• San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank Building
• Former Crocker Bank Headquarters
• Montgomery Building
• Washington Montgomery Tower
• Jewish Community Centers
• Bayside Plaza
• California Center
• Darrell Pl. condominiums
• California St. Building
• 388 Market Street Building
• Abbreviations

A monumental loggia along Market and a reticent but granite-clad stepped facade distinguish this complicated building, which has everything from executive offices to warehousing operations (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 35).

Skidmore Owings Merrill's (SOM) Federal Reserve Building (6) occupies the south side of the next block on Market Street. The leading practitioner of modernism in the city, the San Francisco office of SOM under chief designer Edward Bassett is thought to have designed close to half of the downtown high rises during Manhattanization. Built in 1982, the Fed is a blocky, stepped-back structure that redeems itself by opening up a good view of the splendid Matson and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) buildings in the next block west. In front of the building there is a ponderous loggia with roof plantings (Wiley 2000: 158).

A distinguished design, commendable for its sensitivity to both urban planning and preservation issues. The subtle play of light on the plaid pattern of polished and thermal-finished granite and the reflective, colored-glass windows change the tower's visual image during the course of the day. Next to the tower the pedestrian corridor through the barrel-vaulted Crocker Galleria is unfortunately interrupted by unsightly escalators. The roof garden created on the top of the old bank building's 1908 banking hall, designed by Willis Polk, is accessible from the upper level of the Galleria. It is a welcome, outdoor city room. Across the street on the corner is sculptor Douglas Tilden's Admission Day monument of 1897 (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 25).

The entrance to Montgomery Street is marked by another deconstructed bank building with a complicated history. The original Crocker Bank Building (37) (1908) (see illustration on page 133) at 1 Montgomery, now Wells Fargo, was the work of Willis Polk. When another architect copied his design for an extension of the banking hall along Montgomery, Polk sued him 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 banking temple with its lavish original interior is now topped by a roof garden, and the Crocker Galleria and Office Tower (1983) by SOM are stacked up to the west of it on Post Street. The Galleria is particularly attractive (Wiley 2000: 166).

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 sandstone 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 Foxcrofdt Building (R148), the Thompson and Ortman Building (R92), and the Lyons Building (R93). Archkitects of the project are Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill A (Corbett and Hall 1979: 104).

A highrise tower set back from the street to incorporate the temple-form facades of Albert Pissis's 1908 Anton Borel and Co. bank and Howard and Galloway's 1908 Sutro and Co. The latter is the more carefully detailed and costly design. In 1841 when the Hudson's Bay Company was located near here, this was the waterfront. Commercial Street, from Montgomery down to the bay, was the Central or Long Wharf, begun in 1848 and extended in 1850 when it was the city's major pier. The first U.S. branch mint in California was located at 608-10 Commercial; in 1875 the U.S. Subtreasury Building replaced it, was gutted by the 1906 fire and rebuilt as the one-story structure now tucked under the Bank of Canton, at 558 Montgomery, SOM, 1989. The old building now houses the Chinese National Historical Society (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 28-29).

Next door [to the Wells Fargo History Museum], Montgomery Plaza is an unimpressive high rise built over two banking temples so as to preserve their street level façades (Wiley 2000: 171).

One of the first mixed office-and-residential-use buildings (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 29).

A restrained design that complements the older buildings that are found on the street (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 36).

Designed to reflect its waterside location with a sculpture by Ruth Asawa in front (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 36).

To the south [of the YMCA at 166 Embarcadero] Tower Architects created a nautical bookend for the larger YMCA with Bayside Plaza (6) at 188 Embarcadero (Wiley 2000: 222).

In order to get the prestigious California Street address and preserve two landmark buildings that were headquarters for the Robert Dollar Steamship Lines, this office building/hotel was driven into the middle of the block and provided with shopping arcades that permit circulation through it. The top with its twin masts is a handsome addition to the skyline (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 30).

Between the two Dollar buildings is the entrance to the California Center (58) by SOM (1986). By building in the middle of the block during the contentious 1980s, SOM preserved a number of historic buildings. The twin towers have been renamed "the Roach Clip." (Wiley 2000: 170)

No. 36 Darrell Place is a condominium building by Ace Architects intended as an homage to Bay Regional architecture. A flight of wooden steps leads down the precipitous hillside. The hill's scarred flanks bear witness to the quarrying operations that chipped away at its base for years until stopped in 1903. Among other uses the quarried rock became fill for the Embarcadero (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 51).

