San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal

About this property

The San Francisco Armory, also known as the San Francisco National Guard Armory and Arsenal or simply The Armory, is a historic building in the Mission District of San Francisco, California. Since 2018, it has been owned by SF Armory LLC, an affiliate of AJ Capital Partners. The building was constructed as an armory and arsenal for the United States National Guard in 1912–1914 and designed with a castle-like appearance in a Moorish Revival style. The Armory was built on part of the site of Woodward's Gardens (1866–1891), a zoo, aquarium, art museum, and amusement park which covered two city blocks, bounded by Mission, Valencia, Duboce, and 15th Streets. The structure was built as a replacement for the old San Francisco Armory in the Western Addition, which had been destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. In addition to its role as an armory and arsenal, during the 1920s, it served as a venue for sporting events, such as prizefights. The Armory served as a stronghold and rallying point for the National Guard in their suppression of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike (an event known as "Bloody Thursday"). The building closed as an armory in 1976, when the National Guard moved its facilities to Fort Funston. From the 1920s through the 1940s, the Mission Armory served as San Francisco's primary sports venue, eventually earning the nickname "the Madison Square Garden of the West." For almost three decades, at least two prizefights were held in the Drill Court each week. One very notable fight included a light heavyweight title fight between Young Corbett III and Jackie Fields. Other notable fights that took place in the Armory included matches between Mike Teague and Jack Thompson (both were welterweight champions); and Corbett and Pete Myers in 1929. After 1976, the building was largely unused for the next 30 years, though in 1978 it was registered as a Class 2 historical landmark in the National Register of Historic Places. Several spaceship-interior scenes in the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back were filmed there, and the San Francisco Opera used the large inner court of The Armory for set construction and rehearsals until the mid-1990s. By this time, The Armory was in a heavy state of disrepair. Various uses of the building were proposed from 1996 to 2006, including self storage units, a rehabilitation clinic, a gym with a rock wall, a dot-com office park, a telecommunications switching center, luxury housing, and low-income housing. Many of these proposals were marked by acrimonious debates between various community interests. Concerns over gentrification, social and environmental impact or the unsuitability of the structure for various uses resulted in none of the various plans for the structure reaching fruition. The building eventually came to be described, variously, as "a herd of white elephants", "cursed", and "not a friendly building". The stairs in the main entrance of the armory also became a well-known skateboarding location referred to as "3-Up 3-Down".

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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