An Architectural Masterpiece

The The U.S. Court of Appeals Building at Seventh & Mission Streets has been described as one of the most ornate public buildings in America. It was designed by James Knox Taylor, Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department, and built in the Italian Renaissance Palazzo style. It was one of the few buildings to survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. The U.S. General Services Administration has undertaken an extensive program of seismic stabilization and restoration of the building.
 

Walking through its gleaming marble halls and ornate courtrooms, one is dazzled by the opulence of materials-a rich variety of marbles and mahoganies, redwood, bronze, colored Venetian glass and porcelain tile-and the extraordinary craftsmanship that created these exquisitely detailed interiors. With its grand marble colonnades, cherubs and vaulted ceilings adorned with intricate mosaics and classical tracery, the building feels like a Florentine Renaissance palazzo. It is one of the finest examples of the American Renaissance style-a distinctly American expression of French Beaux-Arts classicism-that dominated civic architecture at the turn of the century. The imposing granite edifice was designed in the 1890s by James Knox Taylor, chief architect for the U.S. Treasury Department, to house the federal courts and the main San Francisco post office. Taylor oversaw the construction of many Beaux Arts federal buildings around the country. The San Francisco courthouse, which opened in I905, is his masterpiece. In its grandeur, extravagance and exuberance, the building expresses the wealth, optimism and pride of a nation proclaiming its new status as a great imperial power.

San Francisco's Resilient Edifice

And what better place to erect such a splendid edifice than San Francisco? Built with overnight fortunes in gold and silver by shipping magnates and railroad robber barons, the exotic city at the edge of the continent had become a booming American metropolis. It had transformed itself in two decades from a sleepy pueblo into the financial and cultural capital of the West. It was the gateway to the Pacific and Asia, a cosmopolitan city famous worldwide for its opulence and flair. But the magic city mythologized by Twain and Stevenson was all but destroyed by the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. While structures all around it crumbled and burned, the courthouse-post office survived the shaker with relatively little damage. Thanks to the heroic effort of postal workers who battled the flames with water-soaked mail sacks, the building was saved from the fires that devoured the city. It was one of the few structures left standing amid the ruins of San Francisco. It served as a symbol of hope and a vital center of communication and commerce in the weeks after the disaster. The landmark building became part of the city's colorful lore, along with the sensational trials of conspirators, bank robbers and bootleggers held in its baroque courtrooms. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Then disaster struck again on October 17, 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked San Francisco. This time the building suffered major structural damage and had to be closed. Federal officials had two options: tear it down and build a new home for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, or repair, upgrade and restore this historic building to its original splendor. The choice seemed obvious. After a $91 million seismic retrofit and restoration, the building reopened on the seventh anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Early History

Following the explosion of settlement and commerce brought by the Gold Rush of the 1850s, the courts and their ever-expanding staff would be housed in a series of downtown buildings. But it was clear by the 1870s that a new federal building was needed to accommodate the court's heavy caseload, and the U.S. Postal Service, which had outgrown its cramped quarters at the old U.S. Customs House on Battery Street. The post office had opened in San Francisco in 1848, working out of a small wooden building on Clay Street at Waverly Place in what is now Chinatown. In those days, prior to the opening of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the mail came by steamship twice a month. Isolated and hungry for news from the East, San Franciscans stood for hours in long lines waiting to get their mail on Steamer Days.

A Call for a New Federal Building

By the 1880s, Washington could no longer ignore San Francisco's call for a new federal building. It had become a city of great wealth and culture-"the city that was never a town," in the famous words of humorist Will Rogers-fueled by the fabulous fortunes of the Big Four and the Comstock Lode silver kings. In 1885, U.S. Congressman William Morrow of San Francisco introduced a bill to appropriate $350,000 to buy a site in San Francisco on which to build a new courthouse and post office. It languished for two years but was finally passed in March, 1887. The Secretaty of the Treasury selected a three-man commission, which included San Francisco Postmaster W.C. Bryan, to find suitable property. When they reported $350,000 could not buy much, Congress eventually raised the allocation to $1,250,000. After considering two dozen sites, the commissioners opted to buy a big sandy lot at the corner of Seventh and Mission Streets. They ranked it second in desirability because of its distance from the central business district. The site was more than a mile from downtown in a working class neighborhood of Irish and German immigrants, warehouses and blacksmith shops. Unbeknown to federal officials at the time, an underground creek lay beneath the southwest corner. "Seventh and Mission was way out in the sticks, way out in the sand dunes," recalled Martin J. O'Donnell, a postal clerk at the turn of the century, "and lots of people thought it was too far from the center of things." The commissioners apparently did not. In December, 1891, the federal government signed an agreement to pay property owner LeRoy G. Harvey $1,040,000 in gold for the 142,625 square-foot lot. It was a controversial deal that triggered accusations of corruption and payoffs. But it went through nonetheless.

