Strange building a mashup masterpiece
With one foot in the Financial District and the other in the Union Square shopping area, Sutter Street between Montgomery and Kearny is a typical busy downtown San Francisco block, in prepandemic days filled with workers, shoppers and tourists.
But there’s nothing typical about the glassfronted sevenstory building at 130 Sutter on the north side of the block, across from the Crocker Galleria. Willis Polk’s Hallidie Building is one of the most revolutionary — and strangest — buildings in the city.
The Hallidie Building, built in 1917, was the first American skyscraper to feature a glass curtain wall. A curtain wall is essentially an enormous window that forms a building’s front wall. Since it fulfills no structural function and needs only to support its own weight, it can be made of light materials like glass.
So many modern skyscrapers feature glass curtain walls that at first glance, the Hallidie Building may appear nothing special. But a closer look reveals it to be a unique creation.
Polk’s building is a weird and wonderful combination of austere modernism and Victorian confectionary. The glass curtain wall, hung a foot outside the reinforced concrete of the building, with its vast (for the time) reflecting surface mirroring the street and sky, has the simple, unadorned, formdriven power of modern architecture.
But that soaring modernist wall is adorned with elaborate goldpainted castiron orna
mentation, including an oversized cantilevered Gothic roof cornice, ornate friezes, rounded balconies and Gothic fire escapes, an overlay that architectural historians Sally and John Woodbridge compare in their guidebook “San Francisco Architecture” to “a Victorian window valance.”
It’s one of the stranger design juxtapositions found in any building in the city — as if Picasso had painted a tutu on one of his demoiselles d’Avignon — and makes the Hallidie Building a oneofakind masterpiece.
The Woodbridges write that “the façade of this building is more curtainlike than almost anything since” and that the ornate decoration “contributes to the impression that the glass grid is a curtain.”
In “Splendid Survivors,” Michael Corbett writes that the building’s curtain wall is “as beautifully and cleanly expressed as any glass curtain wall built since,” and finds in its elaborate ornamentation both a gracious homage to an older style and a delicious joke at its own selfcontradictions.
In a way, it makes sense that the Hallidie Building is at once audacious and conservative. For its architect, Willis Polk, displayed both traits himself.
Born in 1867 in Illinois, Polk trained in his architect father’s office in Kansas City, Mo., before moving to New York, where he joined the firm of A. Page Brown and moved with it to San Francisco in 1889.
Brown soon became the leader of an architectural renaissance in the Bay Area. As Richard Longstreth writes in “On the Edge of the World: Four Architects in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century,” Brown, Polk and their young colleagues found the city’s dominant Victorian style vulgar and commercial. Polk caustically called the Western Addition, site of many of the newest Victorians, “an architectural nightmare conceived in a reign of terror and produced by artistic anarchists.”
Brown, Polk, Maybeck, Julia Morgan and other young architects led the revolt against the Victorian style in houses. Eschewing gaudy details and frilly woodwork, they created elegant, eclectic homes inspired by California vernacular architectural traditions and by nature, a style now known as the First Bay Tradition.
Polk’s own duplex, a stillstanding sevenstory building at 101317 Vallejo St. constructed in 1892, is a wonderful example of his eclecticism. Russian Hill historian William Kostura describes it as “a remarkable synthesis of the east coast shingle style, medieval Brittannic urbanism, Joseph Worcester’s love of natural materials, hilltop Bohemianism, and Willis Polk’s creative genius.”
Polk’s talent was quickly recognized, but his arrogance and often outrageous behavior did not advance his career. Polk’s eccentricities were legendary, and he handed out insults like party favors. When an East Coast industrialist who wanted Polk to design a building told the architect that he admired his work, Polk replied, “I would feel complimented if I thought you knew anything about art.” Polk did not get the commission.
But Polk’s penchant for offending people did not stop him from becoming one of the city’s leading architects. His 1903 Merchants Exchange Building at California and Leidesdorff was one of the earliest big buildings of the prequake downtown building boom. After the quake, Polk went to work for “City Beautiful” proponent James Burnham, and redesigned more buildings than any other architect, including such dignified structures as the Mills Building, the Hobart Building and the de Young building.
Polk’s office buildings are formally correct, fit harmoniously into their surroundings, and their ornamentation is restrained and tasteful. But they’re far more conservative than his residential work, and they’re not as individualistic or memorable. According to Longstreth, Polk’s association with Burnham “marked a turning point in his career . ... The individualism that he had articulated so defiantly in the 1890s was subsumed by his yearning for prestige and recognition.”
But Polk had one last act of artistic rebellion in him: the Hallidie Building. The onetime enfant terrible, now a 50yearold whose best work was behind him, reached inside to create his masterpiece.
How and why did he do it?
“One can only speculate that Polk momentarily sought to be his old self again,” Longstreth writes. He notes that after Polk famously gave to Bernard Maybeck his own commission to design the Palace of Fine Arts, Maybeck wrote to Polk that “you have put up a monument to your Ideals (through me) and made a sacrifice for them — there is in you a yearning for the highest Ideal ... and I believe some morning you will wake up to cut out that other side which you seem to consider important.”
Polk’s career declined afterward, and he died just seven years later. But in the twilight of his life he had done what Maybeck appealed to him to do: He had expressed his artistic vision. And his last major architectural testament is not only decades ahead of its time, it serves as a kind of selfportrait.
Both sides of this Janusfaced creator, the revolutionary and the conservative, are not only visible, but engage in an ongoing dialogue — a witty and profound conversation between cast iron and shimmering glass that will amuse, instruct and inspire passersby as long as the Hallidie Building stands on Sutter Street.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. His new book, with drawings by Paul Madonna, is “Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages Through the Unknown City.” All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@ sfchronicle.com