"One can see an...interesting attempt to satisfactorily terminate a tower in The Hobart Building....This is an instructive example of the lengths to which an architect can go to fit the surroundings and still produce something original and desirable.""

""Willis Polk designed this building around 1914 and it is said to have been his favorite. The lower bulk of the structure is very plain, so non-committal that it could get along with almost any building on Market Street. Above this basic structure, Polk reared a tower almost as much higher, a tower standing free of the margins of the plot (which is odd-shaped and filled by the lower building), a tower that is finished on all sides in magnificently ornate style unmatched by any of its neighbors. The visual effect of the rays of the setting sun on the rich detailing is one of downtown San Francisco's remarkable sights."

Source: Here Today, San Francisco's Architectural Heritage by Roger Olmsted and T. H. Watkins, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1969.

The kiosks arrived in 1995 as part of a larger deal with JCDecaux to put public toilets on San Francisco streets. The French company would install and maintain 26 toilets in return for the right to plant advertising kiosks throughout what their current brochure describes as "the most geographically-concentrated urban shopping area on the West Coast."

Today (in November 2010) there are 110 kiosks, all with backlit vertical display panels. Sixty are designed to double as newsstands, with counters inside and doors that swing open to reveal display racks.

The idea was to rid the street of the shabby makeshift news-vending sheds then sprinkled through the downtown. When they were installed, no less an arbiter of civic taste than Chronicle columnist Herb Caen noted approvingly that in the quest to spiff up San Francisco "a touch of Paris never hurts."

Source: John King, Chronicle Urban Design Critic, San Francisco Chronicle article dated 26 November 2010.

For othger photographs of the Hobart Building, see Path of Gold Light Standards and National Register Listing #100006911.