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Overview

The cornerstone was laid on 07/17/1853 for Old Saint Mary's on a plot located at the northeast corner of California Street and Dupont (renamed Grant Avenue). San Francisco architects William Craine and Thomas England developed the design of the church intended to resemble a Gothic church in Vich, Spain, the Catalonian hometown of Archbishop Joseph Sadoc Alemany y Conill (1814-1888). Alemany presided at the church's dedication coinciding with the Christmas Midnight Mass of 12/25/1854.

Building History

Alemany's cathedra functioned for nearly 30 years, but by 1881, the archbishop sent a pastoral letter to the congregation indicating that the church's location had become surrounded by sin and degradation. The notorious saloons, brothels and street criminals of the nearby Barbary Coast as well as Chinatown's opium houses and tangs created a unpredicatble and dangerous immediate environment. Alemany resolved to find a new location for a cathedral and did in the Western Addition, far from the gang violence and blasphemy occurring in the neighborhood. Seven years after the installation of the next Archbishop, Patrick William Riordan (1841-1914), the new cathedral, renamed "St. Mary’s of the Assumption," had been completed, and the first cathedral was down-graded to being a parish church in 1891. It functioned as "Old Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church," until 1906.

In 1894, the the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle (popularly known as the "Paulists,") were given control over Old Saint Mary's by Riordan. The Paulists, founded in 1858 by Father Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819 –1888), developed in the melting pot that was New York City in the mid-eighteenth century. The order's main purposes were twofold; for the priest or novitiate, in Hecker's words, "The main purpose of each Paulist must be the attainment of personal perfection by the practice of those virtues without which it cannot be secured — interior fidelity to grace, prayer, detachment and the like." (See New Advent, "Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle," accessed 03/15/2015.) For the order as a whole, Hecker directed vigorous evangelism: "In the external order, the Paulist vocation is primarily, as was the original vocation of Father Hecker, the conversion of non-Catholics. The spread of Catholicism holds the first place both in their prayers and in their active life; it outranks in importance all other external labours." (See New Advent, "Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle," accessed 03/15/2015.) Riordan felt the order's high personal standards would set a fine example for the lawless neighborhood, and its missionary zeal might attract new converts to the faith in Chinatown and other ethnic neighborhoods of the parish.

Old Saint Mary's web site described the first cathedral: "The new cathedral had parapets on either flank, surmounted with embrasures, and buttresses finished cut-stone pinnacles. Inside, a vaulted ceiling with groin arches rose above a Carrara marble altar imported from Rome. The original plan included a steeple, but the chance of an earthquake toppling it into the street changed the plans, leaving only a bell tower." At this early date, factories to produced construction materials in the Bay Area were still rudimentary, and a lot of components had to be assembled from sources around the world. Old Saint Mary's web site continued, "The materials used to build San Francisco's first cathedral came from both East and West, as later did its parishioners. Granite was used around the base of the structure to deflect rainwater and for other trim. It was quarried in China and brought across the Pacific in Precut blocks. Bricks minted in New England for the outer walls came around Cape Horn as ship ballast. Locally quarried sandstone was use for the foundation, the clock trim and the main entrance. Lumber for beams, floors and other interior work, was also obtained locally." (See Old Saint Mary's Cathedral, "History," accessed 03/15/2015.) The diversely-sourced materials mirrored the cosmopolitan make-up of the early city, crammed full of 49'ers of every ethnicity.

Building Notes

The church recalled Early Gothic Revival Churches of the East, having a simple, symmetrical plan and an uncomplicated fenestration. It had a gable-front roof with a square belltower placed symmetrically in the middle of the main facade. The tower also contained a clock that was important for local timekeeping. The main facade faced south and entry was gained up a flight of stairs through the main portal carved into the belltower's base, and Gothic openings on either side of the tower to the east or west. Beacuse the church had been sited on a slope, the steps on the east were higher than those of the west. The wooden spanning members of the interior required significant exterior bolstering, creating lines of pier buttresses on the east and west-facing walls. These butresses formed a steady rhythm for pedestrians walking up the hill going south on Grant Avenue. Finials continued the line of the buttresses above the eaves line.

Demolition Notes

The Old Saint Mary's Roman Catholic Church #1 burned in the Great Earthquake and Fire of 04/18-19/1906. An historic structure even in 1906, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese resolved to rebuild this symbollically important first cathedral. Archbishop Riordan presided at the dedication of the rebuilt "Old Saint Mary's" on 06/20/1909.