• Fernando Nelson house
• YWCA Clay Street Center
• Mills Tower
• Former Chinatown Women's YWCA
• New College of California
• Monument to Volunteer Fire Department
• Pulgas Water Temple
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Roos house
• Central Tower (former S.F. Call Building)
• Abbreviations

Fernando Nelson, developer of Presidio Terrace, had this half-timbered rustic home built for himself(Olmsted and Watkins 1969: 290; Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 102).

Designed concurrently with the Residence Hall, the Clay Street Center is more stylistically adventuresome and has an urbane yet residential scale and plan (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 43).

The YWCA's Clay Street Center (10) (1931) at 965 Clay is another Morgan design, this time in a more accommodating Oriental style. The Chinese Historical Society of America acquired the building and plans to transform it into a museum (Wiley 2000: 186).

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).

When it was built in 1891, the Mills Building (45) at 220 Montgomery Street was the epitome of modernity because of its entirely steel frame (the first in San Francisco), its high-speed elevators, its innovative use of terra-cotta, and its organization of 420 offices around a light well. Designed by Burnham and Root, it was built for Darius Ogden Mills, head of the Bank of California. This structure is considered the finest pre-earthquake example of the Chicago style building in the city. The base, with its Romanesque arch (similar to that of Burnham's Chronicle Building), in Inyo white marble with brick and terra-cotta ornamentation above. Despite the claim that it was fireproof, the building suffered extensive interior damage in 1906; it was rebuilt in 1908 and enlarged twice in 1914 and 1918, according to drawings by Polk. His restored lobby still features the lavish use of marble. The Mills Tower at the back of the building was designed by Lewis Hobart and added in 1931 (Wiley 2000: 168).

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 and Hall 1979: 205).

Designed concurrently with the Clay Street Center, the Residence Hall is a severe, elongated Tuscan villa. Morgan was the official YWCA architect for the western region for some years (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 43).

In her capacity as the YWCA's district architect, Morgan also designed the Chinatown Women's Residence Hall (9) at 940-50 Powell Street in the style of a Tuscan villa (Wiley 2000: 186).

The New College of California School of Law (14) (1932) at 50 Fell is a Spanish Revival work by Willis Polk (Wiley 2000: 216; Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 119).

Blighted by unkempt cemeteries in its first decade, this early rectangular plot was leveled in the 1860s and became a favorite place to promenade after Montgomery Avenue, renamed Columbus in 1909, was cut across one corner of it in the 1870s. 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 the Square. In 1958 Lawrence Halprin and 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 1924, Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who as a child had been adopted as mascot of Volunteer Engine Company Number Five, left $100,000 to the city for general beautification, and $50,000 for a memorial to her beloved firemen. Part of her donation was spent for a large bronze statue, which stands today in Washington Square. The rest went into the erection of Coit Tower, designed by Arthur Brown, Jr., leading architect of the magnificent Civic Center (Alexander and Heig 2002: 95).

The story of San Francisco's early-day fire companies would be incomplete without mention of the legendary Lillie Hitchcock Coit, who as a child was adopted as a mascot by the brave members of Knickerbocker Engine #5. The boys first encountered little Lillie when she was a schoolgirl. Straining to pull their engine up the perilously steep slopes of Telegraph Hill, they were beginning to flag when Lillie threw down her schoolbooks and grabbed one of the pulling ropes, urging the boys to pull harder and faster. Whenever the Knickerbocker Company was called upon, there, more often than not, would be little Lillie, cheering them on. Her mother, the wife of an Army surgeon, who considered herself an arbiter of San Francisco society, was horrified at the child's hoydenish behavior. But somehow Lillie managed to slip away from her parents whenever the fire bell rang. Once she raced after the engine while wearing a bridesmaid's gown. When a firefighting gang of competitors jeered the boys from Number Five for having a girl mascot, her own boys turned the hose on her to show that she was no sissy.

