Case Study: 355 11th Street, San Francisco

By Clifford A. Pearson

The Grateful Dead weren’t thinking of 355 Eleventh Street when they sang, “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” but their words evoke the San Francisco building’s checkered history. Built around 1912 as a bottle-storage facility for the adjacent Jackson Brewery, the 14,000-square-foot structure hit the skids as the surrounding South of Market (SoMa) area became increasingly rundown in the 1970s and ‘80s. Today, though, it stands as a poster child for greening our cities’ industrial neighborhoods and is San Francisco’s first LEED-NC Gold-certified building.