The Galleria: From Industrial to Design Mecca
COUPAR's Galleria location affords us not only a catbird seat to everything happening in the design community but also a link to San Francisco's urban history. The San Francisco Design Center developed in the 1970s when the once industrial South of Market air smelled pungent with the acrid scent of commerce. A sweet aroma of white bread baking at Kilpatrick's factory mixed with the bitterness of coffee roasting at Hills Brothers. It was into this rough, blue-collar landscape of manufacturing, construction, and transport that visionary and developer Henry Adams built the Galleria.
Crocker-Langley San Francisco city directory (1920) Dunham Carrigan & Hayden Co. building
At the time, interior designers visited showrooms North of Market in historic Jackson Square and the waterfront area's Ice House. But with limited, costly parking in the former and the latter slated for office conversion, Adams saw potential in the vacant American Commercial style brick and timber warehouses and factories on desolate Kansas Street. He first purchased the Dunham Carrigan & Hayden Co. building, purveyors of hardware, and mining tools turning it into the Showplace.
The Rural Californian February 1906 with an article about Pacific Implement Co.
Down the street, two companion four-story warehouses designed by architects Meyers & Ward in 1906 flanked a smaller structure. Facing left, 101 Kansas Street, the John Hoey, and Co. building once housed a mattress factory while on the right, 131 Kansas Street's Pacific Implement Co. dealt in farm equipment. Adams hired the esteemed architectural firm of Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons to repurpose the buildings into an interior design showplace. A soaring glass-paned atrium with retractable skylight replaced the central structure to join the two edifices creating what is today known as the Galleria.
The elegant, dramatic space became not only a mecca for interior design but also a venue for events. Adams acted as a Pied Piper and showman, making the Galleria a destination. After he passed away in 1981 at the age of 61, the city renamed Showplace Square's two-block stretch of Kansas, Henry Adams Steet, in his honor