There is a visual progression from the early stages of this third phase [of the Bay Area Tradition] to designs in some areas, such as South of Market. Architect Andrew Batey explained in New Architecture San Francisco: "I think [Joseph] Esherick was the turning point, in that he broke down the overt modesty of William Wurster and started playing with the elements." In one striking example, Ace Architects (Lucia Howard and David Weingarten) designed a condominium on Telegraph Hill as "an archeology of the Bay Region style" by blending design elements taken from Maybeck, Polk, Coxhead, Wurster, and Moore (see illustration on page 244). (Note 53: (Shay 1989: 28)

Note the condominiums at 34-36 Darrell Place (12). They are the work of Ace Architects (Lucia Howard and David Weingarten) and were designed, according to the architects, as a homage to Bernard Maybeck, William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, and Charles Moore (Wiley 2000: 143, 244-45).

A fragment of a classical arch is balanced by a V-shaped bay which projects above the roof. A borrowing from San Francisco's various Bay Region traditions--from Coxhead to Moore (Gebhard Winter Sandweiss 1985: 59).

The last building in this selection of current work by Bay Area architects takes us back to the hills. It is a four-story, two condominium building shoe-horned onto what must be the last patch of buildable land on Telegraph Hill's east side. ACE Architects, David Weingarten and Lucia Howard, the building's designers, have a reverence for Bay Tradition architects of earlier generations. Like others of this generation of Bay Area architects, they received their architectural degrees from U. C. Berkeley and were influenced by architects such as Joseph Esherick, who taught there.

The condominium site is on Darrell Place, a narrow pedestrian lane about one block long. Darrell starts at the Filbert Street right-of-way, which features a discontinuous wooden stair (the grade was too steep for a street) leading downhill through a garden maintained by the residents. Downhill from Darrell is Napier Lane, a Gold Rush vintage boardwalk with houses to match in character if not dates. Houses on Darrell are less homogeneous, but the general ambience of the hill pulls everything together.

The architects intended the design as an archaeology of the Bay Tradition, an homage to Maybeck, Wurster, Esherick, and Moore. They described the design as a collision of three emblematic buildings. The pseudo-masonry of scored and rough-cast stucco on the ground floor contains a vaulted undercroft or cave, the place of origins. Inside, Baroque overtones in the wall treatment and in the plan of the oval study combine with the monumental red fireplace and cast steel kitchen serving island to evoke the spirit of Maybeck. The wooden upper stories, which incorporate a two-story atrium, stand for the evolution from the open, horizontal plan of the 1940s and 1950s to the tight, vertical one of the 1960s and 1970s. The layers are blended rather than neatly sorted out. Maybeck is again recalled in the two-sided bay window, while a section of bold cornice molding on the roof also speaks of Coxhead and Polk.

This symbolism is well integrated into the design of the whole. Appreciations and enjoyment of the building do not depend on deciphering a cleverly contrived historic code.

We hope that the Bay Tradition will have many more chapters. One of the reasons for this hope is that the work which we consider to be in the tradition does not represent a comeback of has-beens. Indeed, the strength of this vaguely structured tradition lies in its susceptibility to personal interpretation. And, although limits to building opportunities loom larger than ever, as long as people manage to build dwellings in an increasingly crowded environment, the tradition will continue to inspire lively solutions (Woodbridge 1988: 350-55).

The spooks on the roof are the talking points of this graceless try at reviving the 1920's skyscraper (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 28).

The most successful design to date for a Market Street triangle, this teardrop shaped tower is a mix of offices below and six residential floors at the top (Woodbridge and Woodbridge 1992: 35).

The SOM-designed building (1987) at 388 Market (13) is the modern equivalent of a flatiron building, well adapted to the triangular lot typical of the intersections north of Market Street. The green framing around the windows harmonizes well with the building's reddish granite skin. The apartments on the top six floors of the building are fitted with balconies that create a grill-like surface, which contrasts nicely with the polished surface below (Wiley 2000: 159).

Abbreviations