451 Jackson St
San Francisco, CA 94133, USA

Hotaling Building, 451 Jackson St San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA

Begun in 1866, it represents an especially fine example of the rich Italianate buildings of brick, with cast iron facades, which dominated commercial design in the 1860s and 1870s. Its builder was Anson Parsons Hotaling, head of A.P. Hotaling Company, wholesale dealers in siprits and tobacco. After a long and active career as the headquarters of the firm, the building entered a period of gradual decline following the fire of 1906. Its revival to glory, in a form which actually far surpassed the ambition of A.P. Hotaling Company`s time, dates from 1952 when the building was acquired by Mr. & Mrs. Henry Lawenda as a center for their wholesale decorative and design firm, Kneedler-Fauchere. This far-sighted and intelligent restoration of a prime group of buildings, on what came to be called Jackson Square (the area east of Montgomery Street), by a group of design and decoration houses, sparked the revival of an historically and architecturally prominent part of San Francisco.