1890 Chronicle Building unmasked in restoration/condo conversion
Posted in Discourse on Wed Sep 6, 06 by Kyle under 19th Century and Architecture.
If you have been to downtown San Francisco lately you might have noticed the renovation and construction going on at the building on the corner of Market and Kearny Streets. That building, 690 Market Street, is the old headquarters of the San Francisco Chronicle. The cladding that has been hiding the original Romanesque Revival tower for the past 45 or so years is coming off and the Ritz-Carlton Hotel group has plans to restore and add additional stories to the building and put it to use as a luxury condo and time-share development.
This building was one of San Francisco’s first skyscraper buildings and was designed by the Chicago architects Daniel H. Burnham and John Wellborn Root. I was pretty stoked when I had heard about the restoration, as the the building is one of the few downtown buildings from the 1800s that (kind of) survived the 1906 earthquake. It was rebuilt by Willis Polk after the 1906 earthquake. It is always a great thing to see an old building come back to life again. Recently I ran across this old color lithograph from 1889 that shows the building in its original condition and some photos before and after the earthquake. The lithograph’s caption reads “The San Francisco Chronicle’s New Building: Throughly Fire Proof, Largest Clock in the World, Entirely Lighted by Electricity.” Truly top of the line for its time.
Sadly though the building was “Throughly Fire Proof,” it was not completely fire proof and has suffered much indignity at the hands of the tectonic plates of California and disastrous “modernizations.” I can only imagine what was demolished and ruined when the building was covered up in the 1960s and it certainly has lost its delightful, if somewhat ungainly, clock tower. I have high hopes that the developers pay more than cursory attention to the restoration of the building. The only image I have been able to dig up of the proposed restoration is a tiny artist’s rendering from an article in the SF Chronicle. The paper hasn’t owned the building since 1924, but any laudatory coverage of the building surely makes the Hearst Corporation gleeful. That rendering does not show the clock tower being rebuilt, which from an economic standpoint makes sense, but the building would be that much more amazing and distinctive if it were rebuilt.
Clock tower or no, by all accounts Ritz-Carlton hasn’t had any trouble finding buyers. The articles I looked into indicated that a generous helping of the condos and penthouses have been snapped up already with six figure deposits paid before the work is even close to being finished. Of course, who wouldn’t mind owning a luxury condo with a level of staff service more characteristic of the 19th century than the 21st? That leaves only one question left for inquiring minds. Will the developers provide interiors and furnishings to match the lavish level of service and the aesthetics of the 1890s façade restoration? If so, I may have to give them a call… after I become a modern-day industrialist robber baron/media mogul.