Veterans Affairs Medical Center-San Francisco, California

Overlooking the Golden Gate and the Pacific from San Francisco's northwest corner, this historic district forms the original core of a veterans hospital campus on Clement Street. Covering about 12 acres of a 29-acre site, it contains buildings completed mainly in 1933-1934 in Art Deco style, decorated with terra cotta moldings drawing on Mayan motifs. Entrances, friezes and spandrel panels carry this ornament, and larger buildings have towers with stepped parapets. The complex was described in 1935 as one of the first government projects designed with careful attention to earthquake hazard, using interior concrete shear walls and terra cotta tied to the concrete structure. The district includes 14 contributing and 8 noncontributing resources, among them the administration building and the main hospital building, though many have been altered. Newer construction elsewhere on the campus reduced its historic character, so those areas lie outside the boundary. The campus remains an operating hospital beside Fort Miley.