Art Deco San Francisco: The Architecture of Timothy Pflueger

SAN FRANCISCO The Architecture of Timothy PямВueger

THERESE POLETTI P H OTO G R A P H Y BY TO M PA I VA

PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS NEW YO RK

In memory of my mother, Peg Poletti

Published by

Special thanks to Nettie Aljian, Sara Bader, Dorothy

Princeton Architectural Press

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© 2008 Therese Poletti

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All rights reserved Printed and bound in China

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

11 10 09 08 4 3 2 1 First edition

Poletti, Therese, 1959–

Frontispiece: Timothy Pflueger, circa 1920s.

Timothy Pflueger / Therese Poletti ; photography

Art deco San Francisco : the architecture of

by Tom Paiva.

This publication is made possible by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the LEF Foundation.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56898-756-9 (alk. paper) 1. Pflueger, Timothy Ludwig, 1892–1946—Criticism

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in

and interpretation. 2. Art deco (Architecture)—

any manner without written permission from the

California—San Francisco. 3. Architecture—

publisher, except in the context of reviews.

California—San Francisco—20th century.

4. Architects—California—San Francisco—

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify

Biography. I. Paiva, Tom. II. Title.

owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be

NA737.P425P65 2008

corrected in subsequent editions.

720.92—dc22 2008003274

Editor: Clare Jacobson Designer: Arnoud Verhaeghe

CONTENTS

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Origins Amid a Devastated City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 An Apprentice with a Trace of Genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 From Nickelodeons to Movie Palaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Skyscrapers for the Jazz Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 The Monument to the Crash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Paradise Found at the Paramount . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Finding Work during the Great Depression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Trials and Tribulations: The Bay Bridge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 Cocktail Lounges and a World’s Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174 The Feminine Mystique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Epilog: A Legacy Continues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222

List of Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 24 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Image Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 40

THE MONUMENT TO THE CRASH

They’re making money hand over fist, my dear fellow. . . . The resources of America are inexhaustible. It isn’t a boom, it’s just the natural development of a great country.

—W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

As the stock market began to soar in the 1920s, Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco became the Wall Street of the West.

The city was growing into a powerful West Coast financial center, and several new buildings for banks and growing companies like Standard Oil were built in the early 1920s in and around its financial district. Most were solid, Renaissance palazzo-styled blocks with Beaux-Arts ornamentation.

This respected banking community had evolved from the city’s upstart gold rush and silver mining roots of the 1850s–70s, which peaked in a speculative frenzy for mining stocks after silver bonanzas were unearthed from mines in Nevada. In 1862, a group of forty brokers formed the San Francisco Stock and Exchange Board, where they could invest in the booming but highly risky mining industry.1 Around 1911 they changed its name to the San Francisco Stock Exchange.

At the peak of the silver boom, masses of speculators gathered in the streets of the nascent financial district. “The crowd became so large that, finally, a policeman was stationed every morning to make a passageway between us, so that citizens having business in that locality could get through,” wrote Joseph King,

a former chairman of the exchange. 2 After a calamitous crash when the silver mines were nearly exhausted, the Bank of California failed in 1875, and a depression in mining stocks ensued. 3 In 1882, a rival exchange, called the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, was founded for trading more traditional stocks and bonds, with a heavy emphasis on industrial and banking firms. 4 In the 1920s James R. Miller and Timothy Pf lueger were hired by both exchanges to design buildings for their then-growing trading f loors. In 1922, the two men designed a Neoclassic temple that gave the original swashbuckling mining group a patina of respect. Six years later, Miller & Pf lueger worked for the rival Stock and Bond Exchange, which was by then the dominant trading f loor of the West Coast. The latter was a modernized temple full of progressive art, lending the capitalist brokers an aura of social consciousness.

During the stock-buying frenzy of the twenties, both exchanges saw huge upswings in trading. Mining stocks began to soar again much as they had in the 1870s, and the Stock Exchange saw an opportunity to compete more directly with the younger Stock and Bond Exchange. 5 In November 1922, the miners announced plans for a new, larger building to accommodate a growing membership and to trade bonds and stocks along with mining shares. 6 Miller and Pflueger were hired in the autumn of 1922, before they cemented their partnership in 1923.

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opposite Timothy Pflueger’s Moderne facade to his Stock Exchange Tower is emphasized by an arresting sculpture by Ralph Stackpole.

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ART DECO SAN FRANCISCO

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architect John Galen Howard, carved two groups of three panels above the windows on the east and west walls. The panels were modern in both form and topic. Those on the east wall represented electric power with figures using lights, the telegraph, and the telephone.

The west panels symbolized the development of gas power or the combustion engine, with a mechanic turning the propeller of an airplane motor.

