Demolished Wards Mail Order Complex in Oakland CA

Montgomery Ward and Company, Oakland California

Date added: January 11, 2024 Categories:

Montgomery Ward & Company was founded in Chicago in 1872. Eventually, it became the largest mail order company in the nation. In 1913, the company established its first warehouse on the West Coast in Portland, Oregon. The Oakland plant was created ten years later to save "from three to five days time filling orders. Oakland's excellent rail and road connections made deliveries of farm equipment and household goods to the rural and small-town markets of the western states available on short notice. The Oakland distribution center operated in parallel with the Portland and Dallas plants to serve the western United States for over sixty years.

Aaron Montgomery Ward, founder of Montgomery Ward & Company, was born in February 1843 in Chatham, New Jersey. As a child, he moved with his parents to Miles, Michigan, where his father established a cobbler's shop. Aaron attended public school and at the age of 14 became a cobbler's apprentice. He looked for other ways to make a living and after factory work and brick yard labor found a job as a shoe clerk. Retail appealed to him and in 1862 he moved to St. Joseph, Michigan, where he worked as a clerk in a general store. After three years he was promoted to manager. He moved on to Chicago to better his opportunities and worked as a clerk in Marshall Fields department store for two years. Then he worked as a traveling salesman for a dry goods wholesaler.

Ward developed an idea for a mail-order catalog while he was traveling about in the rural Midwest. Limited goods were available in limited quantities in each location. He concluded that the system for delivering goods was outdated and conceived of the idea of consumers selecting goods from a catalog and ordering from a centrally located store, which could deal in huge volumes and keep prices reasonable.

After several setbacks in starting a business, he started Montgomery Ward & Company with two partners in a small rented room in Chicago, in 1872. His one-page catalog listed 163 items and was advertised in farm periodicals.

Although the first year of business was slow, the 1874 catalog sold $100,000 worth of merchandise. The catalog was bound and included 24 pages. Farmers were the primary customers for many years. However, good, quality merchandise made for satisfied customers and increased business to the extent that Ward became the largest mail order company in the nation during Aaron Ward's lifetime.

Montgomery Ward & Company established its first warehouse on the West Coast in July 1913 in Portland, Oregon, it expanded in 1919. Before this, customers ordered merchandise from the Chicago store. The Portland warehouse served customers in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California, Alaska and Hawaii. It featured only catalog sales and no retail.

The Oakland Montgomery Ward plant was created to save "from three to five days time in filling orders, and will also greatly reduce transportation charges" (Oakland Tribune, June 12^th, 1923). Ward promised Oakland jobs for several hundred: people, an increase in postal revenues, a retail store for the convenience of the people of Oakland and vicinity, and business for local manufacturers, following its policy of buying as much of its mail-order goods as possible from local manufacturers. Ward announced that "They are interested in locating manufacturers in Oakland, who make similar items to those which they catalog, but who have the equipment and the surplus capacity to make items which they could buy", including practically all lines of household, farm necessities and wearing apparel." The Montgomery Ward catalog sales and distribution center in Oakland operated in parallel with the Portland and Dallas plants to serve the people of the western US for over sixty years. No other company handled such diverse merchandise and made it available to people so quickly. The location in Oakland where roads and rail and water transport formed a western transportation hub was indeed intentional. The rail and road connections to the site made deliveries of farm equipment and household goods to the rural and small town market in the western states available on short notice. Shortly, MW came to mean "Made in the West".

Montgomery Ward was the first catalog sales and distribution center and retail store of its kind and size to be located in Oakland. The store opened in 1923 to great fanfare; the 1924 and 1926 buildings expanded both the warehouse and the retail store. Many items were stored on site and could be delivered in minutes by employees on roller skates and series of corkscrew chutes to the order desk below.

In 1930, Sears Roebuck, a catalog sales competitor at the national level, opened a fashionable Oakland store. It did not include distribution and warehousing.

