The Bank the Artists Voted Best

The building on your left, with its columned dome rising over the corner, was declared the best building in San Francisco within months of its completion, and the vote was not close. In an eighteen ninety two poll of twenty local artists conducted by the San Francisco Call, fourteen of them picked this Beaux Arts bank, designed by architect Albert Pissis, as the single finest building in the city. Its nearest competitor, the Mills Building, got four votes.

That reputation for beauty turned out to matter less than its reputation for durability. When the great earthquake struck San Francisco in nineteen oh six and the fires that followed burned through the surrounding blocks, reducing one after another to rubble, this building was scorched but did not fall. The Hibernia Bank reopened for business just five weeks after the disaster, making it one of the very first structures in the devastated zone to resume normal operation while its neighbors were still smoking ruins.

Pissis himself returned to the building in nineteen oh eight to design an expansion, cementing it as one of his signature works in a city full of them. The bank eventually moved on, and the building has passed through long stretches of vacancy and reuse since, but its granite columns and dome remain exactly where the artists of eighteen ninety two said they belonged, at the top of the list. Drive past it today and you are looking at a building that out designed its rivals, outlasted an earthquake, and is still standing as the neighborhood around it has cycled through booms and declines the bank itself never saw coming.