Columbus Tower - The Green Flatiron
Photo: Joe Fu, CC BY-SA 3.0 (cropped)
A stop on San Francisco, District by District, a free self-guided tour.
The copper-green flatiron at Columbus Avenue and Kearny Street was going up when the 1906 earthquake struck, and it was finished in 1907, one of the first new buildings in the burned city. Its narrow wedge follows Columbus Avenue, a diagonal cut through the street grid in the 1870s as a shortcut from downtown to North Beach.
Its tenants read like a short history of the city. The top floor first held the offices of Abe Ruef, the political boss later convicted in the graft trials that followed the fire. In the early 1950s the hungry i nightclub got its start in the basement. The folk group the Kingston Trio bought the building in the late 1950s, and in 1972 filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope moved in; he restored its original name, the Sentinel Building.
Look up at the copper skin, turned green by a century of salt air.
More on Wikipedia: Columbus Tower · Abe Ruef · American Zoetrope
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