Re: Market Street, long ago - existing buildings
Author: Dragoman
Date: 02-16-2010 - 15:31
The film appears to start around Powell St.
At the beginning, the tallest, rather bulky building on the right side of the street is Claus Spreckels’ Call Building at the southwest corner of 3rd & Market. (Spreckels took some of the family's sugar fortune and invested in the SF Call newspaper.) It had an ornate baroque dome (out of the frame), and was for a time the tallest building west of the Mississippi. The building survived the Great Earthquake, and still exists, but is virtually unrecognizable – around 1938, they cut off the dome, added some 6 floors, and “modernized” the exterior. It is now the Central Tower at 703 Market.
On the left, directly across Market from the Call building (the tallish building with a dormer-type window in a mansard-style roof) is the 12-13 story building on the narrow triangle at 700 Market/One Kearney/One Geary. It is still intact (with modern additions).
The white building that comes into view on the right, just pass the ornate columned entry to the Call building (and just across 3rd Street), is the Hearst Building, once the HQ of William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire (including his flagship, the SF Examiner). The building (not the paper) is still there. (In fact this was considered San Francisco’s “newspaper corner”; besides the Examiner and Call, the fourth building on this corner – the dark building on the left about 2 minutes into the film, is the deYoung Building, then home to the SF Chronicle. Again, the building (not the paper) is still there.)
On the right hand side of the street, just past the Hearst Building, are the Monadnock at 685 Market, and the Palace Hotel at the corner of New Montgomery. Both still exist.
Beyond these, I believe that there is little left that survives from that era.