Landmark 153
Earle C. Anthony Packard Showroom
901 Van Ness Avenue At Ellis
Van Ness/Civic Center
Built 1927
In the Roaring Twenties when automobiles were at the height of their glamour, how could Earle Anthony settle
on anyone other than Bernard Maybeck to design his new Packard showroom on Van Ness Avenue, then and now San Francisco's Auto Row?
Opening night was attended by Hollywood starlets and was broadcast on one of Anthony's radio stations.
According to Berkeley author Sally Woodbridge,
Anthony distributed a booklet, A Saga of Transportation, in which he described Maybeck's achievement:
Maybeck has vitalized with his own dynamic personality the exotic influences which drift in through the Golden Gate from
the Seven Seas....Discarding the shackles of architectural convention [he used] rose marble from Numidia and black from
Belgium, travertine in tawny foam and glittering scaggiola--lanterns from a Persian Hareem--Spanish doorways and Gothic
doorways--columns crowned with Corinthian acanthus supporting Byzantine corbels [to create] an Aladdin's palace in
which the gorgeous panoply of the Arabian Nights vies with the luxury of the Middle Ages.
The booklet also quoted Maybeck's instructions to the construction workers and artisans:
Imagine that no cars roar by on Van Ness Avenue and that no telephone will call you
from your work. Believe yourselves, instead, working in the gloom of a cathedral of the Middle Ages, your overseer a monk
or an artisan who loves, as you do, the work in hand.
Maybeck and Anthony were a dynamic duo when it came to prose.
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