Day Five

South of Market • Embarcadero • South Park • Civic Center

Start out with breakfast in the Garden Court of Trowbridge & Livingston’s spectacular 1909 Palace Hotel (Market at New Montgomery). Nearby is the Reid Brothers’ 1914 Call Building (74 New Montgomery) and the 1925 Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Building (134 New Montgomery) by Miller and Pfleuger, one of the city’s finest skyscrapers. Don’t miss the exquisite bronze detailing in the lobby.

Willis Polk’s historic Jessie Street Substation (222 Jessie St.), designed in 1905, has been incorporated into the dramatic new Contemporary Jewish Museum (736 Mission St.) designed by Daniel Libeskind. Next door is St. Patrick’s Church, built in 1872 and rebuilt after the earthquake, one of the city’s oldest churches. Note its Tiffany clerestory windows.

The gardens across the street at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (701 Mission) are filled with public art such as Terry Allen’s bronze “Shaking Man” and Huston Conway’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Waterfall. The esplanade, completed in 1992 by MGA Partners with Romaldo Giurgola, sits on the roof of the expanded Moscone Convention Center, constructed in 1991 by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum. Above the gardens are two outdoor cafes; stop for refreshments and view YBC’s contemporary architecture, including Zeum, an art and technology center, the Metreon, and, looming beyond, Mario Botta’s magnificent Museum of Modern Art, built in 1995.

Walk down to the Embarcadero, which got a new lease on life with the removal of the elevated freeway damaged in the 1989 earthquake. Begin at the foot of Market St., at Justin Herman Plaza, homage to the longtime head of the city Redevelopment Agency. Plaza centerpiece is sculptor Armand Vaillancourt’s fountain, erected in 1971, its impact an ironic casualty of the demolished freeway, removing the setting for his political portrayal of the inevitable future.

Across the Embarcadero is A. Page Brown’s 1898 Ferry Building, restored and reopened in 2003 with restaurants, food shops and a farmers’ market two days a week. One block south is A.A. Pyle’s 1914 Agriculture Building, a Renaissance palazzo-style structure that once was the city’s main post office. Across the street is the Audiffred Building (1-21 Mission), Hippolyte Audiffred’s 1889 tribute to his native France. The 1938 Rincon Center at Mission and Spear designed by Gilbert Underwood, also once a post office, contains remarkable WPA murals. Heading south toward the Bay Bridge, note Carl Werner’s 1924 YMCA Building (166 The Embarcadero) and the graceful, 1933 neo-Romanesque Hills Brothers Coffee Factory (2 Harrison) by George Kelham.

As you walk along the Embarcadero, note the Promenade Ribbon, a linear sculpture, and the Historic Interpretive Signage Project of plaques and illustrated pylons. On them, you can read the story of 1930s union fighter and longshoreman Harry Bridges, see a 1913 photo of the Embarcadero and more. At Folsom Street is Rincon Park with “Cupid’s Span,” a 60-foot sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen donated to the city by Gap founders Donald and Doris Fisher. At Pier 40 is grassy South Beach Park and Mark di Suvero’s 60-foot stainless steel sculpture “Sea Change.”

Rehabilitated into housing, the 1867 Oriental Warehouse (650 First St.) was the repository for goods shipped from Asia. At Townsend and Second is Frederick H. Meyer’s 1920 Fire Department Pumping Station (698 Second St.). South Park, laid out in 1856 by George Gordon in the model of London residential crescents and leveled by the ’06 quake, today is a tony commercial and residential area. A few blocks away, at Fourth and King streets, is AT&T Park, San Francisco Giant’s 40,000-seat baseball stadium. The Schmidt Lithography Co. at Second and Bryant and the plant across the street have been rehabilitated as the “Clock Tower” live/work complex. Note 85 Second St., a former Wells Fargo Express Building that survived the ‘06 earthquake. Return to the Palace Hotel for tea in the Garden Court.

Catch the historic F-Line trolley on Market. Get off at Seventh Street and walk one block south to Mission and the old Main Post Office, now the U.S. Court of Appeals Building, designed by James Knox Taylor in 1905. The golden-arched mosaic interior is among the most impressive of the public buildings. Across the street is the new Federal Building, designed by 2005 Pritzker Architectural Prize-winner Thom Mayne. Albert Pissis’ now-empty 1892 Hibernia Bank Building (Jones, Market and McAllister) is the city’s oldest surviving bank building in a strictly classical revival idiom.

The Civic Center, with its Beaux Arts symmetrical layout, expresses San Francisco’s early 20th century consciousness of its position as THE metropolis of the West Coast. Buildings include: Arthur Brown Jr.’s 1936 Federal Building; George Kelham’s 1917 Old Main Library, now home of the Asian Art Museum, renovated by Italian architect Gae Aulenti and reopened in 2003; the new Main Library at Market and Grove, designed by James Freed & Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris in 1996; John Galen Howard, Frederick Meyer & John Reid Jr.’s 1914 Civic Auditorium, renamed for rockmeister Bill Graham; the ubiquitous Bliss & Faville’s 1922 State Building at 250 McAllister; and Hood Miller’s 1997 Superior Court, 350 McAllister. Facing Civic Center Plaza is City Hall, the highest expression of the Beaux Arts City Beautiful Movement in the nation, designed by Bakewell & Brown in 1915.

Facing the Van Ness Ave. side of City Hall are Arthur Brown Jr. & G. Albert Lansburg’s 1932 Opera House and Veterans Building, and Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s 1981 Davies Symphony Hall, with Henry Moore’s 1973 “Large Four Piece Reclining Figure” in bronze outside.

Three public art installations grace the Main Library at Larkin and Grove: Alice Aycock’s “Functional and Fantasy Stair, Cyclone Fragment,” made of aluminum, painted steel, stainless steel and plaster; Nayland Blake’s “Constellation,” painted steel, mirrors and fiber optic lighting by Architectural Lighting Design and Ann Hamilton; and Ann Chamberlain’s “Untitled,” 50,000 hand-notated catalogue cards embedded in artisan plaster on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floor walls.

Moving with air currents and reflecting the changing light outside the library is Carl Djerassi’s 1982 gift to the city, “Double L Excentric Gyratory,” a stainless steel kinetic sculpture by American artist George Rickey.

NEXT