Taylor's design, with its classical grandeur and emphasis on luxurious material and fine craftsmanship, exemplified the American Renaissance mode of architecture. Drawing on Italian Renaissance and classical forms and ornamentation, the style was developed in the 1890s by American disciples of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The Treasury Department had decided to adopt this "Classical style" for all buildings, Taylor wrote in 1891, because "this style is best suited for Government buildings. The experience of centuries has demonstrated that no form of architecture is so pleasing to the great mass of mankind as the classic." And in San Francisco, the architect created one of the country's most magnificent neo-classical buildings.

The Post Office and Federal Court House in 1905

Dazzling Interiors

As impressive as the exterior is, the lavish interiors are what have dazzled visitors for 90 years. Passing through massive bronze doors, one enters the grand first-floor hallway. The walls are paneled in black-veined white Italian marble, trimmed with green marble from Maryland and Vermont. Intricate marble mosaics adorn the groin-vaulted ceilings. A multicolored ceramic-tile mosaic covers the floor. In the rotunda at either end, a stained-glass dome is ringed by a quartet of marble-tile eagles. Every floor offers an extraordinary range of imported and domestic marbles: red Numidian from North Africa, white Povonezza, Carrara and yellow Siena from Italy, Tennessee Imperial Pink, Vermont Verde, Black Belgian, Pacific Coast Salmon Pink, Georgia Gray. Rare in 1905, some of these marbles are irreplaceable today. There is also a rich variety of wood: white and dark Mexican mahogany, red mahogany from East India, antique oak, curly Northern California red-wood. Wood workers carved countless garlands, rosettes and other classical details on doors and molding throughout the building.

Beautiful Venetian glass mosaics, in glimmering shades of blue, green, red and gold, adorn the hallways of the second floor. The craftsmen inlaid these mosaics, a revival of an ancient Assyrian art, in decorative panels using five or six different colors of marble. These glass and marble compositions appear in even more elaborate designs on the third floor.

View detail of interior decoration. From United States Court of Appeals Building for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Washington, D.C., 1997, page 16. [132 K ]

View detail of interior decoration. From United States Court of Appeals Building for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Washington, D.C., 1997, page 19. [129 K ]

View detail of interior decoration. From United States Court of Appeals Building for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Washington, D.C., 1997, page 17. [94 K ]

View detail of interior decoration. From United States Court of Appeals Building for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Washington, D.C., 1997, page 18. [94 K ]

Courtroom Number Three was designed for the future expansion of the District Court. It is similar to Courtroom Number One, but less elaborate. It has three ceramic lunettes, depicting the themes: "Justice of the Law," "Wisdom of the Law," and "Majesty of the Law." There are also three stained-glass skylights.

The judges' chambers and conference rooms display the same opulent finishes and fine craftsmanship. All the suites have fireplaces, each made of a different marble, many of them elaborately carved. The Redwood Room, designed as the library for District Judge J. DeHaven, is a masterpiece of the woodcarver's art. It is covered in exquisitely carved redwood from Northern California. There are intricately carved owls, lions, fruits and shields. The heavy beams that span the ceiling are supported by brackets carved in the form of an ancient nautical figure who blows the wind. Raving about these splendid rooms in the September 1905 issue of Sunset Magazine, Francis J. Dyer wrote, "The whole structure has a palatial effect not often secured in the public edifices of the world's greatest democracy." The building, he wrote, was considered to "be more beautiful than any other public structure in the United States, with the possible exception of the Library of Congress, built in 1899. In the opinion of the experts, it is the best constructed building in the United States." The validity of that statement would be tested seven months later, when the earth shook and shattered the fabled city of St. Francis.

