• Presidio Gate Canons
• Lotta's Fountain
• Ben Franklin Statue
• Chinese Tomb
• Bronze gate
• Sharon Children's House stained glass
• Baseball Player
• The Thinker
• Prayer Book Cross
• Swedenborgian Church
• Abbreviations

The history of the San Francisco Presidio only begins with the Spanish occupation of California. In 1848, the adobe Comandancia with its adjoining chapel and officers' quarters were incorporated into an American officer's club, which stands today. Two of the original Spanish cannons, cast in 1673, now guard the entrance to the club. The touchhole of one still contains fragments of the file thrust in by Captain John C. Fremont in 1846. Two others cannos from the Castillo are located elsewhere on the grounds: one, cast in 1628, stands before the Presidio Army Museum, and the other, cast in 1684, is at Fort Point. Another pair flank the Lyon Street entrance to the Presidio, while two more flank the flagpole just 400 feet from the entrance of the Officers' Club (Alexander and Heig 2002: 17).

Lotta Crabtree, the most highly paid American actress of her day, retired from touring in 1891 to San Francsco. Her $4 million fortune went to charity; the best known gift is this fountain. The shaft was lengthened in 1915 by eight feet to better match the Market Street light standards. In 1916 the merchants paid for their bas-reliefs, created by noted sculptor Arthur Putnam (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 19).

Evelyn Wells [in her captivating book Champagne Days of San Francisco] also describes the "Cocktail Route," for decades a part of San Francisco legend. The town's tycoons, like the Senator, the Banker and the Judge [the book's three leading characters], met in the early afternoon at Lotta's Fountain, to adjourn for refreshments at such great watering places as the Palace bar, where the city's bonanza kings might rub elbows with local celebrities like the English nobleman, Lord Talbot Clifton, and his pal, White Hat McCarty, a horse trainer from Boston, who in 1898 won $100,000 backing a fifty-to-one shot in the American Derby at Chicago. McCarty's white beaver hat and a heavy gold watch chain were the only reminders of the fortune he had flung away on bets and high living (Alexander and Heig 2002: 328).

The last portrait [in the trompe l'oeil mural on the west wall of the Monadock Building lobby] with a name is opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini, one of Italy's greatest coloratura sopranos. In 1910, on Christmas Eve, she sang "The Last Rose of Summer" to over a quarter million people right across the street at Lotta's Fountain (Monadnock Building Handout, nd).

Lillie Coit's monument to the Volunteer Fire Department, sculpted by Haig Patigian and installed in 1933, and the 1879 statue of Ben Franklin are in ... [Washington] Square. In 1958 Lawrence Halprin & Associates and Douglas Baylis designed the present landscape, which is so sympathetic to its surroundings and to the activities of the square that it seems as though it had always existed (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 49).

In 1902, in response to public clamor for a public golf course, John McLaren, steward of San Francisco's public parks, asked Jack Neville and Vincent Whitney to design a three hole course covering the chinese section of the Golden Gate Cemetery at Lands End. Facilitated by the chinese practice of making temporary burials (after decomposition the bones were exhumed, cleansed and shipped to China for reburial), the layout was complete by year's end, with only the chinese tomb and its grove remaining on the first fairway.

The James Flood mansion at California and Mason Streets, built of Connecticut brownstone and surrounded by the most expensive bronze fence in the city, survives today in altered form as the Pacific Union Club. After the interior burned in 1906, Willis Polk designed substantial changes: he placed curved wings on the sides and added a third floor, replacing the squat tower on the original (Alexander and Heig 2002: 207).

"Yielding precedence to none," said the San Francisco Newsletter, "this massive mansion standing on California Street, between Mason and Taylor, is a monument to wealth!" Architect Augustus Laver included every luxurious detail that Comstock silver could buy. This new building stood out in startling contrast to its wooden neighbors, for its walls were of dark, reddish-brown Connecticut sandstone. The house was long celebrated as the only brownstone dwelling west of the Rockies, but its most outstanding feature was a magnificent $30,000 bronze fence. Tradition has it that the Floods retained a servant whose sole duty was to keep this fence polished to a dazzling brightness. Otherwise, the exterior was a model of restraint compared with the appointments within (Alexander and Heig 2002: 206-09).

The Children's House, which holds all manner of child-oriented delights, is the city's purest surviving example of Richardsonian Romanesque. Heavily damaged in the 1906 earthquake, as were other masonry structures in the park, it was rebuilt within the year. The carousel dates from c. 1892. In 1978 Michael Painter and Assoc. redesigned the playground (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 168).

Outside the perimeter of the tennis courts, on the east end of J. F. Kennedy Drive, near intersection of Middle Drive. A life-size figure of a mustachioed baseball player of the 1880's throwing a ball. When first shown in a Paris exhibition, the work was titled the "National Game."(Arts Commission of San Francisco 1978: 57).

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).

Extant (Longstreth 1998: 424).

Presented to Golden Gate Park at the opening of the Midwinter Fair in January of 1894 as a memorial of the service held on the shore of Drake's Bay about Saint John Baptist's Day, June 24, 1579. [This was] the first Christian service in the English tongue on the California coast, and the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in the United States (from the legend on the monument).

Prayer Book Cross, created by Ernest Coxhead, stands on one of the higher points in Golden Gate Park. It is located between John F. Kennedy Drive and Park Presidio Drive, near Cross Over Drive. This 75 ft. sandstone cross commemorates the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in California by Sir Francis Drake's chaplain on June 24, 1579 (Text and Photographs Copyright ©1998 David Gardner. All Rights Reserved Worldwide).

No reference to the unique architecture of Pacific Heights would be complete without mention of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, located at 2107 Lyon Street, the northwest corner of Washington Street. It was established in 1893 by Reverend Joseph Worcester, occupant and designer of one of the rustic Marshall cottages on Russian Hill. The design of the church was partly inspired by sketches of a tiny village church in the Po Valley near Verona. These sketches, made by Bruce Porter, were left for young Bernard Maybeck to interpret when he was employed in the offices of A. Page Brown (Alexander and Heig 2002: 307).

A beloved landmark of the early Craftsman era, [the Swedenborgian Church] brought together the talents of Brown; Bruce Porter, who sketched the original design and did the stained glass; Bernard Maybeck; and A.C. Schweinfurth, who did the drawings in Brown's office. The prime mover behind it all was the Rev. Joseph Worcester, pastor of the church, and friend and patron of the artists and architects who fostered the Bay Area branch of the California Arts and Crafts Movement. The garden provides an appropriate introduction to the church interior, a living room with a roof supported by untrimmed madrone tree trunks and a great brick fireplace. The stained-glass windows by Porter are complemented by landscape paintings by William Keith. The pegged wooden chairs with seats and backs of woven rushes that Maybeck may have designed were credited by Gustav Stickley as the inspiration for Mission furniture. Rarely have nature and architecture been so well married. (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 101).

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