The 1964 parking structure was added to the Oakland Ward store as part of a "multi-million dollar expansion" (Tribune, January 12^th, 1964), aimed at customers who were being lured to suburban shopping centers. While the Montgomery Ward catalog and distribution center served the people of the West for sixty years, the retail department store served the people of Oakland and the Bay Area for almost as long. Hundreds of people also were employed by Wards for many years and still live nearby.

The Ward retail store closed in 1980 and the Mail order distribution facility closed in 1985. The Ward Building has been vacant ever since and the garage was demolished in 1996. The City of Oakland and Montgomery Ward entered, into an agreement to demolish the building and jointly build a shopping center. The Negative Declaration on the proposed demolition was appealed by Oakland Heritage Alliance, a Citywide non-profit organization of over 1,000 members. When the appeal was overruled by the Planning Commission, the League for Protection of Oakland's Architectural and Historic Resources filed a Writ of Mandamus and eventually prevailed in the State Court of Appeals. The Court ordered the City to prepare an Environmental Impact Report (EIR).

The City, however, recently entered into an exclusive negotiating agreement with the Oakland School District to take steps to seek funding to demolish the building and build a middle school on the site. The League has just filed a second lawsuit against the City to ensure that alternatives to demolition are investigated under an EIR prior to making any decision to demolish the building. The League has identified an interested developer who would like to restore the building and reuse it for mixed commercial, residential and live/work uses.

The entire complex was demolished in 2001.

Mail Order Merchandising and its Cultural Impact

After the Civil War, several factors combined to open the way for the growth of catalog sales as a major force in American retailing. The country was experiencing a population explosion, both through high birth rates and immigration. The farm belt saw its population grow dramatically. Technology exploded as well, both in agriculture and in other areas of American life. (Most of the new farm machinery and many of the other new inventions were first sold by mail order.) The proliferation of railroad routes during this time, with the rise of Chicago as the hub of rural railroad lines, had a major effect as did the introduction of rural free mail delivery. In addition, the cost of manufacturing paper declined, making it possible to print catalogs much more cheaply than ever before. Literacy rates were on the rise.

Into this environment stepped Aaron Montgomery Ward, who began his mail-order business in 1872. Ward was certainly not the first mail-order merchant, but his plans for a new business set him apart from his predecessors. Ward planned to market almost exclusively to farmers, to eliminate the middleman by buying directly from manufacturers or manufacturing items himself, and selling directly to customers. He would sell for cash, operate out of Chicago exclusively, offer a huge variety of goods, and use railway express to ship products to the station nearest the customer.

Ward saw the farmer as a second-class citizen when it came to commerce. He believed the farmer should have every opportunity to purchase everything the city dweller could and be assured of quality as well. An admiring biographer explained Ward's vision: "Aaron Ward saw himself and the firm of Montgomery Ward not as a salesman or selling organization but as servants of farmers. The job was not to sell so much as to find out what was needed....The idea was to educate the farmer to the latest improvements..." (Hoge, First One Hundred Years, p. 15).

Gaining the farmer's trust was all-important, since sending money to a merchant one could not see required an act of faith. Many were already skeptical of peddlers and merchants who promised one thing but delivered quite another. Ward was fortunate in making an alliance with the National Grange organization of farmers whose membership totaled almost a million in the 1870s. As one of their precepts, the Grangers called for the elimination of the middleman wherever possible. Ward saw the organization as a natural ally and was able to receive their endorsement. He spoke often at Grange meetings and explained the concept of his catalog sales. He became the purchasing agent for the Illinois Grange and the company thereafter referred to itself as "The Original Grange Supply House."

While the first "catalog" produced in 1872 had only one page, Ward's first bound catalog came out in 1874. It was only 3" by 5" and had only 32 pages. By fall of 1875 the catalog had 152 pages and advertised almost 4,000 items. Ward recalled that the new venture was regarded very skeptically. "Our business was looked upon with suspicion by those whom we wished as customers. It was ridiculed by retail merchants, doubted by manufacturers and predicated a short life by all." (Quoted in Mahoney and Sloan, The Great Merchants, p. 12) But the skeptics were proven wrong. By 1878 the company was doing $400,000 worth of business. (Its most popular selling item was the sewing machine.) The catalog grew and improved. By the 1880s almost every item was accompanied by a wood-cut illustration. (The first illustration had been of the "Granger hat.") The catalog of 1884 had 240 pages and nearly ten thousand items for sale.

