As the last guest checks out of the Cathedral Hill Hotel today, a 44-year run of hotel hospitality will come to an end at the corner of Geary and Van Ness and put to rest a piece of San Francisco history.The Jack Tar Hotel is going to be demolished.
For the first 22 years of its life, that was the name of the Cathedral, and it was as the Jack Tar that the building became notorious to a generation of San Franciscans.
The Jack Tar, opened in April 196o, was once an oasis of opulence and swank, the kind of joint where Don Draper from "Mad Men" might have stayed over for a martini or two.
It was also a gawd-awful piece of modernist architecture ridiculed for its boxy shape and checkerboard exterior.
In a city that loves to hate its buildings, perhaps no other structure burned so deeply into the civic consciousness.
Herb Caen, who jabbed at the pink and turquoise color scheme as often as he used an ellipsis, referred to another modern hotel built off Union Square as "the San Francisco Hilton, the box the Jack Tar Hotel came in."
And as late as 1983, a year after the Jack Tar had changed ownership and been drastically remodeled and repainted a sedate beige, a national wire service story about a fatal fire on the property noted, "A woman's body was found in the mezzanine ballroom of the 400-room, 12-story Cathedral Hill Hotel, formerly the Jack Tar Hotel."
via www.sfgate.com
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