According to anycountyprivateschools.com, the city center of San Francisco, California is made up of a monumental group of modern buildings. The Town Hall, designed by architects Bakewell and Brown, is the tallest building in the group. It is a baroque building with a beautiful 92m high dome. and a central pavilion flanked by a Doric colonnade resting on a high base. To the west of City Hall, on the opposite side of Van Ness Avenue, which here leads obliquely into Market Street, are the Opera House, the first building built for this purpose in the United States, and the War Memorial Building (1930), which houses a permanent collection of war memories. Town Hall Square to the east of the Town Hall itself is surrounded by beautiful buildings, including the Municipal Auditorium, the State Building and the Library, designed in the Italian Renaissance style by George W. Kelham.
In the northeastern part of San Francisco is the business district. Seen from above, this part resembles a forest of skyscrapers, the most beautiful of which is the 26-story Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Building. The 28-story skyscraper known as Methodist Temple is a building whose lower floor serves as a church, the upper as a hotel. The Stock Exchange Club is known for the munali paintings by Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Another important commercial building is the Hallidie Building, designed by Wills Polk and constructed of metal and glass. The towers of the business district tower over the pagoda roofs of the Chinese city, now limited to a few blocks in the vicinity of Grant Avenue and Stockton Street, largely destroyed by the 1906 fire. North of the Chinese quarter is Portsmouth Square. originally the Plaza, a part of the old Yerba Buena village. A little further north is the picturesque Latin Quarter, which includes the Mexican, Spanish and Italian districts. Immediately north of the Italian quarter stands Telegraph Hill with a grove of eucalyptus trees and a beautiful esplanade overlooking the Golden Gate.
The northernmost point of the peninsula is occupied by an important military reserved enclosure, called the garrison, which preserves traces of the first buildings built by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza when he placed the first garrison there in 1776.
Immediately after the northeastern edge of the garrison stands the California Palace of Fine Arts, which houses some fine works from the Barbizon school. This building, restored to its present purpose in 1932, is one of the leftovers from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, whose buildings, although most of them were not permanent, marked an important epoch in exhibition architecture (architect Edward H. Bennett).
The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, a copy of the Palace of Paris, houses a collection of tapestries, paintings and sculptures and is located west of the Presidio in Lincoln Park.
San Francisco has more than 40 parks, of which the finest and most noteworthy, Golden Gate Park, spans a vast rectangular stretch west from Stanyan Street to the Pacific. A Scottish landscape painter, John McLaren, started this park with extraordinary talent and good taste on what was a desolate expanse of sand dunes 50 years ago. Now two gigantic windmills with arms 34 meters long irrigate the earth. One of the most enchanting places in the park is the Japanese tea garden. In the Park are the Temple of Music, the Academy of Science Museum, the Steinhart Aquarium, the excellent Anthropological Museum with a fine collection of Egyptian models and the MH De Young Memorial Museum (1917) with no less than 55 collections of antiquities, glassware, ceramics, weapons, paintings and sculptures. Kezar Stadium in the southern corner of the Park has a seating capacity of 100,000. There are also the monument to Goethe and Schiller, modeled after that of Weimar, the statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza kneeling before the portrait of Cervantes, executed by JJ Mora, the bronzes of Burns and Beethoven, the bust with Verdi’s epigraph and the beautiful Baroque statue of Father Jampero Serra, superior of the Franciscans of Baia California and head of the missionary enterprise of the north, works of Douglas Tilden, of which San Francisco has other monuments, especially the Ball Player and the Mechanical Fountain.
South of Golden Gate Park are the Sutro Forest, the fields of the colleges of law and medicine affiliated with the University of California, and some residential neighborhoods set up in parkland.
The city has preserved only two monuments from its historical past. Beyond the commander’s house in the garrison, there is only the ancient mission of St. Francis of Assisi, often called the Dolores Mission (1776), from its position on the Arroyo de Dolores, discovered on a Passion Friday. The shape of the building of the century. XVIII has been preserved by modern restorers, but the appearance is marred by an awkward roof, made necessary by the humidity of the climate.
Although the Dolores mission is the only ecclesiastical foundation of historical importance in the city precinct, there are remains of others in the surrounding area. At the southern end of the bay was Santa Clara, designed by Father Murguía in 1784, which is said to have been the finest building of its time in California. The church museum contains candlesticks, paintings, choirs, vestments and crucifixes. The secular buildings now house the university of santa Clara, which also has an architecture course. Opposite the southern end of the bay is part of the San José de Guadalupe mission, and across the bay remain the remnants of San Francisco Solano’s brick facade. They are part of a chain of ecclesiastical foundations,
In the surroundings of the city there are also the building groups of several universities and high schools (see below).