Even after the company was a success, Ward and his partner George Thorne took pains to maintain a personal relationship with their farmer customers. Many of them would write to the firm, asking for advice or assistance, for the name of a good lawyer, or to propose to one of the models illustrated in the "Big Book." Their letters would be answered, often in a way that would help promote further sales. One farmer asked to be sent "a good wife. She must be a good housekeeper and able to do all household duty." (Quoted in Boorstin, The Americans, p. 124) The farmer was advised not to select a wife through mail-order, but "after you get the wife and you find that she needs some wearing apparel or household goods, we feel sure we could serve both you and her to good advantage." Another man wrote that he hadn't ordered anything for a while because he had been kicked by a cow, his wife had been sick, and the couple had just had a new baby boy. The letter was answered: "Condolences on the broken arm, congratulations on the baby, and had the farmer noticed the anti-cow-kicking device advertised in the catalog?"

Ward's business was already a big success when another entrepreneur, Richard Warren Sears, entered the business. While Ward had built a reputation on quality and a good price, Sears pitched his appeal to the less affluent farmers and offered them merchandise at rock-bottom prices. Moving from Minnesota to Chicago in 1887 he became partners with a young watchmaker named Alvah Curtis Roebuck. Originally selling only watches through the mail, by the early 1890s, they were offering a huge variety of merchandise. More aggressive and less conservative than Wards, the new business quickly grew to rival the older company. By 1907 it had annual sales of more than fifty-three million dollars. Yet even as it grew, Sears also took pains to maintain a personal relationship with its customers, answering their many letters with hand-written responses.

While the two firms competed aggressively, the early years of the twentieth century provided enough opportunities in mail-order merchandising to allow them both to thrive. The two companies dominated the field, and their catalogs became a staple in American culture. Daniel Boorstin has noted:

It was not merely facetious to say that many farmers came to live more intimately with the good Big Book of Ward's or Sears, Roebuck than with the Good Book... For many … families the catalog probably expressed their most vivid hopes for salvation … Just as, three centuries before, New England schoolchildren had learned the path to salvation along with their ABC's and had learned how to read at the same time that they learned the tenets of their community, so farm children now learned from the new Bible of their consumption community. In rural schoolhouses, children were drilled in reading and spelling from the catalog. They practiced arithmetic by filling out orders and adding up items. They tried their hand at drawing by copying the catalog models, and acquired geography by studying the postal-zone maps. In schoolrooms that had no other encyclopedia, a Ward" or Sears" catalog handily served the purpose; it was illustrated, it told you what something was made of and what it was good for, how long it would last, and even what it cost. Many a mother in a household with few children" books pacified her child with the pictures in the catalog. When the new book arrived, the pictures in the old catalog were indelibly fixed in the memory of girls who cut them up for paper dolls. Just as Puritan children were supposed to think of their Bible as an exhaustive catalog of the "types" which provided the pattern for all the actual happenings of the world, so the children of rural America thought of the big books from Sears and Wards as exhaustive catalogues of the material world. (The Americans, p. 129).

Essential to the explosion of the mail-order business in the early twentieth century was the dramatic improvement of mail delivery to rural patrons. Since 1863, people living in urban areas could receive their mail directly at their home address. But few towns were large enough to qualify for the service. In 1887 the population of a town must have reached 10,000 people in order to have free home delivery. At that time seventy-five percent of the American population had to retrieve their mail at the post office. Interestingly, the local postmaster often combined that occupation with that of merchant, so that there was often a divided loyalty in terms of the promotion of free home delivery. Farmers going to town to pick up their mail would buy supplies at the same time. Understandably these rural postmasters were not inclined to support free home delivery and the fight for extending the service was a long one. The National Grange officially endorsed the concept in 1891 and rural reformers such as Tom Watson of Georgia made it a rallying cry. In 1898 the Post Office provided for a program that would allow groups of farmers to petition their congressman for the service, and by 1906 an infrastructure of routes and agents was in place.

