San Francisco Skyscraper-Church

When city land becomes too expensive to build churches upon, a solution is to combine churches and skyscrapers. The Chicago Temple (First Methodist Episcopal Church plus offices, stores) and Manhattan's Broadway Temple (Methodist Episcopal Church plus apartment houses, hotel, stores) are examples. San Franciscans now have a brand new 30-story pyramidal skyscraper-church-hotel to admire --the William Taylor Hotel and Temple Methodist Episcopal Church, on the busy corner of McAllister and Leavenworth Streets.

A greystone tower with a suggestion of Gothic ornament, it is named for Forty-Niner William ("California") Taylor who chose the longest way to the gold fields-- around the Horn. In 1849 that route was safely traversed by 108 vessels. Most of the passengers sought gold. Few of them became either rich or famous, many returned East. William Taylor took a cargo of cut timber with him to build a church. An overpowering man with a stentorian voice, he wore a big, warm beard instead of a shirt. He had been Methodist Bishop of Africa. When he arrived in San Francisco he put his Bible on an overturned whiskey barrel in the middle of Portsmouth Square, bellowed and sang until the saloons emptied to hear him. For diversion he swam regularly across San Francisco Bay, a procedure still regarded as something of an athletic feat. He founded the College of the Pacific (Methodist Episcopal college in Stockton, enrollment about 970), wrote more than 20 books, thundered his old-time religion at Gold Coast sots and socialites.

The building which bears his name cost $2,800,000, contains 500 guest rooms and 32 tower apartments, a famed French chef, a glossy array of electric stoves, refrigerators, semi-modernistic furniture. It is floodlighted at night, has a tapestried lobby. Its seven elevators can reach the roof in 30 seconds.

The church proper, in the Gothic style, will seat 1,500, with a chapel seating 125 more. Two assembly halls may be combined to hold an audience of 1,100 for athletics or theatricals. Four Methodist churches combined to form the new congregation. The pastor is Dr. Walter John Sherman, who devoted ten years to the scheme. Laymen prominently involved: Fred D. Parr, president of Parr Terminal Co.; John H. McCallum, lumberman, president of the San Francisco Y.M.C.A.

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