The Grand Nave - A Ferry Terminal Reborn

The Grand Nave - A Ferry Terminal Reborn

Photo: Daniel Lu (User:dllu), CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.

Step inside and look up. The long skylit hall that runs the length of the building was the upper concourse for ferry passengers, who poured through by the tens of thousands each day before the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1936 and 1937. Architect A. Page Brown designed the building in the Beaux-Arts style, and it opened in 1898 on the site of an older wooden depot.

Once the bridges opened, ferry traffic collapsed, and in the 1950s the grand hall was carved up into offices. A restoration finished in 2003 tore out the partitions and brought back the open nave and its steel trusses, with a public marketplace on the ground floor. Ferries never stopped entirely, and today commuter boats again leave from the docks behind the building.

Walk through to the back and look across the water toward Oakland: that view of the bay is the reason the city grew up here.

More on Wikipedia: San Francisco Ferry Building · A. Page Brown

Stops on this tour

  1. Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
  2. Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
  3. Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
  4. North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
  5. Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
  6. Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
  7. The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
  8. Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
  9. Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
  10. Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
  11. The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
  12. The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
  13. Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
  14. South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom