• Jessie Street Substation
• 726 44th Ave. cottage
• First Church of Christ, Scientist
• Seldon S. Wright house
• Telesis Tower (Former Crocker Bank Headquarters banking hall)
• Fuller Company Glass Warehouse
• Mills Building
• St. Matthew's Episcopal Church
• Pacific Union Club
• Arthur Conan Doyle House
• Abbreviations

Also known as Pacific Gas and Electric Co. Stevenson St. Substation, Central S, this one-story, brick and terra cotta, Classical Revival style building (Landmark No. 87), with a towering, arched doorway and Romanesque detailing is of historic significance owing to its architecture and engineering. It served as an energy utilities substation until 1924, but is currently vacant and slated to be part of the new home of the Jewish Museum (National Register of Historic Places: California, San Francisco)

In 1998 The Jewish Museum San Francisco commissioned internationally acclaimed architect Daniel Libeskind to design its new building. Libeskind's striking design preserves and expands a former power substation designed by distinguished architect Willis Polk in 1907, transforming it into a unique 21st-century museum in the heart of what has become the San Francisco Bay Area's foremost arts and cultural district. The expansion of this historic building will allow The Magnes Museum the additional space necessary to expand its mission and programming. The Magnes Museum looks forward to opening its new building in 2005 (The Magnes Museum: New Buildings).

The finest and the first of a number of designs by Polk for P. G. & E. substations in northern California. These widely publicized designs served as prototypes for work by other architects for the same company. Such "beautification" of industrial structures was an aspect of the City Beautiful Movement. The design of this building was a 1905 remodel of an 1881 structure which burned in February 1906 and again in April of 1906. It was rebuilt in 1907 and enlarged in 1909. The building is a steel frame and reinforced concrete structure with a steel truss roof. Its main brick facade is a modified vault in composition, with Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation in cream colored, matte glazed terra cotta. Its finest feature is a sculptural group over the smaller of two main entrances consisting of four cherubs with gourds and garlands of fruit beneath a torch. The facade sets up a tension between carefully wrought, sometimes delicate terra cotta ornament and a vast wall of rough red industrial brick. Until demolition of adjacent structures for Yerba Buena Center in recent years, this grand facade was hidden on a blind alley in the middle of a block of taller buildings. This building was initially slated for demolition, as well, but now figures prominently in plans for revitalization of the area. A (Corbett 1979: 76).

The Pacific Gas & Electric Co. substation, 222-226 Jessie Street, tucked away in a dead-end alley between Market and Mission, is one of San Francisco's few great examples of the architectural possibilities of the brick facade. Originally built in 1881, and subsequently enlarged twice, the substation was damaged in a fire in February, 1906, and almost destroyed in the earthquake and fire of April, 1906. Rebuilt in 1907, the building owes its present character to Willis Polk, at that time head of the San Francisco office of D. H. Burnham and Company, the Chicago firm that had prepared the 1905 plan for the conversion of San Francisco to a model of the "city beautiful" along the lines of Paris and Washington. As a result, it is not altogether surprising that the architectural ideas of Polk and Burnham should have been applied to an electric substation in a South-of-Market alley.

This noble structure is a simple (but quite sophisticated) exercise in the development of balance, line, and texture. Though the eye focuses on the ornamental, vertical, and symmetrical piercings and moldings, it is the horizontal line of the rough, red wall that catches the breath. Yet, of course, it is the elaborate applied inventions that make the plain surface more than just another brick wall. This is a building that many San Franciscans have never seen, and it is worth going out of one's way to look at it (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 93; 96-97).

A modest but interesting shingled cottage that suggests a much different lifestyle than that of its neighbors, which were built in the 1930s (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 165)).

An elegant Classic Revival design, the only one of its kind by this important San Francisco architect. The building also contributes, even in its currently abandoned state, to the civic dignity of St. James Park (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 192).

(Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 70).

Willis Polk designed this interesting shingled residence to replace an earlier one (destroyed in 1906) built for Seldon S. Wright, prominent San Francisco attorney and one-time supervisor (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 279).