View detail of interior decoration. From United States Court of Appeals Building for the Ninth Circuit, U.S. General Services Administration, Public Buildings Service, Washington, D.C., 1997, page 45. [96 K ]

Most San Franciscans were asleep when their world came crashing down. It was 5:13 a.m. on April 18, 1906. The earth shook with a terrific rumble, jolting the city with a series of tremors that toppled buildings and tore gaping fissures in the streets. People were buried under piles of brick and glass. The quake broke gas lines and overturned stoves, starting more than 50 fires. It also burst the water mains, leaving firemen helpless to fight the fires. The fires merged into one massive conflagration that raged through the city for three days, destroying most of San Francisco. The U.S. Courthouse and Post Office was one of the few San Francisco buildings to survive the catastrophe.

"The street was like a heaving sea," wrote a postal worker, "frozen in one of its wildest contortions." The marshy ground at the southwest corner of the building sank considerably more, causing the entire building to slide five feet to the south. But the great gray lady still stood, relatively undamaged. As the fires swept westward, hundreds of panicked citizens, running from the flames that were engulfing the city, sought refuge at the post office. "They came laden with household goods and food," wrote an anonymous postal employee in a report titled "Account of San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of April 18, 1906." Women screaming, babies crying, the whole street was filled with a mob that was fearful to look at. Within a half-hour of the quake, they had filled the lawn with piles of what household stuff they could save, until there was room for no more. As the fire swept toward the building, the tribe of refugees was driven west.

Unsung Heroes

Ignoring orders from U.S. Army officers to vacate the building, ten postal employees stayed behind and fought the blaze with canvas mail bags soaked in water from the hydraulic tank that ran the freight elevator. The fire leaped into Judge De Haven's chambers on the northeast side of the building, "turning the beautiful rooms into a roaring furnace." The glorious Redwood Room, with its 30,000 books, was destroyed. Bricks rained in and the smoke was suffocating. But these brave men fought on and saved the building. They nailed wet sacks to the doors, allowed the doors to burn until charred. They smothered the fire inside the building. Outside, it swept past on Stevenson Street, consuming everything in its path. Three days later, the U.S. Courthouse and Post Office "was the only sign of life in a field of darkness. It still stood in the midst of a ruined waste." Much of the damage to the building actually occurred six days after the quake, when a dynamiting crew blew up what was left of the Odd Fellows Building across the street. The blast shattered all the courthouse windows, shook down marble cornices and mosaics, tore doors from their hinges and blew the United States Attorney's weighty law books out the window. But no matter, the building stood. It served as a symbol of strength and hope for San Franciscans in the days and weeks after the disaster, as well as the city's center of communication and banking. Two days after the quake mail was being delivered again.

Courtroom Dramas

Over the decades, a good deal of drama was played out in the sumptuous San Francisco courtrooms. The most dramatic scene took place during the famous Hindu Conspiracy Trial of World War I. The government had charged Franz Bopp, the German consul general in San Francisco, and 44 others with conspiring to smuggle arms to India to overthrow British rule. All but one was convicted. On April 23, 1918, in Courtroom One, Ram Singh, a defendant turned government witness, shot and killed another defendant, Indian revolutionary Ram Chandra. U.S. Marshal James P. Holohan drew his revolver and killed Ram Singh with a single bullet through the heart. One of Singh's stray bullets hit the glass-mosaic inlay on the front of the judge's bench; the bullet hole is still there today, a chipped piece of history left untouched. Over the next decade, the federal bureaucracy expanded greatly in San Francisco. The Seventh and Mission building not only housed the post office and the district and appellate courts, whose case loads grew heavier by the year, but also the local offices of the Justice, Naturalization and other departments. By the late 1920s, the building had become so crowded that an expansion was inevitable.

In Rides Judge Richard Chambers

By the 1950s, the splendid turn-of-the-century building had fallen on hard times, like many of the people who lived in the run-down neighborhood. It was the victim of neglect and changing tastes. The exterior was chipped and soiled. Inside, original bare-bulbed brass and bronze chandeliers were considered old-fashioned and replaced with modern light fixtures. Marble mosaics and gilded ornamentation on the hallway ceilings were covered with drab green paint. Vintage furniture was stashed in the basement or sold off as junk. 

