The Folgers Coffee Company Building is a historic mid-rise office building located at 101 Howard Street in the Financial District,

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 ...

Description and history

The five-story plus basement, Renaissance Revival style building was originally built in 1904 as the headquarters of J. A. Folger & Company, and remained the main offices of the company until 1963 when Folger's Coffee was purchased by

Procter & Gamble The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G) is an American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. It specializes in a wide range of personal health/consumer hea ...

. As described by its NRHP designation, it is, “unusual and noteworthy in that the building survived both of the major San Francisco

earthquake An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, from ...

s in

1906 Events January–February * January 12 – Persian Constitutional Revolution: A nationalistic coalition of merchants, religious leaders and intellectuals in Persia forces the shah Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar to grant a constitution, ...

and

1989 File:1989 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The Cypress Street Viaduct, Cypress structure collapses as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, killing motorists below; The proposal document for the World Wide Web is submitted; The Exxo ...

.” One reason for this is that it was, “constructed on wooden pilings that were driven into San Francisco Bay fill to a depth of about forty feet, with a steam driven pile driver.” On August 2, 2011, The Folger Building was purchased by the

University of San Francisco The University of San Francisco (USF) is a private Jesuit university in San Francisco, California. The university's main campus is located on a setting between the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park. The main campus is nicknamed "The Hil ...

, for almost $37 million. This marked the return of the university's downtown roots. It has no

LEED Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a green building certification program used worldwide. Developed by the non-profit U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), it includes a set of rating systems for the design, construction ...

certification, as is typical of buildings from its time, and has 83,500 square feet of rentable office space. The building was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

on June 21, 1996.

References

Office buildings in San Francisco National Register of Historic Places in San Francisco Commercial buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in California Coffee companies of the United States Renaissance Revival architecture in California Commercial buildings completed in 1904 {{SanFrancisco-NRHP-stub