According to Daniel Boorstin, "This was the least heralded and in some ways the most important communications revolution in American history. Now for the first time it was normal for every person in the United States to be accessible by cheap public communication. For the rural American (more than half the nation's population by the census of 1910), the change was crucial. Now he was lifted out of the narrow community of those he saw and knew, and put in continual touch with a larger world of persons and events and things read about but unheard and unseen. RFD (rural free delivery) made these everywhere communities possible." (p. 132-133)

Another innovation that spurred the growth of catalog sales was the introduction of parcel post. Before 1913, the maximum weight for a package shipped through the U.S. mail was four pounds. If a package weighed more than that it had to be shipped through the more expensive express companies such as Wells, Fargo and American Express, or it had to be divided up into smaller packages. The introduction of U.S. parcel post in that year allowed large packages to be sent cheaply and resulted in an explosion of packages going through the mail, with three hundred million sent during the first year after enactment. While ostensibly the argument for parcel post was to enable the farmer to better send his crops to the city, the real impact was in reverse, with the farmers receiving more and more goods from the city. Montgomery Wards and Sears Roebuck were the beneficiaries of these developments. In the initial year of parcel post, Sears' sales increased 500% and Wards experienced a boost almost as great. Over the next decade, mail-order sales increased steadily with a high point reached in 1926. In that year Wards had 8,500,000 catalog customers.

It was within this context that Montgomery Wards began to expand its facilities. In 1913 it opened its first West Coast warehouse in Portland, Oregon. Previously customers could only receive goods from Chicago. With trade continuing to increase, though, additional distribution facilities were needed. It was at this point, close to the national pinnacle of mail-order sales, that the Oakland Montgomery Wards was built. It represented a need for major regional warehousing and distribution facilities, located at Oakland, one of the state's most important railroad and shipping hubs.

Interestingly, the building also reveals some changes on the horizon in the field of retailing. While catalog sales continued to be an important part of the company's business for many years, at least one of Wards' executives recognized that American life was changing and that the automobile was likely to transform the way Americans shopped. Wards helped to hasten the change by selling all manner of automobile parts, including its own brand of tires. General Robert E. Wood, who would later leave Wards to become head of Sears, had a vision of a new type of store for the company in the 1920s. He felt that retail stores would gradually become much more important in the company's business and would at some point take over prominence in it. The store that Wood projected would be larger than the usual department store and would make its appeal to men rather than women. Hardware, auto and radio supplies and home improvement products would be the mainstays of the new stores. They would be built on the outskirts of cities, not in more expensive downtowns, and they would be geared to working-class customers. While Montgomery Ward had for many years resisted the idea of any retail outlets, in the mid-1920s it made its earliest foray into the field. The Oakland retail store was one of the company's first.

The Oakland Wards Building is important because of what it reflects about the economic and cultural history of the United States. Through its major role in the distribution of catalog advertised merchandise throughout the Western United States it is associated with the transformation of America's consumption patterns and the creation of a national base for consumer identification. It was associated with the Montgomery Ward Company at a time when that firm had a large role in that transformation. Aaron Ward had made Montgomery Ward the most widely recognized national brand of the time. The company advertised more widely and effectively and distributed products more efficiently than anyone had ever done before.

The building also reflects the changes that the automobile would make in the history of commerce. The store operation, located outside the downtown, was one of the first opened by the company. It was emblematic of the growing prominence of the newly mobile consumer, much more likely to visit a retail store, even one located outside the downtown area, than to order from a catalog.

