{"nrhp_refnum":"79000537","name":"Rincon Annex","other_names":[],"category":"building","location":{"address":"101--199 Mission St.","address_restricted":false,"city":"San Francisco","county":"San Francisco","state":"CA","lat":37.79250267200007,"lon":-122.39299524399996,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"1979-11-16","is_nhl":false,"nhl_designated_date":null,"areas_of_significance":["Art","Architecture"],"significance_levels":["national"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"Rincon Annex is a large three-story reinforced concrete post office building at 101-199 Mission Street in San Francisco, designed by Gilbert S. Underwood and built 1939-1940 in the Streamlined Moderne style.","why_significant":"The nomination calls it one of the finest large public buildings in San Francisco in the Streamlined Moderne style, with an interior intact from construction. It also holds Anton Refregier's 27-panel mural series on California history, described as the largest mural series awarded by the government at the time and a major WPA-era artistic achievement. It was submitted even though it was not yet fifty years old.","narrative":"Rincon Annex is a post office building on Mission Street in San Francisco, built between 1939 and 1940 to a design by Gilbert S. Underwood. Its reinforced concrete frame is trimmed with marble and expressed on the main facade as eight colossal piers, with leaping dolphins decorating the spandrels between tall windows. Aluminum panels, clocks, signs and lettering inside follow the same Streamlined Moderne approach. The building covers about 385,000 square feet, and its columns are hollow to carry ventilation ducts through all three floors. The lobby holds Anton Refregier's twenty-seven murals of California history, commissioned in 1941 as the largest mural series the government had awarded, covering a lobby frieze about four hundred feet long. The murals were praised for treating California's story as a wider account of human progress. Because the interior survives intact from construction, both the interior and exterior were put forward for listing despite the building's age.","period_of_significance":"1939-1940","architect_builder":"Gilbert S. Underwood (architect); George A. Fuller Construction company (builder)","architectural_style":"Streamlined Moderne","criteria":[],"status_note":"Occupied and in use as a postal facility; the form states the postal operation is expected to move to a one-story facility in the near future.","vacant_flag":false,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-sonnet-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.0-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 02:55:31.955519-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_CA/79000537.pdf"},"photo":{"url_800":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/79000537/41885157e1-800.webp","url_1600":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/media/79000537/41885157e1-1600.webp","licence":"CC BY 2.0","author":"Dale Cruse - 10M views","credit_html":"<a href=\"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rincon_Towers.jpg\" rel=\"noopener\">Dale Cruse - 10M views</a>, <a href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0\" rel=\"license noopener\">CC BY 2.0</a>, via Wikimedia Commons","source_page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rincon_Towers.jpg"},"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/123861267","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rincon_Center","wikidata":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1877405"},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/california/san-francisco/rincon-annex-79000537/"}