San Francisco Ferry Building, San Francisco: architect, style and history

The San Francisco Ferry Building is a ferry terminal, food hall, and office building on the Embarcadero, designed in 1892 by A. Page Brown in the Beaux-Arts style and completed in 1898. At its opening it was the largest construction project the city had yet undertaken, and its 245-foot clock tower became a fixed point on the skyline, visible all the way up Market Street.

the building

The clock tower. The tower rises 245 feet and carries four clock dials, each 22 feet in diameter; one of Brown's design references was reportedly the 16th-century Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain. The building's street frontages are organized around a continuous arched arcade running its full length.

the style

Brown worked in the Beaux-Arts idiom then dominant among American civic and transportation buildings, using the arcaded facade and a landmark tower borrowed from a much older European precedent to give a working ferry terminal the gravity of a monument.

significance

With the rise of the bridges in the mid-20th century and the shift from streetcars to buses, ferry traffic declined and the building's public spaces were broken up for office use. A 2002 restoration and renovation redeveloped the complex, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

nearby

Hyatt Regency San Francisco 0.2 mi · 1973
Audiffred Building 0.2 mi · Second Empire
Rincon Center 0.2 mi · Streamline Moderne
Pacific Gas and Electric Company General Office Building and Annex 0.2 mi · Beaux-Arts
Matson Building 0.3 mi · Renaissance Revival
Folger Coffee Company Building 0.3 mi · Renaissance Revival

All 99 buildings in San Francisco