Topped with Gothic flourishes and trimmed with period ornament that likely matched up with the building’s neighbors at the time, the Hallidie building was an early glimpse into a glassier future that wouldn’t become commonplace for decades. The budget was less than $250,000, a moderate sum for the time, and construction took just six months in 1917. He had overseen the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (and he was ultimately influential in making sure that Bernard Maybeck’s iconic Palace of Fine Arts was preserved and not demolished), and he was commissioned by the University of California to build an investment property in the bustling Financial District, at 130 Sutter.
Now look at the Hallidie Building and imagine that Polk receives this commission just two years later, in 1916, on the eve of what would be the World War I-related construction decline marking the end of his storied career.
Burnham and Company: the Merchants Exchange Building (completed in 1903 but heavily reconstructed following the 1906 earthquake with the help of a young Julia Morgan), with its heavy columned facade and the 21-story Hobart Building at Market and Montgomery, completed in 1914, in which Polk applied layers of Burnham-esque, Beaux-Arts cornice details to what was at the time the city’s second-tallest skyscraper. Just look at two of the most significant projects Polk worked on during his decade representing D.H. He collaborated personally with famed New York firm McKim, Mead and White, as well as Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, becoming the head of Burnham’s West Coast office in 1903-one year after the completion of Burnham’s singular triumph, the 20-story Flatiron Building in New York. Polk worked mostly in the neo-classical and Beaux Arts styles of the most popular firms of his day. Nothing that Polk had designed in San Francisco, particularly in the booming post-quake decade prior to this commission, showed any indication that he had a flair for something so innovative and sleek. The window wall is supported by brackets projecting from each concrete floor platform attached to steel mullions so that the surface floats in front of the structure, not unlike the way curtain walls are constructed today. While the juxtaposition of the building’s lacy, gold-painted iron ornaments-which have echoes in the gold crowns atop the street lamps that went up downtown in this same era, between 19-and the uninterrupted grid of glass is striking in its oddness, it’s the glass curtain itself that made this building unique for 1918.