San Francisco's Historic Gem Returned To Life

"Eleven stories of ruddy sandstone and brick command the corner of Kearny and Market streets every bit as robustly as they did in 1890, when the building that then housed The Chronicle opened as the tallest tower on the West Coast.

To finance the rebirth, city officials let the developer put a tower in back.

You'd never guess that for 40 years the walls were hidden behind drab metal panels with a pseudo-modern look...the interior was gutted long ago and the facade was scarred by a skin of metal and glass tattooed into place in 1962, when the owner at the time tried to make it more attractive to potential tenants."

"Restoring the facade wasn't a matter of just stripping off the 60s cladding. The vertical bay at the front of the building was painstakingly recrafted and the stonework was repaired with stones cut from the same quarry as the orignal."

"The masonry facade is virtually all that's left of the original, designed by Chicago firm Burnham and Root for Chronicle publisher M. H. de Young.

But now the red bricks conceal something much different from a newspaper plant: Behind and above them sit the Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences."

[Editor's note: Read chronology of De Young in the article, starting in 1887, the 1906 earthquake, to today;and see photo history of it in Curbed SF link, including photos of 1890 building, the 1962 office conversion, and the current restoration].