Hibernia Bank, Neoclassical bank building in Mid-Market, San Francisco, US.
Hibernia Bank is a Beaux-Arts building at 1 Jones Street, on the corner of McAllister and Market Streets, designed by Albert Pissis and completed in 1892. Its stone facade faces the street corner, and a 1908 addition by Pissis extended the structure. The building holds 42,000 square feet of interior space.
The Hibernia Savings and Loan Society completed its headquarters at 1 Jones Street in 1892, designed by Albert Pissis in the Beaux-Arts style and nicknamed "The Paragon". The building was slightly damaged in the 1906 earthquake and fire but reopened on May 25, 1906, five weeks later. Pissis designed an 1908 addition. The bank left in 1985; after police use and decades of vacancy, a $15 million renovation and seismic retrofit finished in 2016.
The name Hibernia is the Latin word for Ireland, chosen by the Hibernia Savings and Loan Society founded in 1859. San Franciscans nicknamed the 1892 headquarters "The Paragon" after a poll of twenty artists in the San Francisco Call rated it the city's best building, with fourteen votes against four for the Mills Building.
The building is at 1 Jones Street, on the corner of McAllister and Market Streets, near the Civic Center and Tenderloin. After the 2016 renovation it was rebranded and subdivided for lease to multiple tenants, so the former banking hall is not a public sightseeing space; view the Beaux-Arts exterior from the sidewalk.
Architect Albert Pissis, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, introduced French Beaux-Arts design to San Francisco through this project. His work became a model for how the city developed its classical architecture afterward.
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