Vertigo in San Francisco

The California Palace of the Legion of Honor greets the fog-drenched headlands of Lincoln Park with a classical facade of white stone, modeled after the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris. Its U-shaped structure, defined by a formal…

Fort Point is a massive, four-tiered brick fortress that sits directly beneath the southern span of the Golden Gate Bridge. Built between eighteen fifty-three and eighteen sixty-one, it remains the only Third System masonry fort…

Coit Tower is a two hundred and ten-foot fluted pillar of unpainted, reinforced concrete crowning the peak of Telegraph Hill. Built between nineteen thirty-two and nineteen thirty-three, the Art Deco structure serves as a landmark…

Eight hundred forty-seven Montgomery Street occupies a classic brick building that once housed the notorious Frisco Dance Hall, a center of life in the city’s rough Barbary Coast district. In nineteen thirty-four, an Italian cook named…

Two hundred twenty-four Grant Avenue is marked by its association with a local institution that held this address for over a century. Founded in eighteen seventy-one, Podesta Baldocchi was a florist that became a destination for city…

Hotel Julian occupies a nine-story structure on Sutter Street that is defined by its vertical blade sign reaching toward the sky. Originally built in nineteen twenty-five as the Hotel Glen Royal, the property has undergone several name…

The Misión San Francisco de Asís, commonly called Mission Dolores, is the oldest intact building in San Francisco. You can identify the site by the contrast between its small, white-washed adobe chapel and the towering stone basilica…