Site Visits

View Original

The Sentinel Building at 916 Kearny Street

I'd hazard to guess that the drive south along the unfortunately named Columbus Avenue is among the most dangerous in all of San Francisco. The reason why is simple. It is incredibly hard to resist not taking out the phone to capture the iconic Transamerica Pyramid views. However, the most popular image is from the intersection of Pacific and Kearny as viewers can contrast some modern buildings and the great pyramid with the Sentinel Building, a copper-clad building from nearly sixty years after American colonizers invaded and took control of the land.

The building was designed by Salfield & Kohlberg. These architects were also responsible for the Rosenthal Building's design, a supposedly beautiful building since demolished.

Harold Kirker observed of the Rosenthal Building: "A typical example of the Beaux-Arts answer to the iron buildings of the seventies and the Romanesque piles of the eighties is Salfield and Kohlberg's Rosenthal Building, whose single virtue is in displaying in one scheme every cliche that the academically trained architect was capable of producing. Both David Salfield and Hermann Kohlberg arrived in California in the eighties, the latter with some years service as a government architect and a too accurate memory of the Teutonic Beaux-Arts villas of Frankfurt or Stuttgart," (source).

Abe Ruef, an infamously corrupt San Francisco politician, was the project developer.