Every city has a signature building: a single structure that defines the skyline, and thereby sets the theme and mood of the city’s character. In the early years of a city’s growth, it is usually a religious building that dominates the landscape: the temple at Luxor, the great ziggurat at Borsippa, the Hagia Sophia. In San Francisco, the first signature building, Mission Dolores (also known as Mission San Francisco de Asís) follows this pattern.

MISSION DOLORES

The birth of San Francisco is but a small chapter – and epilogue – in the vast volume of the Spanish Empire. When the Mission Dolores was founded in 1776, it represented the last, waning hope of Catholic Spain to combine economic advantage with the religious zeal (and promise, given the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494) to convert and save the “savage nations.” The original structure was replaced in 1791 by the present building, designed by Father Francisco Palou in 1782. Made from the local earth itself – adobe, later stuccoed over to protect the crumbling substance of this first and most sacred structure of San Francisco – the Mission San Francisco de Assis preserves the religious and colonial origins of the city. When the Americans took over California in 1846, the U.S. flag was raised in the tiny pueblo of Yerba Buena, a little village of 459 souls at the bay’s edge, several miles from Mission Dolores. But so strong was the authority of the Mission that the name of the village itself was officially changed to “San Francisco” in 1847. The thick-walled bastion of the missionaries had forever put its stamp on the unfranciscan city about to be born.