Classic Architecture – Public Art and Architecture from Around the World

The Sundial at Ingleside Terrace

Posted by Cindy on June 17, 2014

Jun 172014

Entrada Court
Ingleside Terrace

What is now Ingleside Terraces was the southwestern most portion of San Miguel Rancho, bordered on the west by Rancho Laguna de la Merced. Rancho Laguna de la Merced and San Miguel Rancho were apparently the last of the Mexican “ranchos” to be incorporated in what we now know as San Francisco.

The sundial was dedicated on October 10, 1913, with a rather spectacular event attended by 1500 people. According to the dedication brochure: “The ceremony attending the dedication of the sundial at Ingleside Terraces was one of rare delight. It took place at the close of a warm, vivid day in the fall of the year. The sun had gone down into the ocean, leaving the sky all crimson and gold. The air was soft and still and heavily scented with the fragrant breath of flowers. Far away beyond the grassy stretches of the Terraces the sea reflected the glory of the sunset, and one might easily imagine himself in an old garden on the shore of the Mediterranean. ”

“The sundial and the four columns surrounding it were veiled and loomed shapeless against a rippling background of flowerbeds…”

There were originally four columns upon which sat the four classic orders of column capitals and then an urn. The Corinthian column urn represented manhood, autumn, and afternoon

The urn atop the Ionic Column represented youth, summer and noon. The Tuscan Column urn represented old age, winter and night and

the Doric urn shows, childhood, springtime and morning. (Photo courtesy of www.SFog.us, as I failed to recognize it in its absolute simplicity while there)

The sundial was installed by the Urban Realty Improvement Company to lure buyers to its Ingleside Terraces development. The 148-acre residence park offered a lawn tennis court, a clubhouse for social gatherings and about 750 houses priced from $6,000 to $20,000.

The sundial stands 26 feet high and 28 feet across. The sundial was first promoted as “the largest and most magnificent sundial in the world,” but that is no longer true, not even in San Francisco . A sundial in Hunters Point that has been written up in this website and you can read about here, has a gnomon (the triangular piece that casts the shadow) that is 78 feet long, nearly triple the length of Ingleside’s.

The residential area was originally the Ingleside Race Track. The race track was dedicated in 1895, but when the 1906 earthquake struck the owner offered the site as a refugee camp for survivors and the track never saw a race again.

In the original brochure this was called Sundial Park and it was designed by Joseph A. Leonard. The brochure described the park like this: “The gigantic granite gnomon of the sundial at Ingleside Terraces…bridges a limpid pool wherein two bronze seals sport at the base of a fountain…four great heart-shaped plots of grass surrounded by walks point one each to the true south, north, east and west. At intermediate points four beautiful columns… surmounted by a bronze vase upon which, in bas-relief, is told by allegorical figures the story of the four stages of man, the four seasons of the year, and the four periods of the day.”

I have also found reference to this Sundial as the Urbano Sundial, I assume because Urbano Road essentially was paved over the course of the race track.

The Hayward/Kohl Building

Posted by Cindy on July 30, 2013

Jul 302013

400 Montgomery Street
Financial District

The Hayward/Kohl Building was designed by Percy & Polk (George Percy and Willis Polk both of whom have been written about on this site many times before) for Alvinza Hayward.

Hayward made his fortune from the Eureka Gold Mine in California and the Comstock Silver Mine in Nevada as well as investments in timber, coal, railroads, real estate, and banking. He was a director of the Bank of California and one of the original investors in the San Francisco City Gas Company which become the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Hayward was in his late seventies when he commissioned the partners Percy and Polk to create a first-class office building that would be a testament to his wealth and position in the community. The building was completed in 1901. The footprint of the building is shaped like the letter H, perhaps a giant monogram for Hayward.

Purchased in 1904 by C. Frederick Kohl the building was one of the first steel-frame “fireproof” buildings in San Francisco. It survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire with damage to only the first floors which were reconstructed under Polk’s supervision. (see the end of this posting)

The lower stories have been redesigned several times, but the upper stories with their brick curtain walls clad in Colusa limestone remain unchanged.

