Building Description & History City of Paris Dry Goods Company, San Francisco California
The building consisted of six stories and a basement. It had a frontage of 137'6" on both Stockton and Geary Street. The lower two floors were designed to be occupied by the City of Paris Dry Goods Company on lease. The upper four floors were partially occupied by the owners, the Spring Valley Water Company. There was also office space for rent on the upper floors, attested by the sign seen in the photograph of 1897. The whole structure was officially known as the Spring Valley Water Company Building.
The exact plan of the original building is not known. The lower floors may have occupied the entire property and the upper floors were in the shape of a hollow square around a light well. There were three entrances, one, the most elaborate architecturally, in the center of the Geary Street facade and two in the southern bay of the Stockton Street side. Historians have surmised that the Geary Street entrance was to the store and one or both of the Stockton Street entrances lead to the office building on the upper floors. However, the California Architect and Building News gives this brief description; "The building being of six stories in height, with frontages on both Geary and Stockton Streets, is very effectively viewed from Union Square. The main entrance is in the center of the Geary Street facade and leads the visitor through a finely tiled vestibule wainscotted with beautiful marbles to the rapidly running elevators whose ample service conducts to the commodious apartments on the upper floors of the building." If true, this leaves us with the unanswered question as to how access was gained to the Store.
The general features of the structure were masonry spread footings supporting steel columns, girders and beams. These supported concrete floor slabs and terra cotta ceiling blocks. There was an extensive diagonal bracing system buried in the concrete floor slabs. Exterior walls were of unreinforced brick of varying thickness. The masonry wall system was not a curtain wall in the modern sense of being supported by the steel frame. The walls supported themselves vertically by bearing on the basement footings and were intended to be supported at each floor by steel spandrel beams and by the floors. The materials of the exterior were given by the California Architect and Building News as follows: "The basement stories are of granite contrasting well with the buff brick and terra cotta finish of the upper part of the structure."
After the fire of 1906, the structure and facing of the two principal street facades and parts of the interior frame and structure remained substantially intact. The reconstruction process appears to have demolished unstable portions and to have replaced damaged structural parts as required to rehabilitate the original cube of the building.
The occupancy of the building changed at this time. The Dry Goods Store expanded into the first three floors, part of the fourth floor, and the basement; the upper floors were laid out as offices (which were leased out for the first years after reoccupancy). The Water Company vacated the building, and removed its name from the facades. From this time on, the building became known as the "City of Paris."
The shape of the light well below the fifth floor may have been altered and new columns supporting the edges installed. However, the general exterior appearance of the building, including the arrangements of entrances, remained mostly unaltered.
After some years, the offices on the upper two floors were no longer rented to the public. The City of Paris Dry Goods Company took over the whole building, demolished the office partitions on the fourth and fifth floors to install retail space and used the sixth floor for administrative space for the store management. The separate Stockton Street Lobby, installed in 1908-1909, and the elevators connecting it directly to the fourth, fifth and sixth floors were removed. A new show window was installed in the bay formerly occupied by the entrance to the Lobby. At some period before 1940, a metal-framed marquee over the Stockton Street store entrance, installed in 1909, was also removed.
The original bank of store elevators and the main stair at the rear center of the store were replaced circa 1931 by two new banks of two elevators each facing a new foyer. This arrangement was carried up through all six floors and one elevator was extended to the basement. On the first floor, a classically detailed columned screen separated the foyer from the main store. In connection with this alteration, the central portion of the mezzanine was removed, necessitating the construction of a new stair to reach the remaining east portion.
A standard exterior fire escape was installed on the Stockton Street facade from the roof to the second floor. The date of this addition is not known.
In 1973, the upper part of the terra cotta work on the building's main cornice was removed, leaving only the decorated frieze and dentil molding which was below it.
When the store expanded southward into an adjacent building in the 1920's, several openings were cut in the south wall of the building to connect the two parts of the store at all levels. These were blocked up again in 1972 during the occupancy of the building by the Liberty House store, which used the building from 1972 to 1974 as temporary quarters during the construction of its new building at Stockton and O'Farrell Streets. Finally, throughout its time of occupancy, minor alterations were continually made in response to changing merchandising needs. Notable among these were the development of the basement for a restaurant and retail sales space, changes in the arrangement of the show windows (which were divided into compartments in place of their original open sweep) and the deletion of a communicating stairs from the second to the sixth floor (it is reasonable to assume that the removal of this stair triggered the necessity for the addition of the fire escape noted above).