Willis Polk's Crocker Bank for decades connected one of San Francisco's most prominent names with the financial district's most prestigious address at One Montgomery Street. There is no longer a Crocker Bank (it was absorbed by Wells Fargo in the 1980s), but the little vampires created by sculptor Arthur Putnam still ornament its bronze window trim. In 1983, through an odd, Faustian compromise with the city planning department, the bank building was decapitated, leaving only the white marble and bronze lobby, so extravagant that it seems intended to make the lowly depositor wonder whether he is good enough to keep his money in such a place. In return the city allowed construction of the 37-story Crocker Center (now called Telesis Tower) designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill with their usual egg-crate façade. The adjoining Galleria, supposedly a contemporary version of the famous Galleria in Milan, has a vast arched glass top, offering the ultimate challenge to window cleaners (Alexander and Heig 2002: 371).

Crocker-Citizens National Bank. This Italian Renaissance building, designed by Willis Polk, has been extensively remodeled, including sheathing with terra cotta. The outstanding feature is the rotunda entrance supported by granite pillars (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 281).

A "combination bank and office building" with one of the most lavish banking interiors in the city, but also with an unfortunately remodeled tower above the banking hall facade. The tower was remodeled about 1960 by Milton Pfleuger after the old santstone facing appeared to be in danger of falling off. The original design was a three part vertical composition with a giant order in the upper zone. In 1921 the banking hall and its arcaded base were extended to the north in an exact copy of the original design. This extension made a grand interior even grander with its sumptuous marble furnishings, fluted columns, and coffered ceilings, but it incurred a characteristically flamboyant reaction from Polk who sued the architect, Charles E. Gottschalk, for plagiarism.

Up until the time of its remodeling, the building occupied a key position in what must have been one of the finest intersections of monumental buildings in America. Across Post Street and occupying the Market Street gore was A. Page Brown's flatiron Crocker Building, across Montgomery was Clinton Day's Union Trust Co. Building, and across Market were the Merchant's National Bank Building (M53) and the Palace Hotel (M54), still standing. The tower of the Hobart Building (M45) was visible over the Union Trust. Despite tremendous losses in the immediate area, the Crocker Bank is still an extremely important building at its location. Its arcaded base and columned entrance vestibule form rich street facades in contrast to the newly prevailing sterility of the area. And the tower, despite its remodeling, still displays in its form a knowledge of how to fill a space at an important intersection.

Crocker Bank is presently planning to remove the tower above the grand banking hall and build a new highrise west of Lick Place. A shopping arcade would front on Lick Place and a tower would rise in the southwest corner of the block, displacing the Lick Garage, the Foxcroft Building (R148), the Thompson and Ortman Building (R92), and the Lyons Building (R93). Architects of the project are Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (Corbett 1979: 104).

One of the most architecturally interesting of the waterfront buildings is 50 Green Street, built for the Fuller Paint Company in 1907. Here the theme of large first-floor arches is carried almost to a logical conclusion, giving the building a very light appearance. Most fortunately this fine building has been carefully remodeled to provide space for a number of businesses (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 65).

The Fuller Company Glass Warehouse in the Classical Revival style was added to the National Register of Historical Places (Building #01001101) in 2001, with Willis Polk and George Alexander Wright credited as the architects. Historically, the building functioned as a manufacturing facility and warehouse; today it provides office space for various business firms.

The only surviving pre-fire skyscraper that clearly reflects the great Chicago School tradition from which it sprang; the wall composition recalls Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium Building of 1888. Damaged but structurally intact after the 1906 earthquake and fire, the building was restored and twice enlarged by Willis Polk, who headed the local D.H. Burnham & Co. office. Lewis Hobart's tower respects the original design. The arched entrance with its fine detail leads to a restrained lobby with a graceful branching stair and unusual foliated balusters (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 27).

An excellent example of Chicago School design by one of Chicago's most important firms during the heyday of the early skyscraper. Also, the earliest entirely steel frame building in San Francisco. The Mills Building was one of the tallest in the city at the time it was built and for many years afterwards. Seriously burned in the fire, it was rebuilt and enlarged in 1908 by D. H. Burnham and Co., with Willis Polk in charge. The building was extended again by Polk in 1914 and 1918. In 1931, the 22-story Mills Tower by Lewis Hobart was erected at the rear of the building in an excellent adaptation of the original design. In composition, the building is a three part vertical block with differentiated end bays. Ornamentation is Romanesque, including the very fine massive round entrance arch. Brick walls are ornamented in terra cotta, some of which has been replaced in recent years with stucco in a mutilation of the original. The base, including the arch, is clad in Inyo County white marble. Built around a large central light court, and with continuous corridors on each floor, the building represented the latest in efficient office building planning and was a model for later downtown construction. The building was built by Darius Ogden Mills, founder of the first bank in the West and later of the Bank of California. This is one of the major architectural landmarks of the city. A (Corbett 1979: 205).