As noted in Splendid Survivors: San Francisco’s Downtown Architectural heritage (Michael R. Corbett, 1979):

It was an early and excellent example…of the more formal designs that later came to characterize the city, relying on a relatively restrained and “correct” use of Renaissance/Baroque ornamentation and the two or three part compositional formula….Ornamentation in this three part composition is concentrated in the upper tier with its mannerist giant order and carved garlands and animal heads.”

C. Frederick Kohl was a man of leisure who lived on an estate down the peninsula inherited from his father, who made his fortune in the Alaska fisheries. In 1909 a French maid employed by Kohl’s wife got into a dispute with a chauffeur. After Kohl had her arrested she sued him for false arrest. When found not guilty two years later he was shot, by the maid, in the chest while leaving the courthouse . He survived and Adele Verge was required to spend time in a mental institution in her native France. She spent years bombarding Kohl with threatening notes. In 1921 at the Del Monte Lodge in Carmel he committed suicide.

Separated from his wife, Kohl left most of his $4 million estate to his mistress Marion L. Lord, ex-wife of the heir to the Lord and Taylor retail chain Alfred P. Lord.

News clippings after the 1906 Fire and Earthquake regarding the Hayward Building:

Very little fire entered the basement, and the power plant is practically uninjured. The marble finish of the entrance hall is in good condition, the ornamental plaster being but slightly damaged. The second and third stores are fire swept, but a few offices in the northeast corner of the building escaped. In the fourth and fifth stories, the fire did the most damage in the offices around the southwest corner of the building. In the sixth and seventh stories the fire entered the building through windows in the northeast corner, consuming all the combustible contents in a few offices and discoloring the rest of the story by smoke. The upper stories are but slightly damaged by fire and smoke, but are disfigured by a great number of plaster cracks caused by the earthquake (Himmelwright 1906: 168-172).

The building’s unique survival of the disaster was generally ascribed to its construction. One engineer noted that “The advantages of the metal-covered trim and the incombustible floor finish were clearly demonstrated in this building.”(Himmelwright 1906: 172) Another observed that the “metal-covered doors in this building…prevented to some extent the spread of the fire within the building itself, so that where one room burned out, the fire coming through a front window, an adjacent room was not burned because of the resistance offered by the door.”(Department of the Interior, United States Geological Survey, The San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of April 18, 1906, and their Effects on Structures and Structural materials, Bulletin no. 324, Series R., Structural Materials 1, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1907, repr: San Francisco Historical Publishing Co., n.p.)

Another reason for the building’s survival was its relative isolation. A local architect, visiting the scene, noted that the “Merchants Exchange building really acted as a screen across the street to the Hayward building, and the one-story Merchants Trust building also served to protect the building, by the fifty-foot open space on the east; California Street on the south and Montgomery Street on the west also protected the building.”(The Architect and Engineer of California, Vol. V No 1 (May, 1906), n.p.)

In 1854 this corner was the site of Sam Brannan’s Express Building, a four-story edifice with a stone facade and New Orleans-style iron balconies around the windows on the upper floors. (source: Rand Richards – Historic Walks in San Francisco) (Photo Courtesy of SF Public Library)

The First National Bank Building

Posted by Cindy on June 24, 2013

Jun 242013

1 Montgomery Street
Financial District

This classic Italian Renaissance bank building was designed by Willis Polk in 1908. Polk has been in this website many times. The Raymond granite entryway is only the tease to a beautiful and highly ornamented interior, replete with a carved white marble staircase; counters and benches of carved marble along with bronze tellers’ windows, and hardware.

Originally the Crocker-Citizens National Bank (absorbed by Wells Fargo in the 1980’s), the building has been extensively remodeled. It originally housed an 11 story office tower above it and was sheathed in terra cotta.

One of its more outstanding features is the rotunda entrance supported by granite pillars, with its coffered ceiling.

Originally a “combination bank and office building” it is now one of the most lavish banking interiors in the city. 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 but it incurred an interesting reaction from Polk who sued the architect, Charles E. Gottschalk, for plagiarism.

By 1960 the sandstone façade was crumbling. So Milton Pflueger, whose brother Timothy was the city’s most influential architect in the 1930’s and 1940s, redesigned the façade for the upper floors. When Crocker proposed a new world headquarters tower and galleria further west on Post Street, the city provided air space in exchange for the demolition of the upper floors of the building at 1 Montgomery. The roof of the bank is now a garden for the Crocker Galleria Shopping Center.

