Transamerica Pyramid - The Site of Halleck's Folly
Photo: The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
The 853-foot pyramid, finished in 1972, is the skyline's signature, but its corner has an older story. From 1853 until 1959 it held the Montgomery Block, a four-story office building that Henry Halleck, a lawyer and later a Union general, built on a raft of redwood logs near the shoreline. Skeptics called it Halleck's Folly.
The folly outlasted its critics. It survived the earthquake and fire of 1906, and as the banks moved on, its cheap rooms filled with writers and artists; Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce and Jack London are among the names linked to it. Locals called it the Monkey Block. It was torn down in 1959 for a parking lot, despite protests from early preservationists.
Walk into the small grove of redwood trees beside the pyramid's east side, a quiet nod to the logs that once held up the old block.
More on Wikipedia: Transamerica Pyramid · Montgomery Block · Henry Halleck
Stops on this tour
- Ferry Building and the Embarcadero - Where the City Met the World
- Financial District and Jackson Square - Gold Rush on the Old Shoreline
- Chinatown - The Neighborhood That Refused to Move
- North Beach and Telegraph Hill - Little Italy and the Beats
- Fisherman's Wharf - Italian Boats and Old Ships
- Nob Hill and Russian Hill - Cable Cars, Mansions and the Great Fire
- The Presidio - Two Centuries Guarding the Golden Gate
- Japantown and the Fillmore - Two Communities, One Neighborhood
- Haight-Ashbury - From Victorian Suburb to Summer of Love
- Golden Gate Park - Sand Dunes Turned Into a Park
- The Castro - A Neighborhood That Became a Movement
- The Mission - Where San Francisco Began
- Civic Center - Domes, Charters and Protest
- South of Market - From Rincon Hill to the Tech Boom