![]() ![]() Photo courtesy of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library For another, it was at the nowhere corner of 10th and Market.”ġ937 photo shows lobby of the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart shortly after opening. For one thing, the building was big and ugly. Upon revisiting the building in 2015 in its newest incarnation, Market Square (also referred to locally as the Twitter Building), longtime Chronicle nostalgist Carl Nolte wrote, “Like most San Franciscans, I never gave the place a second glance. The Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart was, after all, just another steel-framed, utilitarian commercial building to arise in an era of many such buildings, and the Deco detailing and grand lobby space were aimed to attract a small segment of the population, as opposed to dazzling the masses. This is in sharp contrast to the grand vaudeville and movie palaces designed by big-name architects that lined Market Street in the era when the SF Mart was built, including the grandest of them all, the spectacular Fox Theatre designed by Thomas Lamb, which stood directly across the street. ![]() Architects, though as preservation architect Elisa Skaggs-who worked on a recent historic resources evaluation of the building by the firm Page and Turnbull-says, “We were never able to identify a single named architect responsible for the building or the detail work.” The original firm responsible for what became known as the Western Merchandise Mart, or just the SF Mart, was Capital Co. The opening of the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart lands on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. Rau of Chicago, executive vice president of the National Retail Furniture Association, whose no-doubt thrilling speech was titled, “How Can Furniture Dealers Make a Profit Despite Increased Costs of Doing Business.” Three days later, on July 3, 1937, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the official grand opening featured keynote speaker Roscoe R. The new mart captures the old spirit of the West, and shows that men still have the courage to dream despite obstacles that may arise.”Īt the dedication luncheon in the Mart’s swanky 10th Floor Mart Club, a Miss Valerie Wynne performed with the Kiwanis Singers. Of course, before the internet, all shopping had to occur in person or by catalogue, but buildings like this sprang up in major American cities (an even larger Merchandise Mart in Chicago has also seen some recent adaptive reuse) because of the synergies that existed within this particular industry, and the mutual benefits of bringing home furnishing vendors together in one physical location.Īt the dedication ceremony on July 31, 1937, San Francisco Mayor Angelo Rossi declared, “This building sprang into life in less than a year, constituting San Francisco’s answer to the Depression. Mid-Market needs to find its heart in order to become a real neighborhood The Hallidie Building and how the curtain wall was born Financial District’s Heineman building, the original skinny legend A full nine floors of showrooms, to be exact, totaling over 600,000 square feet at the outset.Īs a representative for the building’s current owner, Shorenstein Realty Services, describes it, “It was essentially a physical internet where buyers could go from showroom to showroom to observe and negotiate for the latest lines in home and commercial furnishings and merchandise.” It was a space where out-of-town furniture retailers and industry tradespeople came together for seasonal trade shows, and where professionals in the world of home decor could comparison-shop the latest styles and technologies, room by room and floor by floor. The hulking, Mayan-inspired, Art Deco monolith originally known as the Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart has stood on its Market Street block between Ninth and Tenth streets for 81 years now.Ĭompleted in the summer of 1937-the same year as the Golden Gate Bridge-at a cost of $3 million and after just one year of construction, the massive showroom complex for wholesalers and manufacturers of home furnishings, carpets, lighting, drapery, appliances, and radios was never intended to be a public space. This is a story about adaptive reuse, unplanned obsolescence, and the way one building can straddle two centuries and come to embody the fickle nature of commerce in a modern American city. ![]()
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