Found on both the interior and exterior of the windows are these little bats. They were designed by Arthur Putnam. Within the frieze, also done by Arthur Putnam, are mountain lions, wolves and foxes.

Arthur Putnam has also appeared many times in this website. Why bats? I have no idea, other than Putnam was well known for his animal sculptures.

350 Bush Street

Posted by Cindy on May 10, 2013

May 102013

San Francisco Mining Exchange
350 Bush Street
Financial District

The San Francisco Mining Exchange, the second oldest exchange in the United States after the New York Stock Exchange, was formed in 1862 to trade mining stocks. It is San Francisco Landmark #113.

When trading in mining stocks surged in the early 1920s, the Mining Exchange hired the firm Miller & Pflueger, whose work can be found all over San Francisco, to design this Beaux Arts building. 350 Bush is an adaptation of the classical temple form much favored by financial institutions in the period, the building’s pediment and four pairs of fluted columns recall the New York Stock Exchange, constructed twenty years earlier.

The building was a trading hall for mining commodities for only five years; the Mining Exchange relocated in 1928.

Subsequently the building was occupied by the San Francisco Curb Exchange (1928-1938). When the Curb Exchange was absorbed into the San Francisco Stock Exchange the building was occupied by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce (1938-1967), and then Western Title Insurance (1967-1979).

The following is adapted from the San Francisco City Planning Commission Resolution No. 8578 dated 1 May 1980:

“This building is the last visible remnant of the San Francisco Mining Exchange which dissolved in 1967. The exchange was instrumental in making San Francisco the financial center of the West, and its capital was used to develop the mines and other industries of the entire western United States. Names associated with the Exchange include Coit, Sharon, Ralston, Mills, Hearst, Flood, Sutro, Hopkins and many more whose fortunes were founded or greatly augmented on the Exchange.With the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859, the need for a central market for trading in mining stocks became apparent. In 1862, the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board was organized, housed first in the Montgomery Block, then in the Merchant’s Exchange.

By the middle of the 1870’s, the Exchange dominated the Western financial world, with capital from the East Coast and Europe pushing its volume of sales over that of the New York Stock Exchange, helping to establish the California-Montgomery Street area as “Wall Street West”.

By the early 1880’s, the Comstock began its permanent decline, and the Exchange’s specialization in mining stocks proved disastrous. In 1882, the rival San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, dealing in a wide range of commodities, was formed and prospered.

The silver discoveries in Tonopah, Nevada, in 1903 gave the Exchange new life, and in the 1920’s it commissioned Miller and Pflueger to design a grand Beaux Arts trading hall at 350 Bush Street.

In 1929, the Exchange, hard hit by the Crash, entered its final decline, with a brief revival during the uranium boom of the 1950’s. An investigation of irregularities in its operation by the Securities and Exchange Commission resulted in an order to close, and on August 15, 1967, after almost 105 years of existence, the Mining Exchange came to an end.”

The building has been vacant since 1979. The Swig Company and partners Shorenstein Properties LLC and Weiler-Arnow Investment Company purchased the Mining Exchange building in the 1960s. In 1979, The Swig Company and its partners began assembling the six land parcels around the Mining Exchange for the 350 Bush development. The partners obtained entitlements in the early 2000s. In 2007 Lincoln Property Company acquired the property from the Swig/Shorenstein and Weiler-Arnow group for $60 million. The intention was to break ground that spring, at this writing, that has not happened.

According to Heller Manus, the architects for the project, the historic exchange hall will be used as a grand lobby for a modern office building. The building will provide 360,000 sf of office space with a dramatic galleria at the street level as well as a mid-block pedestrian link between Bush and Pine Streets

The pediment was sculpted by Jo Mora. Joseph Jacinto “Jo” Mora (1876–1947) was an Uruguayan-born American cartoonist, illustrator and cowboy, who lived with the Hopi and wrote extensively about his experiences in California. He was an artist-historian, sculptor, painter, photographer, illustrator, muralist and author. He has been called the “Renaissance Man of the West”.

