|
|||||||
 |
|
|
|
|
|||
 |
|||||||
|
|||||||
 |
|||||||
| Text
reprinted from Heritage
News, Vol.XXXII, No. 4, July-August 2004 Heritage will soon review a project proposed for the Hayes Valley site that until recently was the campus for the University of California Extension. Shortly after closing the school and vacating the property last year, the university issued a request for proposals. Last March U.C. signed an exclusive negotiating agreement with A.F. Evans Development, Inc., and Mercy Housing California to convert the site to residential use under a long-term lease of the property, whose owner will remain the university. As part of the planning process, the prospective developer engaged Page & Turnbull to prepare a historic resources study of the property. The subjects of the study are four buildings on the nearly 6-acre sloping site bounded by Haight, Buchanan, Hermann and Laguna Streets, built for San Francisco State Teachers College. Founded in 1899 as San Francisco State Normal School, the teacher-training institution moved to this location after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed its building on Powell near Clay. It occupied the schoolhouse of the Protestant Orphan Asylum in the northeast corner of Buchanan and Waller (then a through street). The orphanage remained just across Waller Street in a building constructed to replace its 1854 brick building, destroyed in 1906. By 1915, the orphanage had added a variety of subsidiary buildings. The Normal School added a row of one-story wood frame structures along the north edge of Waller and a three-story wood frame U-plan building at the corner of Hermann and Buchanan. In 1921, the Normal School became San Francisco State Teacher’s College, and in the following year it announced an ambitious building program. Bernard Maybeck prepared a plan and elevations for the new campus. A perspective sketch appeared in the Chronicle (November 7, 1922) that, according to the Page & Turnbull report, “depicted the campus as a series of linked pavilions, each one vaguely reminiscent of his Palace of Fine Arts built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition.” What actually got built over the next decade, however, was largely the work of state architect George B. McDougall, in a simplified Spanish Colonial Revival style. In 1924, the first new building opened a gymnasium with classrooms (now called Middle Hall). Soon after the one-story H-plan Kindergarten Training Building (now the Richardson Hall Administration Wing) went up on Laguna. Completed in 1927, the Science Building (now Woods Hall) with its arched formal entry, wraps the corner of Haight and Buchanan. The 1930 Training School Wing of Richardson, expressed in three distinct volumes, embraces the corner of Laguna and Hermann. W.B. Daniels, a state architect, designed Richardson, continuing the Spanish Colonial Revival style but in a kind of stripped Moderne expression. The retaining wall along Laguna was completed about the same time. The final construction was the Woods Hall Annex (1936) along Haight Street, funded by the New Deal’s WPA and containing a WPA mural, A Dissertation on Alchemy, by Reuben Kadish, that remains in place. By this time, the institution, now called San Francisco State College, had begun to consider a new campus. In the post-war period, the school began development of the Lake Merced campus, which it occupied in 1953-54. By 1957, renovations prepared the way for the U.C. Extension Center. Most of the remaining wood frame structures were removed and three large parking lots filled the heart of the campus. In 1973, the French-American School leased Woods Hall, Woods Hall Annex and the Gymnasium (Middle Hall) and remained on the site until last year. U.C. San Francisco continues to operate a dental clinic in a contemporary building that replaced the pre-1915 U-plan structure at the corner of Buchanan and Hermann. The Page & Turnbull study judged that the campus is National Register eligible. Integrity, which according to the study, varies from low-to-moderate for the campus itself to moderate-to-high for the Woods Hall Annex may affect eligibility for the National Register, but not the California Register. |
|||||||
