Jackson Square Historic District: The 1850s Brick Survivors

Why is it significant?

Walk along the tree-shaded brick sidewalks of Jackson Street and examine the heavy iron shutters flanking the windows of these handsome two-story brick rowhouses.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk along the tree-shaded brick sidewalks of Jackson Street and examine the heavy iron shutters flanking the windows of these handsome two-story brick rowhouses. You are standing inside Jackson Square, the sole surviving collection of commercial buildings from the Gold Rush era that survived the catastrophic nineteen zero six earthquake and firestorm.

In the eighteen fifties, this was the financial heart of San Francisco. Gold miners fresh from the Sierra Nevada foothills rushed into these very buildings with pouches of gold dust. Look at number four hundred and seventy-two: it was the Bank of Lucas, Turner and Company, managed by future Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, who slept in an iron-shuttered upstairs room.

When the inferno of nineteen zero six swept downhill toward these streets, Italian-American wine merchants and naval sailors fought back with water pumped from naval tugboats and barrels of red wine from the nearby Italian-Swiss Colony cellars, dousing the brick walls to halt the flames!

Walk up Washington Street into Portsmouth Square, the birthplace of the city.