Then along came Judge Richard Chambers, a Tucson lawyer who was named to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 1959. As the junior member of the court, Chambers was named custodian of the court. Falling in love with the building, he took the job to heart. Appalled by the building's increasingly shabby condition, he became passionately committed to restoring it to its former beauty. He rescued furniture from the basement and began scavenging furniture and light and plumbing fixtures from historic federal buildings around the country that were about to be demolished. Learning that the old court-house in Chicago was being torn down, Chambers made some calls and within a few days three moving vans loaded with light fixtures, furniture, clocks and pull-chain toilets were on their way to San Francisco. A headline in the Chicago Tribune read, "San Francisco Judge Snatches Priceless Furniture." The beautiful brass torch lamps that line the Great Hall were among the Chicago spoils. Chambers salvaged other furnishings from doomed federal buildings in Spokane, Key West, Carson City, and Cheyenne, where he got tables and chairs used during the famous Teapot Dome trial. Under Chambers' guidance, this architectural gem began to shine again. When plans were made to move all the courts to the new 20-story federal building on Golden Gate Avenue, Chambers was among those who insisted that the Circuit Court of Appeals remain in its historic home. Sadly, Judge Chambers died before the beautifully restored U.S. Court of Appeals Building reopened on October 17, 1996, exactly seven years after the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

It was not as devastating as the 1906 quake, but the earthquake that shook San Francisco on October 17, 1989 wreaked havoc on the Bay Area, killing dozens of people. A stretch of freeway collapsed, as did a section of roadway on the Bay Bridge. Hundreds of buildings were damaged, including the courthouse, which suffered major structural damage. The hollow clay interior walls and some of the marble slabs attached to them were badly cracked. Marble columns were dislodged. There were cracks in the floors and in the exterior granite facade. The building was "red-tagged" as unsafe and closed. The Postal Service moved its operations to other branches and the Court of Appeals relocated to rented offices downtown.

Restoration

General Services Administration officials considered the option of tearing down the bulding and constructing a new one. But it was clear that that there was really no choice but to save this landmark beauty. The first step of the restoration project, begun in 1993, was to seismically retrofit the building to protect it from future earthquakes. The GSA decided to use an innovative "base isolation" system-architectural shock absorbers-to significantly reduce damage from future temblors. The system uses friction pendulum bearings. Inside each bearing there is a piece called an "articulated slider" that sits in a stainless steel bowl; when the earth moves, it slides up and down the bowl, causing the structure to lift up and sway like a pendulum. The building moves as a single unit. The courthouse is the largest structure in the United States to use this system of base isolators, and the first historic building to do so.

To strengthen the structure, more than 30 steel-reinforced concrete shear walls were built throughout the building. In order to install them and repair cracked interior walls, much of the marble paneling, decorative plaster and tile mosaics had to be removed. In the process, workmen put in all new electrical, plumbing and fire-safety systems and brought the building up to current handicapped-access codes. Contemporary craftsmen, working in the tradition of those turn-of-the-century Italian artisans, repaired and restored the interior finishes. All the wooden doors were removed and shipped to Portland, where wood workers refurbished them and restored chipped ornamentation with newly carved pieces made to look original. Large amounts of decorative plaster molding were either taken down or destroyed during the construction. The plasterers replaced whole sections of cornices and ceilings, making reverse molds from the pieces that remained intact, then replicating those details with new castings. Plaster work throughout the building was cleaned and painted. The exterior granite facades also got a major cleaning, and they sparkle.

A new atrium was constructed that is linked to the older structure. It is a luminous space whose elegantly modern design and materials-maple wood, glass and steel-speak of the late 20th century yet connect to the past in real and poetic ways. To link the atrium to the old building, granite walls were built around its perimeter. The steel spindles of the stairway railings echo the cages of the old postal windows lining the west wall; the library's white marble counters allude to those windows as well. Layers of history unfold as one moves from the old building to the center of the new. A web of steel beams running along the atrium roof connects the new space to the old, tying them together visually and structurally. These seams are covered with glass membrane skylights that let natural light pour into both the atrium and the adjoining historic spaces. For the first time the general public can see the beautiful courtyard facades.

Strengthened to withstand the force of nature and restored to its original splendor, this beautiful building stands as a testament to the people who built it. The American taxpayers at the end of the 19th century gave us a building worth saving. Those at the end of the 20th century have continued the legacy by preserving this architectural treasure for future generations.

An 'Unvanished' History Site Map	South-of-Market History	Restoration of the U.S.  Court of Appeals Building
Project	Earthquake & Fire	References Cited
Prehistory	Archival Study	Recommended Reading
The Early Days of San Francisco		Additional Internet Sources

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