Holidays Past: Celebrating the Season in San Francisco

Decorating the City of Paris Christmas tree, 1970. Photo: Jerry Telfer

Feeling a bit nostalgic, COUPAR looks back as the  Ghost of Christmas Past at how San Francisco celebrated the winter holidays. The City of Paris department store's forty-foot Christmas tree was one of its most beloved traditions. In 1850 French brothers Felix and Emil Verdier sailed to San Francisco in a ship named “La Ville de Paris” laden with champagne and cognac for California Gold Rush men and silks and lace for their wives and girlfriends. Initially, they sold their goods straight from the boat. 

By 1896 the City of Paris was located on Union Square in a Beaux-Arts building designed by architect Clinton Day. The structure's facade survived the 1906 earthquake and fires but destroyed the interiors. The Verdier family commissioned renowned architects John Bakewell and Arthur Brown, both graduates of the  École des Beaux-Arts, to reconstruct the City of Paris. While they made few exterior changes, they created a central elliptical rotunda surmounted by a stained-glass dome depicting the ship La Ville de Paris and the store's Latin motto Fluctuat nec mergitur, "It floats and never sinks." 

The Louis XVI style grillwork with an open view to all floors allowed space for the annual holiday tree, known as San Francisco's official Christmas tree. Sadly despite the City of Paris being listed on the National Register of Historic Places and as a California Historical Landmark, along with protests by preservationists, the store was demolished in 1981 to make way for the Dallas-based Neiman Marcus. Post-Modern architect Philip Johnson designed the new building, incorporating the original rotunda and stained glass skylight.

San Francisco's Union Square, Christmas, circa 1965. Photographer unknown.

In addition to the City of Paris, other magical stores of holidays past existed in downtown San Francisco.  I. Magnin Union Square was known as "the Marble Lady" for the ten-story white stone building that architect Timothy L. Pflueger designed in 1948. Its two-story main hall with Lalique light fixtures, gold ceilings, and glass murals showcased Christmas trees and decorations for the holidays.  

Florist Podesta Baldocchi on Grant Avenue with its distinctive tiled floor made famous in Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 film Vertigo was a San Francisco tradition. People would wait in line for hours to see their beautifully decorated trees and take home a unique ornament. But the favorite outing for children was the Emporium on Market Street with Santa on parade and rooftop rides.

Podesta & Baldocchi on Post and Sutter Streets, 1980. Photo: Arthur  Frisch