Southern Pacific Company Hospital Historic District

Occupying an entire block beside the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, this complex of five brick buildings was built from 1907 for the Southern Pacific Company's employee hospital system. It replaced an earlier hospital destroyed in the 1906 fire. Architect Daniel J. Patterson designed the main hospital, the nurses' annex and the powerhouse in a monumental Neo-Classical style, with rusticated bases, quoins, cornices and a Corinthian portico facing Fell Street. Huntington Social Hall was added in 1911, and a reinforced concrete wing followed in 1930. The hospital was the largest and headquarters facility of the railroad's eighteen hospital service areas, part of a paternalistic program begun in 1868. Its residential, park-side setting followed contemporary hospital planning advice. The hospital closed in 1974, and the complex survives as the city's only intact early twentieth-century medical campus. The main building was converted to senior housing in 1982-83, while the other four structures stand vacant.