Is the Clock Tower of the San Francisco Ferry Building Based on the Bell Tower of a Cathedral in Spain?
IN CONNECTION with The Emperor Norton Trust’s recent proposal that the San Francisco Ferry Building’s clock tower be named “The Emperor Norton Tower” next year — the 125th anniversary of the Ferry Building — we’ve been doing some additional research into the design and construction of the building and its tower.
The Ferry Building opened in 1898, and one of the chestnuts that has been repeated about the building for most of its lifetime — increasingly so in the period after World War II — is the claim that the design of the clock tower is “based on” — or “modeled after” — or “patterned after” the 12th-century bell tower, known as La Giralda, of the Seville Cathedral in Spain.
Some commentators have gone so far as to say that the Ferry Building clock tower is a “replica” of the Giralda.
But, is it? Let’s start with a visual test. Here’s the clock tower of the Ferry Building;
San Francisco Ferry Building clock tower in 2020. Photograph © Ryan Fitzsimons
The Giralda originally was completed in 1198 as a minaret for the Grand Mosque of Seville. The mosque was converted to a cathedral in 1248. But, it wasn’t until 300 years later — between 1558 and 1568 — that the Renaissance belfry was added that has invited comparisons between the Giralda and the Ferry Building clock tower.
Here is the Giralda, as it appears today.
The Seville Cathedral in Spain, with La Giralda. Photograph © 2014 Ingo Mehling. CC BY–SA 4.0. Source: Wikipedia
And a closer look at the top:
Crown of La Giralda at Seville Cathedral, in Spain. Photograph © 2019 Joaquim Alves Gaspar. CC BY–SA 4.0. Source: Wikipedia
So, does the design of the Ferry Building clock tower owe anything to the Giralda — and, if so, how much?
Certainly, each is a tall square tower with a “wedding cake” crown that
has a columned section at the top of the main tower, and that
is topped, above the main tower, with a crown of four sections of diminishing size — two square sections at the bottom and two circular columned sections at the top.
But, the similarities more or less end there. The execution of the basic concept is quite different between the two towers.
Where the aesthetic and decorative expression of the Giralda is elaborately Moorish on the bottom and Renaissance on top, the Ferry Building tower is understatedly Beaux-Arts and neo-Classical throughout.
The proportions of the towers are very different. The crown of the taller Giralda is much narrower than the main tower and “nests” atop it, creating a clear separation between main tower and crown that makes the main tower appear bulkier. In the Ferry Building, the transition between main tower and crown is more seamless, making the tower as a whole appear sleeker and more streamlined — and more unified in general.
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A SEARCH of real-time newspaper and magazine coverage of the design, construction and opening of the Ferry Building in the mid to late 1890s finds no invocation of the Giralda.
Extending this same search beyond the opening of the Ferry Building in 1898, it appears that the first published effort to draw an explicit connection between the two towers may have been made five years later. On 27 April 1903, The Argonaut, a San Francisco weekly, ran an article, “The City of Seville,” in which the author wrote that “the beautiful Giralda Tower…has served as a model for towers all over the world, among them the ferry clock tower at the foot of Market Street, San Francisco.”
More influential, perhaps, was Herman Scheffauer (1876–1927), who followed suit with the comparison in 1905.
Born in San Francisco, Scheffauer was — and would continue to be — known primarily as a critic, journalist, poet, playwright and translator. Although Scheffauer studied art and architecture at the city’s Mark Hopkins Institute in the mid 1890s and is reported to have worked as an architectural draftsman for a few years after his architectural training, the public record of him shows that his energies always were devoted to literary pursuits. While he was described early on as an “architect,” this appears primarily to have been a term of art. But, he did continue to write about architecture, off and on, for the rest of his life.
Between summer 1904 and early 1907, Scheffauer was traveling and living in Europe. During this period, he wrote “letters from abroad” that were published in the San Francisco weekly, Town Talk. The magazine’s issue of 27 May 1905 ran Scheffauer’s “Letter from Spain,” in which he remarked:
Excerpt from Herman Scheffauer’s “Letter from Spain,” Town Talk, 27 May 1905, p. 13. Source: Internet Archive
Scheffauer’s description of San Francisco’s “tin ferry-tower…aping [La Giralda’s] form” carries mores than a whiff of the view that the Ferry Building clock tower was a cheap, ersatz copy of the Giralda.
A year later, his view seemed to have softened. Sheffauer was living in London when the earthquake and fires shook and consumed San Francisco on 18 April 1906. In response to the event, he penned a column that was published in the Daily Express of London on April 27th.
As highlighted in the San Francisco Call of 10 June 1906, Scheffauer wrote of “the ferry depot, with its graceful tower patterned after that of La Giralda, in Seville.”
Excerpt from item on Herman Scheffauer, San Francisco Call, 10 June 1906, p. 19. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
At the time, Scheffauer was vice president of the relatively new San Francisco Architectural Club and was advocating from afar for Daniel Burnham’s Beaux-Arts-inspired 1905 plan for San Francisco.