The outstanding pre-fire building of the financial district is the Mills Building, 220 Montgomery Street, designed by the famous Chicago firm of Burnham & Root and erected in 1891-92. This ten-story, foursquare brick structure picks up the Richardson Romanesque style in its massive, intricately-carved, arched entrance, in the arches crowning the modified Corinthian pilasters that delineate the vertical line of the building, in the repetition of the Romanesque arches in the ninth-floor frieze, and in the squat columns between the windows of the top story. Yet the building as a whole is a powerful expression of the style that was developing in Chicago in the heyday of Burnham and Sullivan and the young Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Mills Building was built by Darius Ogden Mills, a Forty-niner who parlayed a Sacramento shop into a partnership in William C. Ralston's Bank of California, and went on to become one of the authentic financial moguls of late-nineteenth-century America.

Willis Polk supervised the reconstruction of the Mills Building after the fire of 1906, and was also in charge of the additions to the rear of the building, which he executed in the same style as the original. In 1931 the adjacent twenty-two-story Mills Tower was completed to the design of Lewis Hobart (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 79).

The always versatile Polk this time produced a very correct Gothic village church. Pflueger daringly cut it in half to insert a carefully matched new section so the nave would seat 160 additional worshipers (Gebhard, Winter and Sandweiss 1985: 134).

Saint Matthew's Episcopal Church, Baldwin Avenue and El Camino Real, was designed by Willis Polk in 1909. Rebuilt on the site of the original church, which was erected in 1865 and destroyed by the 1906 earthquake, the present structure is nothing like its predecessor. Palk abandoned the Victorian character of the original church completely; his design is executed in a more purist English Gothic manner. The structure owes much of its elegance to this purity of design and to a sensitive use of material. Constructed with the earthquake still fresh in memory, the framework is of steel.

The essential simplicity of Polk's design was amply illustrated in 1957; the church was split laterally and its western section moved out thirty feet (to permit installation of one hundred and sixty additional pew seats) without noticeably altering its lines. Both this church and the original one were built on land donated by the heirs of William D. M. Howard and constructed of stone from his quarry on Crystal Springs Road. A crypt in the chapel of the church, marked by a marble obelisk, commemorates the connection with the Howard family

Because it was built of Connecticut brownstone and not wood, [Flood's] mansion survived the 1906 fire that devastated the more ostentatious homes of his neighbors. When the gutted shell was to be restored as the new home of the Pacific Union Club, William Bourn, Willis Polk's great patron who was on the building committee, got him the commission. Polk's sensitive remodeling, which consisted of adding wings and altering the top floor, improved the proportions and changed the architectural character from that of a dry, tightly drawn 19th-century town house to a more free and gracious Neoclassical 20th-century manor house. The interiors, accessible only to members, are the quintessential image of a gentleman's club. The bronze fence surrounding the property is the city's finest; Flood allegedly employed one man just to polish it. West of the club is Huntington Park, where stood the Davil Colton house later purchased by Collis P. Huntington, who gave the land to the city after 1906. This oasis features a replica of the Tartarughe Fountain in Rome minus the tortoises. To sit in the park on a sunny day is to feel on top of the world (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 61).

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).

Even before building their Nob Hill mansion, the Floods were well known to San Franciscans, for the genial and handsome pair had once been proud owners of the popular Auction Lunch Saloon on Washington Street. Originally from New York State, where Mr. Flood had built fine carriages, they had moved to San Francisco during the Gold Rush. On the dignified premises of the Auction Lunch, Flood and his partner William O'Brien tended bar while Mrs. Flood supervised the production of those fine collations which San Francisco's saloons always proffered along with the purchase of a nickel glass of beer. No doubt everybody rejoiced for this hard-working trio when Flood's and O'Brien's investments in the Comstock Lode paid off. Flood became the founder of the Bank of Nevada, with headquarters on California Street. Most Californians thought that the Floods had already made their architectural statement some years before when they stunned the Old Guard down the Peninsula at Menlo Park. In the midst of this sacred enclave of "old" San Francisco society rose the Floods' Linden Towers, an immense white frame mansion that resembled nothing so much as a huge wedding cake. Now, with his bold addition to the Nob Hill palaces, Jim Flood had struck again.