In 1985, the company closed its catalog business after 113 years and began an aggressive policy of renovating its remaining stores. It restructured many of the store layouts in the downtown areas of larger cities and affluent neighborhoods into boutique-like specialty stores, as these were drawing business from traditional department stores. In 1988, the company management undertook a successful $3.8 billion leveraged buyout, making Montgomery Ward a privately held company.

By the 1990s even its rivals began to lose ground to low-price competition from the likes of Target and Walmart, which eroded even more of Montgomery Ward's traditional customer base. In 1997, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, emerging from protection by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois in August 1999 as a wholly owned subsidiary of GE Capital, which was by then its largest shareholder. As part of a last-ditch effort to remain competitive, the company closed over 100 retail locations in 30 U.S. states, abandoned the specialty store strategy, rebranded the chain as simply Wards, and spent millions of dollars to renovate its remaining outlets to be flashier and more consumer-friendly. GE Capital reneged on promises of further financial support of Montgomery Ward's restructuring plans.

On December 28^th, 2000, after lower-than-expected sales during the Christmas season, the company announced it would cease operating, close its remaining 250 retail outlets, and lay off its 37,000 employees.

Building Description

The Montgomery Ward Building, Oakland's largest and tallest industrial building, is a complex comprised of four reinforced concrete buildings that abut one another other and are internally connected. Its eight stories stack 910,000 square feet of floor area. into an architecturally impressive arcaded Art Deco industrial structure on the Oakland skyline, visible from downtown, the surrounding neighborhoods and cities, the Oakland Hills neighborhoods, State Route 880, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Fremont line and from across San Francisco Bay. It occupies an eight-acre parcel of the Flatlands, equivalent to three blocks of the adjacent pattern. Three of the buildings that comprise the Ward Building were constructed in rapid succession in 1923, 1924, and 1926 in the same arcaded style in an L-plan by Architect, W.H. McCaully. In the early years, a landscaped plaza featuring palm trees and other mature trees, including a sequoia and a pepper tree that remained from the Augustus B. Derby Estate Company, served as the entry to the retail store located on the first and second floors of the Building. A row of 24-inch elms lined 29^th Avenue between E. 14^th and E. 12^th Streets. The fourth building was added in 1959 in a more modern version clearly designed to blend in but not necessarily become one with the other three buildings. In 1964 a four-level garage structure was added on the west one-third of the site; the street entry plaza was filled in and storefronts were covered over in an attempt at modernization to capture suburban clients. In 1996, the parking structure was demolished; huge piles of rubble remain on the portion of the site occupied by the garage. There is no longer any landscaping on the site although street trees soften the interface with the sidewalk. The complex' huge concrete mass, lightened by fenestration and distinctive arcaded industrial towers and bays, is familiar to all Bay Areans as they pass by it regularly on the freeway and BART.

The Montgomery Ward Building occupies a nearly rectangular lot with frontages of 792 feet along East 14^th Street (recently renamed International Boulevard) and East 12^th Street, on the northeast and southwest respectively. The southeasterly 29^th Avenue frontage measures 400 feet. The first lot purchased, at the southeast end of the current property, was part of one of east Oakland's last country estates, occupied by a large single-family home with a ring driveway. By 1911, it was listed as owned by the Derby Estate Company. The northwest portion of the Ward property was held by an Emma Wellman until 1920. By 1923, all of the property was owned by the Magnavox Company, who sold it to Montgomery Ward in numerous incremental parcels. The northwesterly property boundary abuts the St. Joseph Professional Center property, a rehabilitated compound of buildings of the Sisters of the Poor orphanage.

The immediate vicinity to the south and west of the Ward Building is heavy commercial and light industrial, mostly of a low-rise nature. The elevated Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) line passes by the site immediately to the southwest and the Fruitvale BART station is located four blocks to the southeast. Highway 880 parallels the BART tracks several hundred feet further south. To the southeast, there is a narrow buffer of commercial and low-density Housing between the Ward Building and the BART station. To the north there are small neighborhoods serving stores and restaurants that front on East 14^th Street and serve the immediately adjacent residential neighborhoods of Fruitvale and San Antonio.

