The Former Masonic Temple – Van Ness Street at Market Street, San Francisco, California

Freemasons have been in California since its inception. While the names of members are supposed to be kept secret, we know that many of the state’s pioneers were Masons. So were Walter Danforth Bliss and William Baker Faville, the architects of this, the second Masonic Lodge in San Francisco.

The first lodge, at 1 Montgomery Street, was built in 1860 and burned down in the 1906 fire. Its replacement at 25 Van Ness Avenue was built in 1911 and is a seven-story Neoclassical structure modeled on a Florentine palazzo. The dominating features of the exterior are the gallery of arches and projections around the top, and the groups of sculpture inside the entrance archway.

Bliss and Faville met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1895 both left to work at the prominent New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. In 1898 they formed a partnership and moved to San Francisco. The 1913 Chamber of Commerce Handbook for San Francisco declared, "One of the few buildings in America comparable to some of the good buildings in Europe is the Masonic Temple." And the 1919 Architectural Review said, "Bliss & Faville’s Masonic Temple is widely known as one of the best Masonic structures, both inside and out. . . . It looks like what it is, and this cannot always be said of lodges and fraternity buildings."

In 1958 the Freemasons moved to their present grand temple on Nob Hill. This 55,000-square-foot building is now home to a number of city and county departments, including the San Francisco Arts Commission, the New Conservatory Theatre, and the San Francisco Parking Division.