It’s impossible to determine from Scheffauer’s comment in the London paper whether he had knowledge of the design intentions of the architect of the Ferry Building — another Beaux-Arts exponent, A. Page Brown (1859–1896) — more about whom shortly — or was just making a personal observation.
One thing that can be said of Herman Scheffauer’s prose of this period is that it was florid — and that there was plenty of it. In an item titled “Scheffauer’s Missionary Work,” Town Talk wrote in its 14 July 1906 number that
[he] has not yet started for home, though it was his first impulse to return when he heard of the catastrophe. However, he is vindicating his loyalty to San Francisco in a way that should prove far more beneficial to the city than he could be were he at home. He is acting as a San Francisco promotion committee of one, and through him, since the fire, the readers of some of the European papers are learning more of this city than they ever knew before.
This probably is the lens through which we should read Scheffauer’s comment — published just nine days after the earthquake and fires — that the Ferry Building clock tower was “patterned after that of La Giralda.”
Anyone who wrote in that moment — and in the same two-sentence paragraph — that “the Twin Peaks” are “two impressive conical hills…rising up like the breasts of a nymph” would not have been making a design-historical claim about the two towers.
More likely, Scheffauer simply was using a picturesque Spanish example to shore up the identity of San Francisco as a once and future place of romance — a place with an affinity for “things Spanish.”
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SCHEFFAUER’S association of the Ferry Building clock tower with the Giralda was picked up by other writers a handful of times over the next few decades.
More frequent mentions started in the 1940s. The idea that the Ferry Building tower had design and artistic roots in exotic Seville has appeared as a flavorful 10-word garnish in San Francisco guidebooks and in local newspaper articles about San Francisco history and tourism.
Even in the post-1940 period, though, there are only some 30 mentions of the idea in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner in the 60 years between 1942 and 2003. None in the 20 years since.
Probably a few of these mentions have been locally influential. “Riptides” columnist Robert O’Brien “said it was so” in 1946. Herb Caen put his seal on it in 1951. And California historian and state librarian Kevin Starr did so in 1979.
Online, though — on websites of every description — the Giralda has become part of the boilerplate description of the Ferry Building clock tower.
Laying the groundwork for San Francisco municipal government’s designation of the Ferry Building as a City landmark in 1977, the San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board wrote in December 1976:
The building’s most prominent feature was the much discussed tower rising 235 feet and visible for much of the length of Market Street. It was noted with pride that the tower was modeled after the Giralda of the Cathedral of Seville and that there was only one other like it in the United States — that at Madison Square Garden (the original 1890 Garden) in New York. The Garden was designed by McKim, Mead, and white, in which firm A. Page Brown had been employed prior to his coming to San Francisco.
The same language was adapted for the following year’s nomination of the Ferry Building to the National Register of Historic Places.
But, the language was an exercise in revisionism. It was not “noted with pride that the tower was modeled after the Giralda.” Locally, this doesn’t appear to have been noted at all — not at the time of the Ferry Building’s opening anyway, and only in isolated instances in the years following.
Nor was it “noted with pride” that the only other tower “like it” in the United States was the Madison Square Garden tower of 1890. Not only was the Ferry Building clock tower not “like” the Madison Square Garden tower. The perceived similarity between the two towers was a sticking point for some.
Before we proceed…
Recall Herman Scheffauer’s note in 1905 that the Madison Square Garden tower was designed “after” the Giralda. We’ll come back to this shortly.
In January 1895, the architect Arthur Page Brown released a number of conceptual drawings of his design for the Ferry Building. The following drawing was among those the San Francisco Chronicle published — together with a glowing endorsement of Brown’s design — on 11 January 1895:
Conceptual drawing of the San Francisco “Union Depot and Ferry House,” by A. Page Brown, in “New City Gateway,” San Francisco Chronicle, 11 January 1895, p. 7. Source: GenealogyBank
The next day, January 12th, the San Francisco Morning Call tried to make make hay about this. In an editorial titled “All About a Tower,” the paper complained in blustery terms that Brown’s clock tower was too similar to the tower of the second Madison Square Garden, in New York, which had opened five years earlier in 1890.
This Madison Square Garden — which replaced the original 1879 Garden — was designed by Stanford White (1853–1906), of the firm of McKim, Mead and White.
A. Page Brown had cut his architectural teeth at this firm. After his one year of architectural training at Cornell, Brown — who was born in Ellisburg, New York — joined McKim in 1879 and was with the firm until hanging out his own shingle in late 1884. He moved to San Francisco in 1889, the year before the second Madison Square Garden opened.
Which is to say: Certainly, Brown would have been aware of White’s tower for the Garden when he was designing his own tower for the Ferry Building in the early 1890s.
Formally — and bizarrely — the Call pushed its complaint against Brown by arguing that Brown’s drawing of his tower was too similar to a drawing of White’s tower done by Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951) in 1891 — the year after the new Madison Square Garden opened.
