Jackson Square, the district that survived the fire

In front of you is something very rare in downtown San Francisco: a commercial street from the Gold Rush years. Look at the scale. Two- and three-story brick buildings with cast-iron pilasters and metal shutters designed to keep out fire, which swept through the city several times in the 1850s.

1Gold, banks and warehouses

Close to the old shoreline, merchants, importers and bankers set up shop here. On the northeast corner of Montgomery and Jackson stood the bank of Lucas, Turner & Co., managed in the 1850s by a certain William Tecumseh Sherman, years before he became one of the most famous generals of the Civil War. A little further along, at 407 Jackson, chocolate maker Domingo Ghirardelli ran his business.

2The whiskey that didn't burn

The building at number 451 went up in 1866 and was occupied by Anson P. Hotaling, who kept one of the largest liquor stocks on the West Coast here. In 1906 the fire closed in, but the building was saved, helped by a hose more than a mile long that the Navy laid from the bay over Telegraph Hill. A newspaperman, Charles K. Field, summed it up in a verse you can read on the plaque:

«If, as they say, God spanked the town / For being over frisky, / Why did He burn the churches down / And save Hotaling's whisky?»

In 1971 the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.

3What to look for

• The Hotaling Building plaque, with Field's famous lines.
• The cast-iron pilasters and metal shutters on the facades.
• Hotaling Place, the narrow alley next to number 451.