The Madison Park Apartments building exemplifies the residential building boom on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in the years following the devastating earthquake and fire in San Francisco in 1906.

It was designed and built in 1908, at a cost of $125,000, by Charles MacGregor, a prominent lumberman who later formed his own contracting company. The specifications called for the finest materials and workmanship. The building was unusually large for its day. An advertisement at the time of it opening called it, "The largest and finest on the entire Coast." Another stated that it had "more apartments under one roof than any other building on the Pacific Coast."

It still survives as one of the largest early wooden apartment buildings in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Madison Park Apartments has architectural interest through its use of materials, its decorative program, its scale, and its rational planning.

The continuous high band of clinker brick around the base is one of the largest concentrations of the material in the Bay Area. The lavish use of cast plaster decoration in a continuous band along the eave is notable. The combination of clinker brick base with the flush siding and decorative detailing make the building a fascinating amalgam of Colonial Revival and Craftsman imagery.

The intact state of the interior rooms contributes to the historical interest of the architecture.

The building is remarkably "honest" and consistent in its execution, in that all four facades are composed with an equal care for materials and design. The use of courtyards and lightwells, the distribution of hallways and apartments, and the regular distribution of projecting bays, evince a carefully conceived and rationally planned building.

Extracted from the NRHP nomination.