DuMond’s drawing appeared as the central “vignette” in a print titled “The Tower and Other Notable Parts of the Madison Square Garden”:
The Tower and Other Notable Parts of the Madison Square Garden, by Frank Vincent DuMond (1865–1951). Print, 14¼” x 19¼”. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. Source: NYPL
Using its own rendering of DuMond’s drawing…
Rendering of detail of 1891 drawing of Madison Square Garden by F.V. DuMond, in “All About a Tower,” San Francisco Morning Call, 12 January 1895, p.4. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
…the Call tried to argue that “A. Page Brown’s tower is, barring a few minor details, almost a facsimile of the great DuMond’s work.”
The paper continued its hatchet job with a blind quote from “one who is interested in the depot building,” who was reported to have said: “The plans submitted by Brown will never be accepted; they are defective in many artistic instances, and the Harbor Commissioners will undoubtedly order that chimney tower lopped off.” The Call concluded with another blind quote — this from “a gentleman in the employ of the Harbor Commissioners,” who was reported to have said that Brown’s plans were “not likely to be accepted.”
Of course, “the great DuMond” was not the designer of the Madison Square Garden tower. Stanford White was. If any comparison was to be drawn in 1895, it should have been between White’s actual tower and Brown’s proposed one.
Given the lack of detail in Brown’s drawing, the Call’s (feigned?) outrage was tantamount to the paper’s saying that (a) all towers of this general form — a tall, square-footprint structure topped with layers of increasingly small doo-dads — were the same; and that (b) because New York already had one such tower, San Francisco shouldn’t have any such tower.
This was ridiculous on its face — a sentiment that seems to have been shared by the Harbor Commission, who approved Brown’s design five days later, on 17 January 1895.
Nothing better reveals the farce of the Call’s claim in 1895 to be “Shocked — shocked!” by Brown’s tower design than the fact that the paper ran an extremely similar drawing by Brown two years earlier, in January 1893, and had nothing negative to say at all.
“Plan of the New Ferry Building,” conceptual drawing by A. Page Brown, illustrating “The Big Depot,” San Francisco Morning Call, 20 January 1893, p. 8. Source: California Digital Newspaper Collection
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AS I NOTED earlier, it wasn’t until 1903, with a brief mention in The Argonaut, and 1905, with Herman Scheffauer’s original somewhat unfavorable comparison of the Ferry Building clock tower to the Giralda of Seville, that the medieval (Moorish) and Renaissance Giralda of 1568 became a point of reference in discussions of the Beaux–Arts Ferry tower of 1898.
In contrast, the Giralda was featured in discussions of the 1890 Madison Square Garden tower almost from the beginning. On 15 November 1891, shortly after the finishing touch of a sculpture of Diana by Augustus Saint–Gaudens (1848–1907) was added to the top of the tower two months earlier, the New York Sun felt compelled to run a lengthy column, “Some Questions of Art: Our Tower and the Giralda,” frankly acknowledging that the tower was an “adaptation” of the Giralda but defending Stanford White against charges of plagiarism.
Here’s White’s tower:
Madison Square Garden, northeast corner of Madison Avenue and 26th Street, New York City, 1891. Source: Architectural Digest
Scroll back up to remind yourself of the Giralda.
The proportions of the Madison Square Garden tower are more delicate — but, Stanford White’s design definitely wears the Giralda on its sleeve.
The Garden tower of 1890 is much closer to the Giralda than the Ferry tower of 1898 is to the Giralda — or to the Garden tower that the Call tried to hang around A. Page Brown’s neck.
The 1978 nomination of the San Francisco Ferry Building to the National Register of Historic Places opened by saying that “the slender, square and lofty tower, inspired by the 12th-century Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain, is subtly translated into neo-classical terms.”
That may work, if one interprets “inspired by” and “translated into” in the broadest possible terms.
But, a photographic comparison of the two towers does not make the connection obvious. One has to squint pretty hard to see it. And, yet, these days if two things are mentioned in descriptions of the Ferry Building clock tower, almost invariably one is the height and the other is the Giralda.
Perhaps the association would not be so persistent had the Madison Square Garden and its tower not been demolished in 1926.
Of course, A. Page Brown did not envision the Ferry Building clock tower in an historical vacuum. One need not deny that the Giralda could have been one of a number of architectural antecedents of the clock tower. But, the design and execution of the clock tower appears to be sufficiently different from the Giralda — or from any other tower of the Ferry Building’s own time or before — to merit the recognition that this tower is sui generis: its own thing.
Any persistent, preferential invocation of the Giralda in modern-day descriptions of the Ferry Building clock tower seems mostly to be a distant echo of the sentimental, romantic musings of a London-bound Herman Scheffauer longing for home in April 1906.
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For details on The Emperor Norton Trust’s proposal that the Ferry Building clock tower be named The Emperor Norton Tower next year, visit…
EmperorNortonTower.org
…and click LEARN MORE.
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