City Beautiful Movement – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

San Francisco’s Civic Center the Heart of the City Beautiful Movement

Posted by Cindy on December 29, 2012

Dec 292012

San Francisco’s 1906 fire and earthquake not only destroyed much of San Francisco, it also destroyed the dream of many to bring the City Beautiful Movement to large sections of San Francisco.

The City Beautiful Movement began with the “White City,” also known as the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. The Exposition took place in Chicago and was an exercise in light, order and forward thinking.

The shimmering “White City” was a model of early city planning and architectural cohesion. In the Court of Honor all of the buildings had uniform heights, were decorated roughly in the same manner, and painted bright white. The beauty of the main court, the well-planned balance of buildings, water, and open green spaces was a wholly new concept to the visitors of the fair. Dignified, monumental and well run, the White City boasted state-of-the-art sanitation and transportation systems. All of this was in sharp contrast to the grey, urban sprawl of Chicago in 1893.

Chicago – 1893 World Columbian Exposition – (Photo courtesy of Boston College)

The City Beautiful Movement was a response to failing urban life. An attempt to improve cities through beautification, it was hoped that the solution of social ills would inspire civic loyalty, and make city centers more inviting to the upper classes, in hopes that they would return to them for work and therefore spend money.

The City Beautiful Movement used the language of the Beaux Arts (Fine Arts) Style. This style was named after the art and architecture school of Paris the Ecoles des Beaux Arts and flourished between 1885 and 1920.

The Beaux Arts is a classical style with a full range of Grecian and Roman elements, including columns, arches, vaults and domes.

General defining elements include the following:

Symmetry
Highly ornamented exterior decorations
A single architectural element as the center of the building composition. This could be an over-scaled
archway or a dramatic line of columns.
A dramatic roofline, often with sculptured figures
Monumental steps approaching the entrance
Floor plans that culminate in a single grand room
Axial floor plans so that vistas can be obtained throughout the building

Classic Elements of Beaux Art Architecture.

The City Beautiful Movement began in San Francisco in 1904, when James Duval Phelan, former mayor and president of the “Association for the Improvement and Adornment of San Francisco,” invited Daniel Hudson Burnham to town. Daniel Burnham was the indisputable “Father of City Beautiful.” He was the Director of Works for the Worlds Columbian Exhibition in Chicago and took a leading role in the creation of master plans for a number of cities.

Burnham’s group proposed that a new Civic Center complex be built at the corner of Market and Van Ness with radiating grand boulevards. A landscaped park would begin at the Civic Center and extend to the Golden Gate Park Panhandle. Twin Peaks was to be crowned with a neo-classic library overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The plan created neighborhoods, which would be accessed by a grid pattern, and tied the transportation systems to scenic views. The groups’ plan prescribed careful treatment of the hills and streets and even took into consideration the issues of building costs, maintenance and upkeep.

The War Memorial Veterans Building – San Francisco

The War Memorial Opera House is almost identical to the Veterans Building.

In 1906 the earthquake and fire presented the City Beautiful movement with a blank canvas-with one caveat, the merchants of San Francisco, eager to regenerate commerce, would have the final say as to the direction of future building in San Francisco.

Nevertheless, there was still a significant Beaux Arts influence in a number of buildings that were built after the earthquake, and the Civic Center we know today is one of the finest examples of the movement.

The Bill Graham Auditorium

The Beaux Arts buildings that create the heart of Civic Center include City Hall and the Exposition Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Auditorium) completed in 1915 in time for the Pan Pacific Exhibition, the War Memorial Opera House and the War Memorial Veterans Building, the Main Library and the State and Old Federal Buildings built in the 1920s and 1930s.

These classic buildings give the San Francisco Civic Center a visual cohesion that should encourage visitors to sit and enjoy this area. Sadly, due to the continued onslaught of vagrancy, the City of San Francisco has destroyed the central park area, Civic Center Plaza, that brings the buildings together.

“The biggest single obstacle to the provision of better public space is the undesirables problem,” wrote William H. Whyte in his 1980 book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. “They are themselves not too much of a problem. It is the actions taken to combat them that is the problem.”

The Civic Center open space has no benches, and if you are looking for a place to sit, you will find poorly maintained lawns interrupted by sparsely planted annuals. A colonnade of pollarded London Plane trees stands like sentinels over a vast bed of decomposed granite that used to house a reflective pool. While the Asian Art Museum has often placed intriguing and world-class art in the plaza, it is not yet enough to make the average citizen want to visit.