In later years, at a masked ball at Napoleon III's Tuilleries in Paris, Lillie arrived wearing the helmet of a San Francisco fireman. As long as she lived she had the insignia of Number Five embroidered on her handkerchiefs, shirtwaists and fans. After an absence of some forty years she returned to spend her last days in San Francisco. When she died in 1927 she left money for a statue in Washington Square, dedicated to San Francisco's firefighters, as well as a considerable sum to be used for a memorial to be erected on Telegraph Hill. This last bequest was used to build Coit Tower (Alexander and Heig 2002: 71).

When [Lillie Hitchcock] Coit died in 1929, she left money for each surviving member of the Knickerbocker Engine Company, for a monument to volunteer firemen, and for a fund to add to the beauty of the city she loved. In accordance with Coit's bequest, Haig Patigian, one of the city's foremost sculptors, was hired to fashion a monument, which stands today in Washington Square (Wiley 2000: 246).

San Francisco built Pulgas Water Temple as a monument to the engineering marvel that brought Hetch Hetchy water more than 160 miles across California from the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the Bay Area. The Hetch Hetchy Project had taken 24 years to build through the Great Depression at a cost of $102 million.

On October 28, 1934, the roar of Hetch Hetchy mountain water greeted everyone gathered at Pulgas Water Temple to celebrate its arrival. With vivid memories of the fire that had raged unchecked after the Great Earthquake of 1906, the city rejoiced in its new secure, plentiful supply of high quality drinking water. The frieze above the columns expresses the city's joyful relief: "I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my people."

Pulgas Water Temple was designed in the Beaux Arts style by William Merchant, a San Francisco architect trained by Bernard Maybeck. Merchant’s design featured fluted columns and Corinthian capitals to reflect the architecture of ancient Greeks and Romans, whose engineering methods were used to build the new water system. Artist and master stone carver Albert Bernasconi brought Merchant’s drawings to life.

Pulgas Water Temple is located about one-half mile south of the Cañada Road trailhead. To get there, take Interstate 280 to the Edgewood Road exit. Proceed west on Edgewood Road to Cañada Road, then north on Cañada Road approximately two miles to the temple.

Pulgas Water Temple and its parking lot are open to the public on weekdays, Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM (SF Public Utilities Commission. 2005. Pulgas Water Temple).

The 4200-foot clear span was until 1959 the longest in the world. The great achievement of placing tower foundations in the swirling currents of the Golden Gate, the superb setting, and the red color of the bridge make it one of the landmarks of bridge building. Moderne detailing remarkably adapted to heavy steel construction makes it an equally clear expression of its time (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 37).

And while it's true it took a "visionary engineer" to span the Golden Gate, the evidence is clear that Joseph Strauss was not that person. Strauss may have been a successful promoter, wheeler-dealer, and deal-maker, but he did not possess the training nor the expertise to build the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, his own design concept for the bridge had been so utterly impractical that critics ridiculed it when it became public in December 1922.

But Strauss was persistent and had the political clout to get a bridge built, and for that he deserves credit. Meanwhile, the engineer who actually conceived the design for the bridge and who single-handedly performed the complex mathematical calculations to prove it could work was Charles Alton Ellis--known to the Golden Gate Bridge District as merely Strauss's "assistant." Ellis was your classic numbers guy with a starched, high white collar, and a slide rule. He was also a highly educated and esteemed professor of structural and bridge engineering at the University of Illinois when, in 1922, Joseph Strauss recruited him to help design the Golden Gate Bridge.

Suspension bridges rely on a vast network of coordinated systems. The mathematics must be precise. Seventy-five years ago Ellis had to simultaneously work out dozens of equations, with between 6 and 22 unknowns each, on a hand crank adding machine and a slide rule. It took him nearly four months of meticulous work to complete the calculations.

For his part, Strauss was busy building political bridges and securing $21 million to pay for the bridge. When in 1931 the bridge district board finally approved Ellis's design (as presented by Strauss), Strauss told Ellis to take a vacation. When it was time for Ellis to return Strauss fired him.

