prevailing way of arranging office buildings shoulder to shoulder by creating a tower in a plaza setting à la Le Corbusier. The building is considered structurally innovative because its steel girders, which reach across the entire width of the building, eliminated the need for interior columns, thus creating office space that could be adapted to shifting organizational forms. Although it is a high rise, the building seems modest in proportions when contrasted with the surrounding megaliths. The building was constructed at a time when Market Street was in decline, thus SOM placed the entrance on Bush Street and faced the service tower, which is clad in greenish mosaic tile, toward Market Street. The small circular building, Web Street Securities, was originally a banking temple, the most innovative of the various modernist attempts along Market Street. The roof is made of precast folded concrete plates sheathed in copper (Wiley 2000: 160-61).

Once a giant, now a moderate-sized tower, but still remarkable for its deference in scale and wall composition to its neighbors, particularly Lewis Hobart's 1910-17 Newhall Building at 260 California Street. The executive offices are on the second floor under the arched vaults, facing a garden terrace designed by Lawrence Halprin (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 33).

As an example of early modernism in San Francisco (1959), the Industrial Indemnity (originally John Hancock) Building (59) at 255 California by SOM stirred up as much excitement as the Crown Zellerbach Building. The building sits on piers whose curving arches pick up the shape of the windows on the top floor of the Dollar Building across the street. The façade is unadorned except for the slightly raised panels between the windows. At 14 floors, this modern building, as compared with 345 California, fits well with its older companions. Lawrence Halprin's lovely Japanese garden, accessible from the second floor, seemed neglected in 2000 (Wiley 2000: 171).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 42).

The major office tower in the Golden Gateway Redevelopment Project. Alcoa was the first design to use the seismic X-bracing as part of its structural aesthetic. The idea was used again in Chicago's Hancock Building, designed in the firm's Chicago office. The formal plan for the garden squares on top of the garages was intended to create the effect of an outdoor sculpture museum. Major pieces are by Marino Marini, Henry Moore, Charles Perry, and Jan Peter Stern; the fountain is by Robert Woodward. Although the rooftop plazas are convincing pedestrian precints in the sky, the street level is a grim reminder of what happens when an area is abandoned to auto traffic (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 34).

Enter the Golden Gateway complex via the stairs and pedestrian bridge leading up from the park. Wander south through the complex and cross another pedestrian bridge to One Maritime Plaza (72), designed by SOM in 1964 as part of the first phase of the Golden Gateway Project. Even with the demolition of the intrusive Embarcadero Freeway ramps, which flanked the plaza on the north and south, the street-level pedestrian is still presented with the unrelenting ugliness of blank concrete walls and garage and service entrances on three sides of the building. This is unfortunate, because once you find your way onto the Plaza, you are in for a treat. The Plaza, a collection of miniparks with sculpture and fountains, is an ideal viewing platform--free of hustle and bustle--from which to study downtown architecture. On both sides of the office tower, with its distinctive exposed sway bracing, there are sleek one-story buildings of glass and brick, which are modernist gems (Wiley 2000: 172).

The plaza with its lush garden by Osmundson and Staley steals the show here. The intersection offers a chance to compare changing fashions in corporate plazas. Ecker and Jessie are two mid-block streets that reveal the possibilities for creating lively pedestrian passageways in the large South of Market blocks (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 32).

Standard Oil continued to expand across Market Street, opting for space and ugliness in two towers at 555 and 575 Market Street (21), by Hertzka and Knowles, built in 1964 and 1975. In what is perhaps a hope to redeem these buildings that rank with the worst of the downtown high rises, the towers are separated by a park by Theodore Osmundson and John Staley that looks appealing but is usually too cold to sit in (Wiley 2000: 162).

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