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Central Tower is a 21-story office building at
Market
Market is a term used to describe concepts such as:
*Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand
*Market economy
*Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market
Geography
*Märket, an ...
and
Third
Third or 3rd may refer to:
Numbers
* 3rd, the ordinal form of the cardinal number 3
* , a fraction of one third
* Second#Sexagesimal divisions of calendar time and day, 1⁄60 of a ''second'', or 1⁄3600 of a ''minute''
Places
* 3rd Street (d ...
Streets in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
. The building has undergone numerous renovations since its completion in 1898 as the Call Building. It was later known as the Spreckels Building.
History
In 1890,
M. H. de Young, owner of the ''
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de ...
'', built San Francisco's first skyscraper, the
Chronicle Building, to house his newspaper. In response,
John D. Spreckels and his father
Claus Spreckels
Adolph Claus J. Spreckels (July 9, 1828 – December 26, 1908) (his last name has also been misspelled as Spreckles) was a major industrialist in Hawai'i during the kingdom, republican and territorial periods of the islands' history. He also in ...
purchased the ''
San Francisco Call
''The San Francisco Call'' was a newspaper that served San Francisco, California. Because of a succession of mergers with other newspapers, the paper variously came to be called ''The San Francisco Call & Post'', the ''San Francisco Call-Bulletin ...
'' in 1895 and commissioned a tower of their own that would dwarf the Chronicle Building. In September 1895, ''The Call'' wrote:
The building eventually stood 315 feet (96 m) tall with an ornate
baroque
The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...
dome
A dome () is an architectural element similar to the hollow upper half of a sphere. There is significant overlap with the term cupola, which may also refer to a dome or a structure on top of a dome. The precise definition of a dome has been a m ...
—which housed the offices of
Reid & Reid
Reid & Reid, also known as Reid Brothers, was an American architectural and engineering firm that was active from 1880 to 1932. Established in Indiana by Canadian immigrants, the firm moved to the West Coast and became was the most prominent fir ...
, the building's architects—and four corner
cupola
In architecture, a cupola () is a relatively small, most often dome-like, tall structure on top of a building. Often used to provide a lookout or to admit light and air, it usually crowns a larger roof or dome.
The word derives, via Italian, from ...
s when construction finished in 1898. It was the tallest building west of the Mississippi River for many years. The structure was badly burned and damaged by the
1906 San Francisco earthquake
At 05:12 Pacific Standard Time on Wednesday, April 18, 1906, the coast of Northern California was struck by a major earthquake with an estimated moment magnitude of 7.9 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XI (''Extreme''). High-intensity sha ...
, although the building did not collapse.
After the fire, ''The Call'' reopened its offices at a new location,
The Montgomery, and the former Call Building became known as the Spreckels Building. In 1938 Albert Roller completely refurbished Central Tower. The building's height was reduced to 298 feet (91 m) and the number of stories was increased from 15 to 21; the ornate dome and the cupolas atop the building were removed.
File:Call building.jpg, The Call from Kearny Street, 1905, with Lotta's Fountain
Lotta's fountain is a fountain at the intersection of Market Street, where Geary and Kearny Streets connect in downtown San Francisco, California.
It was commissioned by actress Lotta Crabtree in 1875 as a gift to the city of San Francisco, an ...
at lower left
File:Call Bldg on fire, San Francisco earthquake cph.3b04298.jpg, On fire after the 1906 earthquake
File:No. 314. Call Building crop.jpg, Aftermath of the fire
See also
*
List of early skyscrapers
This list of early skyscrapers details a range of tall, commercial buildings built between 1880 and the 1930s, predominantly in the United States cities of New York and Chicago, but also across the rest of the U.S. and in many other parts of the ...
*
List of San Francisco Designated Landmarks
This is a list of San Francisco Designated Landmarks. In 1967, the city of San Francisco, California adopted Article 10 of the Planning Code, providing the city with the authority to designate and protect landmarks from inappropriate alterations. ...
*
List of tallest buildings in San Francisco
San Francisco, California, in the United States, has at least 482 high-rises, 58 of which are at least tall. The tallest building is Salesforce Tower, which rises and is the 17th-tallest building in the United States. The city's second- ...
References
External links
*
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Skyscraper office buildings in San Francisco
Financial District, San Francisco
Market Street (San Francisco)
Office buildings completed in 1898
1898 establishments in California
Reid & Reid buildings
Art Deco architecture in California