Dealing with the homeless problem in San Francisco has never been one of calm and reason; making the area scream, “go away” has not worked. It is time to find a way to bring vibrancy and humanity back to the area. It is time that the city slowly works its way back to the ideals of the City Beautiful Movement within its own Civic Center.

The State of California building

Two Old Banks Still Stand Proud

Posted by Cindy on March 16, 2001

Mar 162001

Grant Avenue and Market Street

Many critics of historical preservation projects complain that the process leaves the building frozen in time. Adaptive re-use proves that this does not need to be the case.

Adaptive re-use, which adapts buildings for new uses while retaining their historic features, can also a sustainable form of development that reduces waste, uses less energy and scales down on the consumption of building materials. San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square remodel in 1964 marked the first adaptive re-use project in the United States and San Francisco has never looked back.

A prime example of adaptive re-use in San Francisco can be found when comparing the two, classic Beaux Arts buildings that make up the stately entrance onto Grant Avenue from Market Street, the one street in San Francisco that comes closest to embodying the City Beautiful movement espoused by Daniel Burnham.

Coincidentally, both buildings were originally banks. Standing at 1 Grant Avenue is San Francisco Landmark #132: built in 1910 as the Savings Union Bank it was reconfigured for retail through adaptive re-use in the 1990s. The Savings Union Bank was designed by Walter Danforth Bliss and William Baker Faville. Both gentlemen were graduates of MIT and began their San Francisco practice in 1898.

This steel frame building is clad in gray granite. Six Ionic columns hold up its massive pediment 38 feet high. This modified domed temple is derived from the Roman Pantheon. The pediment, designed and sculpted by Haig Patigian, houses a Bas Relief of Liberty. Patigian, an Armenian by birth who spent most of his career in San Francisco, was one of the cities most prolific sculptors during his time.

At one time the front was graced with bronze doors. These doors consisted of four panels designed by Arthur Mathews and were said to be “descriptive of the historical succession of the races in California.” First the Indian, then the Spaniard who was typified by a Franciscan monk, next a miner representing the “American” and then an allegorical representation of a San Franciscan shown as the ideal figure of a youth beside a potter’s wheel modeling one of the new buildings in the city. Those doors have been replaced with glass.

Interior of Retail establishment at 1 Grant Avenue (photo courtesy of Goldstick Lighting Company).

Inside are eight Tavernelle (an old building stone term that means spotted or mottled) marble Corinthian pilasters and columns thirty feet high. These support the main cornice, which is surmounted by an attic and coffered ceiling. The walls are not of marble but of Caen stone. Caen stone is a limestone quarried in France near the city of Caen. It was first used in the Gallo-Roman period. (the period when Gaul was under Roman influence)

Across the street, also built in 1910, at a cost of $1.5 million, stands the Union Trust Company Building, San Francisco Landmark #131. Union Trust merged with Wells Fargo Bank in 1923. The building still houses a Wells Fargo Bank branch.

Photo Courtesy of San Francisco Public Library.

Clinton Day was the architect of this Neoclassical Beaux Arts building. According to the July 1, 1908 San Francisco Call “The structure at Market Street and Grant Avenue Will Be Handsome and Commodious.” Day came from a distinguished California family. His father was State Senator Sherman Day and co-founder of College of California, the precursor to the University of California Berkeley. Clinton Day was a graduate of College of California.

This modified temple design is without a pediment. Its beautiful layered façade consists of carved granite ornamentation, derived from classical antiquity that includes ten columns, a bracketed overhang and a roof crowned by a balustrade parapet. This is all accented by dark iron window framing. The curvature on the Market Street side grounds it nicely to its location.

This well-heeled area of Market Street makes these two banks stand proud, unlike the rundown Mid Market area that holds the Hibernia Bank.

Pediment at 1 Grant Avenue designed and sculpted by Haig Patigian.

The Hibernia Bank at the Heart of MidMarket

Posted by Cindy on March 9, 2001

Mar 092001

1 Jones Street
MidMarket

Imagine walking down the Champs-Élysées, or Fifth Avenue between 49th and 60th Streets, and when you hit the middle you hail a cab just to go two or three blocks, then get out and continue walking.

This is what has happened to Market Street in San Francisco. The street that best epitomizes the concept of the City Beautiful Movement has a large gaping hole in the middle. The area around 6th and Market has been taken over by the less fortunate, and they have made it their outdoor hotel.

