City of Paris Dry Goods Co.
- Style
- Beaux-Arts
- City
- San Francisco, CA
- Collection
- the city beautiful
The City of Paris Dry Goods Company traced its origins to the 1849 Gold Rush, when brothers Felix and Emile Verdier arrived in San Francisco Harbor aboard the chartered ship Ville de Paris loaded with silks, laces, wines, and champagne; locals bought out the cargo on the spot, some paying in bags of gold dust. The store they founded in May 1850 grew into one of San Francisco's leading department stores, operating diagonally opposite Union Square until 1972.
the building
Rotunda and glass dome. When the original store was demolished in 1980 after a lengthy preservation fight to make way for Neiman Marcus, its rotunda and glass dome were saved and built into the new store's design, preserving a piece of the Beaux-Arts building inside its replacement.
the style
The store's Beaux-Arts facade and rotunda represented the formal, ornamented commercial architecture typical of grand early-20th-century department stores, elements distinctive enough to survive the building's demolition and preservation fight.
More on Beaux-Artssignificance
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building was the subject of a lengthy preservation fight before its 1980 demolition; its rotunda and glass dome were ultimately incorporated into the Neiman Marcus store built on the site.
nearby
- Neiman-Marcus Department Store
- V. C. Morris Gift Shop
- Building at 735 Market Street
- 450 Sutter Street
- Contemporary Jewish Museum
- Flood Building