The rest of the space contained members’ booths, each equipped with a telephone board to receive orders from member firms, which were then transmitted to their brokers on the floor. The space was broken up into four trading centers, paneled in quartered Japanese oak,

surrounding nine trading posts. Each post was equipped with a pneumatic tube system for rapid transmission of orders and “annunciator” boards for signaling between posts and members’ booths. Pflueger designed the room so that if the market continued its breakneck pace, more trading posts and facilities could be added. 36 Stepping out of the trading room, the traders entered a world of beauty and repose, from the detailed metalwork on the elevator doors to the carved travertine panels in the sitting area. The club rooms on the tenth and eleventh floors are filled with beautiful materials and art.

The tenth-floor lounge, for example, has Jeanne d’Arc stone over a fireplace, with animals

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opposite top Gold elevators contrast nicely with polished burgundy Levanto marble in the lobby. opposite bottom A broad, low stairway in the rear of the lobby led to an aluminum-trimmed entrance to the trading floor, in the same streamlined motif as the front entrance. above The metal fin ceiling of the trading floor conceals the trusses of a large skylight. Basreliefs by Robert Boardman Howard were above windows.

ART DECO SAN FRANCISCO

carved above a flat bronze inlay that serves as a mantel. The fireplace is framed by deep brown travertine. The walls are parchment stretched over laminated panels, and stylish furniture, including a massive marble-topped table, was designed for the room. Howard carved the interior door of the board of directors’ room and a series of wooden panels in the eleventhfloor dining room. The sculptress Adeline Kent, who carved the Saxophone Player bas-relief for the Luncheon Club, was particularly impressed that Pflueger paid the artists not according to their reputation but “impartially by the square foot of work.”37 She rekindled a friendship with Howard amid the camaraderie of the artists working together on the club, a friendship that led to their marriage in 1930. 38 With the trading floor nearly complete and works of art in progress for the Luncheon Club, the roaring bull market came to a screeching top left The reception area on the tenth floor of what is now the City Club. The staircase railings feature a man at work and a man at play. above The tenth-floor lounge area featured cream-colored parchment walls and a huge custom-designed black marble table.

top right Bas-reliefs on California travertine in a sitting area on the tenth floor. Swimmers

by Clifford Wight is on the left. opposite October 28, 1929, the day before the stock market crashed, Gabriel Moulin took this construction photo as the Stock Exchange neared completion.

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ART DECO SAN FRANCISCO

above Ralph Stackpole’s granite sculptures flank the Tuscan colonnade of the former San Francisco Stock Exchange. opposite The center panel of Diego Rivera’s 1931 mural, The Making of a Fresco, for the California School of Fine Arts depicts Timothy Pflueger (left) and Arthur Brown Jr. (right) conferring with Bill Gerstle (center) over plans.

a large female figure wearing a thick gold necklace. One massive hand reveals the earth’s riches while the other displays the bounties of the Golden State. She is surrounded by scenes depicting well-known inventors and business leaders and symbols of emerging industries in California, such as aerospace and petroleum.

“The committee of the Stock Exchange, however, objected when they saw that my portrait was to be in the fresco,” Wills Moody wrote. “They said they didn’t want any living person in it, whether or not I could be said, as Rivera claimed, to be a person typical of California.”48 Asked to disguise Wills Moody, Rivera darkened her hair, broadened her eyes, changed the corners of her mouth, and angled her jawline. 49 After the tiff over Wills Moody ended, the thirty-foot-high mural was well received. The club had a luncheon with Rivera as guest of honor. California Arts and Architecture called it the pièce de résistance of the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club. “The fresco is like a superb tapestry; its rich and glowing color scheme is attuned to the warm yellow of the California travertine walls which frame it.”50 The Stock

Exchange commission lead to three more commissions for Rivera in California, including a mural at the California School of Fine Arts, which was managed by the San Francisco Art Association. Rivera’s The Making of a Fresco included Gerstle, Pflueger, and Arthur Brown Jr., the architect of the school’s Spanish Colonial building, standing together looking over plans.

The final artwork for the Stock Exchange was completed by the end of 1932. After ten months of tough work, wearing goggles and a mask as he chiseled the massive fifteen-ton pieces of gray Yosemite granite, Stackpole put the finishing touches on two additional statuary groups. 51 The twenty-foot-high sculptures, placed on pylons on either side of the Pine Street colonnade, served as monuments to modern art. The male and female figures are both Rivera-esque, with large features and primitive faces. On New Year’s Eve of 1932, Stackpole, Pflueger, Mayor Angelo Rossi, and local artists dressed in smocks and berets braved chilly evening winds to take part in the festivities to unveil the sculptures. 52 The Stock Exchange as an institution evolved over many years. In 1957 it became the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange through a merger with the Los Angeles Stock Exchange.

With the advent of electronic trading, it moved to much smaller quarters south of Market, and after its acquisition by Archipelago, it merged with the New York Stock Exchange. The trading f loor, where brokers once scurried amid a cacophony of sounds and a flurry of paper, is now a gym where finance industry workers run on stationary treadmills to blow off steam under the metallic fin ceiling. The modern yet Neoclassic building with its enduring works of art is a testament of hope in the future, in humankind, and in progress.

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