Mora was born on October 22, 1876 in Montevideo, Uruguay. His father was the Catalonian sculptor, Domingo Mora, and his mother was Laura Gaillard Mora, an intellectual French woman. His elder brother was F. Luis Mora, who would become an acclaimed artist and the first Hispanic member of the National Academy of Design. The family entered the United States in 1880 and first settled in New York, and then Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Jo Mora studied art in the New York and Boston, at the Art Student’s League in New York and the Cowles School in Boston. In 1903 he moved to Solvang, California. After wandering the Southwest he returned to San Jose, California.

By 1919, he was sculpting for the Bohemian Club, including a memorial plaque dedicated to Bret Harte, completed in August 1919 and mounted on the outside of the private men’s club building in San Francisco. In 1925, he designed the commemorative half dollar for the California Diamond Jubilee. Mora died October 10, 1947, in Monterey, California.

The building was reopened in 2018, you can read about the “restoration” here.

When Infrastructure Buildings Kept Beauty in Mind

Posted by Cindy on May 6, 2013

May 062013

2920 23rd Avenue
Merced Manor / Sunset District

This classical building is the Central Pump Station. Designed by Willis Polk and built in 1936, it sits atop the asphalt capped Merced Manor Reservoir which holds 9.5 million gallons of water to supply the city of San Francisco. The building has been attributed to N. A. Eckart by some, but he was the General Manager and Chief Engineer of the Water department.

The City and County of San Francisco through the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, owns and operates a regional water system that serves 2.4 million people, primarily in San Francisco and the south San Francisco Bay region. The system extends about 167 miles, from Yosemite National Park (Hetch Hetchy) to San Francisco, and develops water supply from three principal watersheds: the Tuolumne River, Alameda, and Peninsula watersheds. The regional water system includes over 280 miles of pipeline, over 60 miles of tunnels, 11 reservoirs, 5 pump stations, and 2 water treatment plants (filtration). The history of the system dates back to the 1860s, and many parts of it are over 100 years old.

The Fish and Trident motif are also used in his design of the Sunol Water Temple.

This is the 23rd street entrance to the lawn area above the reservoir. The Valve House is at the top of the stairs.

The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange

Posted by Cindy on March 12, 2013

Mar 122013

301 Pine Street
Financial District

301 Pine Street-one of the historic buildings that comprised our financial system on the West Coast-began its life in 1915 as a sub-treasury building for the United States Treasury. In 1930, when the San Francisco Financial District was fast becoming the Wall Street of the West, the “gentlemen of the tape and ticker” sought a building to express the important financial work they were doing. They chose the San Francisco firm of Miller and Pflueger to remodel the old government building into a new Exchange.

Front of the building features a colonnade and granite staircase, the only remnants of the building’s original design.

At this point in his life architect Timothy Pflueger was interested in throwing out Classicism, a style of architecture modeled after ancient Greek and Roman structures; however, his commission required that he keep the colonnade and the granite stairs leading to the building, part of the original design by J. Milton Dyer of Cleveland, Ohio. As a result, the original building was completely gutted, and the only thing that remained was the front of the building we see today. The colonnade consists of ten Tuscan columns, and as part of the Tuscan Order, the entablature, the area above the columns, should have remained plain and simple. Instead, Pflueger chose to break the classical rules and placed two Art Deco medallions inside the entablature. Art Deco began in the 1920s and lasted for a good twenty years. Known for its linear symmetry, it was a nice fit with the simple Tuscan style that Pflueger was forced to keep.

Art Deco medallions inside the entablature of the Pacific Stock Exchange Building:

The massive Art Deco pieces that grace the Exchange were sculpted out of Yosemite granite by Ralph Stackpole. They are meant to show the polarity of agriculture and industry and are named accordingly. The sculptures were an important part of Pflueger’s move toward modern architecture, as he did not want any of the “classic” repetitive art on the exterior of the building.

Agriculture

Industry

The Pacific Coast Stock Exchange has a long history in the financial world of the United States. In 1882 nineteen gentlemen anted up $50 each to form the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange. In 1957 they merged with the Los Angeles Oil Exchange to become the Pacific Stock Exchange, although each town kept its own trading floor. In 1976 they began trading options, and options are still traded in a building around the corner. The trading floor closed in 2002, and the building was later sold to private developers. In a wonderful example of historic reuse, the tenant today is Equinox Fitness.

The Neo-Gothic Russ Building towers over the classical Pacific Coast Stock Exchange.