National Register of Historic Places
Federal Office Building
San Francisco, San Francisco County, California
The record
- Listed
- June 8, 2017
- Type
- Building
- Address
- 50 United Nations Plaza, San Francisco
- County
- San Francisco
- State
- California
- Contributing resources
- 1 building
- Coordinates
- 37.78043, -122.41446
- Reference number
- 100001018
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.
David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesDavid Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries
The story
Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com
The Federal Office Building is a Beaux Arts office building at 50 United Nations Plaza in San Francisco, designed by architects Arthur Brown, Jr., and John Bakewell, Jr., and built from 1933 to 1936.
Why it's listed
It was listed under criteria A and C in 2017, with state-level significance in architecture and politics and government; its period of significance is 1936, the year it was completed.
Physical character
It has a steel frame on a concrete foundation, walls of terra cotta and granite, a zinc roof, and a colonnade of Doric columns on the south elevation. A 2013 renovation replaced the roof with standing-seam zinc and redesigned the courtyard, after earlier changes removed wood structures from the courtyard in the 1960s and added accessibility ramps at the main lobby in the 1980s.
Historical context
Federal agencies occupied the building from its completion in 1936 until it was vacated in 2007 for a new building at 90 7th Street; it reopened as GSA headquarters in 2013 after a renovation. In 1977 the building was the site of the Section 504 Sit-In, when activists demonstrated at buildings housing HEW offices; the ARC/AIDS Vigil began in front of it in 1985 and ended in 1995 after a storm.