Jackson Square: When the Design District was North of Market

Jackson Street and Hotaling Place, San Francisco, photo taken for travel writer Horace Sutton,1964

Before The San Francisco Design Center’s development in the 1970s, interior designers frequented "To the Trade" showrooms North of Market in historic Jackson Square. Just as it took vision, ingenuity, and hard work to transform SOMA's vacant warehouses and factories into a design mecca, so did the restoration of the neglected Classical Revival and Italianate commercial buildings in Jackson Square. Settlers lured by the California Gold Rush built the area in the 1850s on a landfill that incorporated ships abandoned by sailors with gold dust in their eyes. The business district included bars, brothels, and purveyors of liquor.

Hotaling Place, San Francisco, photographer, Jay Risling, 1941

One of these purveyors was A. P. Hotaling, who, in 1866, built a three-story Italianate brick warehouse with cast iron facades for his wholesale whiskey business. Known as the Hotaling Building, it survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire along with its contents, which prompted local poet Charles Field to write: 

If, as they say, God spanked the town

For being over-frisky, 

Why did He burn His churches down 

And spare Hotaling's whiskey?

After the earthquake, Hotaling Building and Jackson Square fell into decline. During Prohibition, bootleggers with rifles occupied the warehouse while creatives and bohemians moved into the area because the rents were cheap. At the nearby Hotaling Annex West, another Italianate brick structure dating from the 1860s and once owned by A. P. Hotaling, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) rented the building for its Federal Writers and Federal Artists projects during the Great Depression of the 1930s. By the 1940s, artists held open-air art shows in the alley of Hotaling Place. 

Kneedler Fauchère, Jackson Street, San Francisco, photo taken for a Dodge Sierra Wagon ad, 1958

The historic Gold Rush district caught the imagination of interior design wholesalers who wanted to restore and renovate the neighborhood, making Jackson Square one of the first design districts in the nation. In 1952, Dorothy Kneedler Lawenda and her husband, Harry Lawenda, purchased the Hotaling Building, which housed Kneedler Fauchère. Other entrepreneurs joined them, including John and Elinor McGuire, the founders of McGuire Furniture. 

Businessman and urban renewalist Henry Adams developed the National Ice and Cold Storage Company buildings near the waterfront in the late 1960s. Called the Ice House, the pair of five-story brick structures, dating from the early twentieth century, were joined by a later glass and steel bridge. But in the 1970s, North of Market fell out of design favor with costly parking and office conversions. Adams saw potential in the vacant American Commercial style warehouses and factories in the desolate South of Market area. The San Francisco Design Center was born!