The Ward Building is Oakland's largest industrial building and a rare example of a mammoth industrial building that interfaces closely with an urban single-family residential neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay area. Its three corner towers, arcaded bays and large expansive steel sash are prominently visible on the skyline from points far and near in every direction.

The 910,000 square foot Montgomery Ward Building includes three eight-story (119 foot-high) reinforced concrete buildings designed by architect W.H. McCaully, Ward's company engineer, and built by Wells Bros., in 1923, 1924 and 1926; and a fourth building added in 1959 mimics the bays but does not include towers or the fine details of the architecture of the first three buildings. The three eight-story buildings adjoin each other in an L-plan with generous setbacks along E. 14^th Street and 29^th Avenue; they appear as a single huge building. The four-story fourth building, built in 1959, adjoins and fills in the L along East 12^th Street.

The 1923 building is set back 60 feet from East 14^th Street and 80 feet from 29^th Avenue. The setback was intended to "permit the most advantageous landscaping of the grounds, on which are many beautiful trees that will be preserved" ("Bolts and Nuts", June 7^th, 1923). It was also set back to make available the "most favorable lighting conditions" ("Bolts and Nuts"). It measures 144 feet along East 14^th Street by 184 feet deep and features seven window bays along East 14^th Street. A corner tower at the northeast corner adds a ninth story.

The 1924 building adjoins the 1923 building at its full 144-foot width and extends its length an additional 184 feet along 29^th Avenue. Together with the 1923 building, there are 17 window bays along 29^th Avenue. A corner tower at the southeast corner adds a ninth story and a lesser tower element marks the juncture of the two buildings.

The 1926 building adjoins the 1923 building and extends the East 14^th Street frontage 200 feet westerly. It added 11 window bays along East 14^th Street and three to fill the turn from the setback of the 1923 building. It is flush to the sidewalk, forming a minor L along the northeast facade, which was once an entry plaza. The building depth of 85 feet created the L around the then-vacant southwest corner.

The 1959 building, 200 feet by 300 feet, filled in the L formed by the other three buildings and adjoins all three. While the building features similar window bays that blend in with the original buildings from a distance, there is no arcade or art deco detailing on this building. It filled an area that then contained a railroad spur, small warehouses and loading docks, used as railroad receiving and warehouse access.

A four-level parking garage, on the west third of the site, built in 1964, was demolished in 1996 by the City of Oakland during a court challenge of the Negative Declaration issued on a proposed demolition of the Ward Building. Debris from the demolished garage is mounded on the west side of the site where the garage once stood.

The original three buildings are altered by a single addition, also constructed in 1964, on the northeast corner. This addition filled in the setback on the 1923 building along East 14^th Street giving that frontage a suburban storefront look and eliminating the original store bulkheads and entry plaza.

The exterior surface of the facades of the buildings is a series of bays, extending the full eight-story height of the Building. Each bay is filled with a wide expanse of industrial sash separated by spandrels between stories. The first, second, third and eighth floors are taller that the fourth through seventh floors. The window area at the top of each bay and the three corner towers is segmentally arched giving the building an arcaded appearance.

The parapet/cornice, concrete piers, and spandrels are smooth surfaced reinforced concrete, with minimal stylized Art Deco "necktie emblems" and geometric ornament, providing what has been called Arts and Craft detail at the top of the building and the first-floor string course. Each corner tower's parapet is curved like an overturned soup dish atop a segmental arch filled with vertical-bar tracery.

No remnant remains of the 1923 entry to the building, which included four doors with a single transom. It was located in the first bay on East 14^th Street nearest to 29^th Avenue. It featured a segmental-arched lintel similar to those of the top-floor windows. Above the first floor spandrel, was a similar arch filled with the same vertical-bar tracery.

A similar doorway exists at the northwest corner of the Ward building in the 1926 building. The door itself-has been replaced but the original segmentally arched transom 'remains in slightly damaged condition.

