Montgomery Block - History

History

In its earliest days, newly affluent "Silver Kings" of the Comstock Lode called the Montgomery Block home. Many of the earliest land disputes between Spanish and Mexican land grant holders and American squatters were resolved by lawyers and judges ensconced in the Montgomery Block. Numerous early California legislators and politicians worked out of the Montgomery Block.

James King of William (his father's first name), editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, was shot in the street out front, and died in room 207 of the Montgomery Block on May 14, 1856 after being shot by James P. Casey, a city supervisor who felt slighted by King's anti-corruption crusading journalism. Casey was lynched a few days after King's death by a reborn Vigilance committee.

In the 1860s Mark Twain met a San Francisco fireman named Tom Sawyer in the Montgomery Block sauna. It was home in 1911 to exiled Dr. Sun Yat-sen who, working with Wong Sam Ark, wrote the Chinese constitution that was later installed after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. One of the oldest masonry structures in San Francisco, the building escaped destruction in the fire of 1906. It is claimed, by E Clampus Vitus among others, that the drink Pisco punch was invented in the Bank Exchange Bar in the first floor of the Montgomery block.

From the 1890s to the 1940s it was an important literary bohemian rendezvous possibly because the Montgomery Block provided office space for the San Francisco Argonaut, for which people like Bierce, Harte, Twain and others wrote. Artists filled its galleries and rented cheap studio space after the building became less exclusive in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the basement, among the many hangouts, was one that went by the name of Coppa's.

During the 1906 earthquake and fire, a tenant named Oliver Perry Stidger, son of pioneers, stood his ground with a pistol and declared he would shoot any man in the demolition squad who came to blow up the building in order to halt the flames. He asked for thirty minutes and a small area of the downtown was saved from the fire.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti mentioned "the classic old Montgomery Block building, the most famous literary and artistic structure in the West" in his 1998 inaugural speech as Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

The Montgomery Block was demolished in 1959, even though a preservation movement had begun to emerge in San Francisco. It is remembered for its historic importance as a bohemian center of the city. The Montgomery Block was replaced by a parking lot and later, the Transamerica Pyramid.