credit: Bancroft Library, Jesse B. Cooke Collection via Up from the Deep
The beginning of a new year is as good a time as any for a field trip through San Francisco history and this morning the folks at Up from the Deep took a trip through a long-gone piece of Civic Center: Marshall Square. The plaza once connected Market Street to City Hall Ave (likewise long-gone at this point) and was the original home of the Pioneer Monument that now sits on Fulton Street between the Public Library's Main Branch and the Asian Art Museum. As Civic Center was reconfigured to create the current post-quake City Hall between Van Ness and Polk Street, Marshall Square plaza became the Marshall Square Building which was a cornerstone of local business. That is - until the owners saw fit to board up the arcaded storefronts and everything became part of what is now the Orpheum theater and home to many a Shrek: The Musical performance. The historical journey is definitely worth the ride if only for the author's personal account of "a tour guide with a waxed and elaborately curled, twelve-inch handlebar mustache, who called himself and his business 'Mr. San Francisco' "
· Marshall Square [Up from the Deep]
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