The tar and gravel roof is flat with a slight curve for drainage. Lt is accessible from the towers and magnificent views abound.

Broken window glass, a paint scheme that painted the spandrels and windows a dark brown (distorting the strong grid formed by the concrete pilasters and spandrels), the insensitive 1964 modern storefront and the almost compatible 1959 addition are all that mar the exterior.

The interior of the Building has been cleared of all partitions, since the vacation of the Building by Montgomery Ward. Shelving and corridors between shelving have all been removed. All that remains of a six-foot-diameter package chute that once connected the floors, is the holes through each floor. The basic appearance of the interior is wide expanses of floor and supporting structural columns of reinforced concrete, placed on 20-foot centers. These are identical in all four buildings. They are three-foot-diameter mushroom columns cylindrical with wide-flaring capitals and no ornament. Only on the eighth floor do the columns change to 22-inch diameters.

The historic floor plans show no partitions. The first-floor entry lobbies were located at the northeast corner (1923 building) and northwest corner (1926 building). The major portion of the first floor was originally used for receiving goods and mail order. Retail was located at the second floor, in 1957, the retail portion expanded to the first floor. Above the retail floors were the mail order operations, warehousing, and some offices. Sanborn maps of the 1930's and 1951 identify "Retail Store 2^nd, Warehouse Above, Offices 4th" in the 1923 and 1924 buildings. The 1926 building is identified similarly with "Employees Cafeteria 4th".

Elevator structures, each serving two large freight elevators, are located at the centers of the northwest Sides of the 1923 and 1924 buildings. The single freight elevator for the 1926 structure is located at the center of its southwest elevation. A passenger elevator, with hollow clay tile enclosure, is located at the north corner of the 1926 building. Stairwells are located in the corner towers of the 1926 building.

The openings between the different buildings are marked by square columns rather than cylindrical ones, and these openings can be closed by fire doors. The fire doors on the 1923 building are pulley-operated sliding doors on a diagonal track, made of galvanized steel. On the 1924 building, the doors are steel roll-up doors. In addition, an extra girder reinforces the connection between the 1926 and 1923 buildings.

A basement is located under portions of the 1923 and 1926 buildings. For many years it was not accessible because of the need for asbestos abatement. All asbestos was removed in 1996-7.

A staircase at the north corner of the 1926 building (East 14^th Street side, on the entrants' left) was intended for general public use. Its treads and risers are tan terrazzo and the adjoining entry floor is 4"x 4" quarry tile. The stair stringers are dark grey, black and green terrazzo. The handrail is molded oak. The balusters are cast iron ellipses with foliate ornament in the center. Newel posts are square in section, with side panels and a nob on top.

All other staircases were for emergency and staff use only. Their walls are simple plaster over reinforced concrete or hollow clay tile. The hollow clay tile sustained minor damage in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. The railings are simple unadorned metal tubes fastened to the walls. The staircases are enclosed with hollow-core corrugated and galvanized steel doors.

An incinerator chute is located at the south corner of the 1926 building and is constructed of brick and enclosed by a three-foot-high hollow-core corrugated and galvanized steel doors on diagonal tracks.

Flooring is concrete slab throughout. Nine-by-nine-inch tiles covered some or all of the floors. The north lobby features 4"x 4" quarry tile.

No wall or ceiling finishes remain. Photos show that some drop ceilings had been in place on some floors.

Windows bring a great deal of natural lighting into the building. The pivoting windows allow one-third of the surface of the windows to open. No interior window trim is noted. The 1964 storefront addition has been covered over with plywood to protect the window glass.

The north lobby retains traces of its original beamed ceiling with egg-and-dart cornice, fluted pilaster, and egg-and-dart-variant capital. Its oak and cast iron stair balustrade and scored plaster walls are intact.

All hardware is utilitarian and not notable. The sliding fire door mechanical systems are, however, illustrative of mechanical history. The foundation is concrete and is not visible from the exterior or the interior.