"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.

Once again, the Newsletter reporter went into paroxysms of delight. The grand entry hall boasted vaulted glass ceilings upheld by enormous, carved caryatids. Naturally, there were the requisite silk-hung walls, acres of jewelled art glass, marquetry floors and sliding doors which could be thrown open to create one vast salon of the entire ground floor. The whole effect was indeed overpowering. (Laver, also the architect of San Francisco's disastrous 19th-century City Hall, did a much better job on the Flood mansion.)

During the 1906 fire, it was hoped at first that the thick stone walls of the Flood house would withstand the flames, but unfortunately the many paintings and furnishings moved from the neighboring Hopkins Art Institute and piled on the Flood lawns by the militia spelled the doom of the Flood house as well. The art works were ignited, and the fire leaped to the mansion. The walls survived, but the interior was destroyed, leaving a masonry shell.

After the fire, the members of the Pacific Union Club purchased the Flood property. Willis Polk, by then one of San Francisco's most prominent young architects, convinced the club directors to spare the ruined walls. By adding a third floor, Polk modified the awkward "millionaire's tower" with an elevated roof line. He also extended the rooms to the right and left of the central mass into rounded wings. Despite the restraint used in the redesign, the sheer scale of the interior is still overwhelming. The imposing house with its bronze fence is the only pre-fire Nob Hill mansion still standing today (Alexander and Heig 2002: 206-09).

Polk also designed a number of buildings for the Spring Valley Water Company and the San Francisco (later Pacific) Gas and Electric Company, as well as the new quarters of the Pacific Union Club, at a time when Bourn was either president of or active in these organizations. Much of the credit should probably go to Bourn for Polk's chairing the Architectural Committee for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (Longstreth 1998: 379 n. 21).

After the [1906] fire, the members of the Pacific Union Club purchased the Flood property. Willis Polk, by then one of San Francisco's most prominent young architects, convinced the club directors to spare the ruined walls. By adding a third floor, Polk modified the awkward "millionaire's tower" with an elevated roof line. He also extended the rooms to the right and left of the central mass into rounded wings. Despite the restraint used in the redesign, the sheer scale of the interior is still overwhelming. The imposing house with its bronze fence is the only pre-fire Nob Hill mansion still standing today (Alexander and Heig 2002: 209).

All the great mansions but one were destroyed in the fire of 1906. The survivor was the Italianate-Baroque brownstone palace of James C. Flood, which was gutted, but stood with its shell intact. Bought by the Pacific Union Club in 1909, it was remodeled by Willis Polk and is today one of the architectural landmarks of San Francisco.

The Flood Mansion, at 1000 California Street, was designed by Augustus Laver and built during 1885-86. Flood, not to be outdone by the magnificoes of New York, ordered the building constructed of Connecticut sandstone. As one of the four proprietors of the "Big Bonanza" of the Virginia City mines, he was quite able to afford a reputed $1,500,000 on the house.

As it stands today, the house that Flood's mining millions financed is a much handsomer building than the long-departed homes of the other Nob Hill millionaires. In part this is the result of good initial design, but at least as much credit should go to Willis Polk, who restored the building, as to Augustus Laver. To accommodate the Pacific Union Club, Polk added the impressive wings on either side, and incorporated a third floor by raising the floor line four feet (at the same time removing the central tower in front). A close look reveals these changes as flaws in the majesty and proportions of the building, yet the general effect is a structure more pleasing than the original (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 66-67).

Willis Polk allegedly remodeled this house, which was briefly the home of Arthur Conan Doyle (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 87).

Conan Doyle and his wife visited San Francisco in late May and early June of 1923 during the author's second lecture tour in the U.S. They stayed at the Clift Hotel. Conan Doyle was on the premises for a few hours when he visited his associate, Dr. Abrams, then owner of 2151 Sacramento (Hank Donat).

This florid adaption of the French Baroque Revival would seem to point to a date between 1900 and 1910 rather than in the '80's. Both the plan and facade of the stucco building are unique (Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 291).

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