The area between 5th and 10th on Market Street is often referred to as the Mid-Market area in San Francisco. Like many problematic areas it is worse at its center. This area has plagued the City of San Francisco since the 1960s. There have been many mayors, and many commissions putting forth ideas, but no action and no solutions.

The few stores that occupy Mid-Market sit amongst mainly boarded up buildings, they have found it easier to serve the less fortunate than try to entice other types of clientele. This leaves an overwhelming retail representation of strip clubs, pawn shops and check cashing stores. Tourists do not, and locals hesitate to, walk down this portion of Market Street, essentially ripping this grand boulevard in two.

Sitting in the heart of Mid-Market is the boarded up and abandoned Hibernia Bank Building, once proclaimed the “Most Artistic Building in Town” by the San Fransisco Call. This building is a perfect example of the fact that sometimes all the tax breaks and good intention laws cannot help.

The Hibernia Bank building is ripe for adaptive reuse, a movement that had its American beginnings in San Francisco. The city has eagerly supported the adaptation of buildings for new uses while retaining their historic features. Keeping city centers alive and conserving historic buildings is an important concept, but one that can and will fail when the right cards do not fall into place.

The Hibernia Bank, which stands as the gateway to the Tenderloin District, is still looking for that properly dealt hand. A baroque inspired Beaux-Arts building, the 38,000 square foot bank with its glass domed corner entrance and grand stairway begs to be appreciated for its beauty. Sadly it has become a boarded up symbol of how down and out the mid-market area is.

Designed by Albert Pissis, Hibernia Bank opened its doors in 1892, serving Irish miners who had struck it rich in the California Gold Rush. It also served their widows by paying out 3% on savings accounts. (Ironically Albert Pissis also designed the Emporium Building, now the Westfield San Francisco Center, a mall that attracts thousands of tourists every year.)

After the 1906 quake. Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Library

The interior of the building was destroyed in the 1906 conflagration, but the exterior remained somewhat intact allowing the bank to reopen just 5 weeks later.

Hibernia Bank housed a bank up until 1987. Since then the banks columned sides and carved granite walls have been spit on, pissed on and lived on, and today they are fenced in and covered with plywood. The building has been sold twice since 1987, it even served as a temporary headquarters for the San Francisco Police Department’s Tenderloin Task Force from 1991 to 2000, but today it once again stands empty and neglected.

The Hibernia Bank Building is a San Francisco landmark and yet that does not help its situation. There are minimal maintenance requirements for privately held historical landmarks in San Francisco. While at both the state and federal levels there are many tax incentives, and laws that help with the restoration, maintenance is not truly covered in any codes.

The Mills Act is perhaps the best preservation incentive available to private property owners in San Francisco. Enacted by the State of California in 1976, the Mills Act authorizes local governments to enter into contracts with owners of privately owned historical property to insure its rehabilitation, restoration, preservation and long-term maintenance. In return, the property owner enjoys a reduction in property taxes for a given period. Mills Act contracts have the net effect of freezing the base value of the property, thereby keeping property taxes low. The City’s Mills Act enabling legislation was adopted in 1996.

When financial times are good many private owners of landmarks spruce up their historic buildings, like the Adam Grant Building and 111 Sutter Street. The Hibernia has not been so lucky.

Since being sold in 2005 for a mere $3.95 million to Seamus Naughton of the Dolman Property Group, the economic times have turned sour. The building needs approximately $18 million for improvements, including seismic retrofitting, asbestos and lead paint abatement as well as disability access.

Even if these improvements can be made, one must ask if it is worth the trouble. The building will still be sitting in the middle of the worst of Mid-Market. At the same time, the restoration of this stunning beauty might be just what the neighborhood needs.

Mid-Market would benefit greatly from an influx of quality housing. Local residents sustain neighborhoods that bring life to the streets and bring in visitors. Most of San Francisco’s vital and interesting neighborhoods for shopping, eating, and drinking are in the midst of dense residential neighborhoods. It would be difficult to imagine how the Hibernia Bank could be turned into housing that would bring in the amount of money needed to turn a profit, and not be so prohibitively expensive as to instantly eliminate the type of person that would buy in a promising, but still down trodden area, and yet that is what is needed.

While San Francisco prides itself on adaptive reuse and historical preservation so many times it falls short in actual action. Preservation and restoration of the neighborhood’s outstanding historic buildings should be a cornerstone of this neighborhood’s revitalization. The Hibernia Bank, at its core, is a good place to start.

The interior central dome. Interior photos are from the real estate brochure.

Ornamental plaster in one of the offices of the Hibernia bank