In 1931, when Ellis was fired by Strauss, it was the height of the Depression. Ellis didn't find work for three years, and he never designed another bridge. He became a Professor Emeritus of structural engineering at Purdue, retiring in 1947. He died two years later, never having returned to see the wonder he had designed (Mark Macnamara and David Weir. Spring, 2002. Golden Gate Lies. 7x7, pp. 17-18).

A lone example in San Francisco of the residential work of this prominent local 1930s Modernist. The canted, boxed window was later imitated by tract builders so often that it became a cliche (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 95).

Wood International Style with Moderne overtones in the angled, shadow box picture window (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 42).

Almost alone among the townhouses designed for San Francisco in the prewar era, the Roos house of 1938 by John Ekin Dinwiddie directly reflects eastern brand, International Style design. Essentially a horizontal box with its living floor slightly extruded, the house is composed of carefully articulated planar elements. The south elevation wall, notched by a window at the corner, features a large, centrally placed bay window, slightly canted to catch the view and set in a bold, white frame. The extension of its white base line, tied to the ground by narrow white poles, defines the entry. A curved, free-standing chimney at the rear of the house completes a compostion controlled by the Cubist aesthetic that had dominated the Modern Movement in the preceding decades. This formalistic, pictorial approach was of no interest to Wurster or Dailey, whose townhouses of two and three years later represent the informal, understated character of current Bay Area Modern (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 161-62).

John Elkin Dinwiddie combined modernist elements--a flat roof, ribbon windows, minimal trim--with local materials, redwood siding with a partial board and batten finish, in a classic Second Bay Tradition home at 2660 Divisadero (35) (1938)(Wiley 2000: 277).

A remodeling in so-so Moderne of a fine Neo-Baroque design by the Reid Bros. The recent ground-floor remodeling has restored some of its elegance (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 19).

In the business section and along Market street many of the gutted steel-framed structures, towering over the ashes and rubble of their neighbors, were rebuilt more or less exactly as they had been. Until the advent of recent high-rise structures, one could easily visualize Market Street as it had looked before 1906; it was outwardly very much the same.

Pissis and Moore's Parrott Building, housing the Emporium, got back its splendidly domed interior, while across the street the Flood Building came to look as though it had never been gutted by fire. The same was true of Albert Pissis's beautiful Hibernia Bank, Willis Polk's Merchants' Exchange, Daniel Burnham's Mills Building on Montgomery, and Bliss and Faville's St. Francis Hotel on Union Square. The Examiner and the Chronicle buildings were restored in somewhat altered form, and Claus Spreckels's Call Building, the tallest in the city, continued to raise its curious knobby dome, with 36 round windows, above Market and Third Streets (Alexander and Heig 2002: 366).

The domed Call Building (33) was likewise a striking edifice. (Architect George Applegarth had his office in the dome.) It was so well engineered that its foundation and frame could accommodate six more floors, which were added in 1938 when the dome was removed, making it into an architectural nonentity (Wiley 2000: 164).

A 1938 remodel of the Reid Brothers' 1898 Call Building, one of the finest skyscrapers ever built in San Francisco. The old Call Building was a domed tower that the prominent local critic, B. J. S. Cahill, called the "handsomest tall offfice building in the world." It inspired many local design imitations, only one of which, and perhaps the least literal, was built--the Humboldt Bank Building. As important structurally as it was architecturally, the U. S. Geological Survey, in its post-fire report on the condition of buildings that survived said, "The design of this steel work is well worthy of study by anyone interested in such structures. It is probably, on the whole, the best designed piece of such work in the U. S." The original structural engineer was Charles Strobel of Chicago, the inventor of Z bar columns.

Ironically, the strength of the structure was partly responsible for the remodeling. Because the structure could support it, when additional space was needed in the mid 1930s, the dome was removed and six floors of offices were added. An article in Architectural Record on the new design was entitled "Economic Forces Prove Stronger than Earthquakes." The new design created a Moderne tower, set back at the upper levels in a manner that recalls the 1931 design of the Irving Trust Co. in New York. The best feature of the new design was its lobby of curving glass brick walls, now obscured by wood paneling, but possibly still intact. B (Corbett and Hall 1979: 85).

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