The Mechanic's Institute Library at the bottom of Post Street is a favorite - they host literary events and chess classes and have a nice reading room. The building is a nice stone commercial building, in a basic classical composition with a rusticated base, middle library floors with a colonnade, and a top with a good cornice. A few blocks up Post Street, beyond Union Square, is a former Elks Lodge, part of a 20 story stone mixed-use building.
Other clubs have buildings that follow the character of an Italian palazzo, in scale from domestic to grand. On Sutter Street, there's the Francisca Club, a 3-story brick building on the domestic scale, almost Colonial in manner. Nearby is the former Women's Athletic Club (1917) - now the Metropolitan Club - a handsome brick facade with large arched windows signifying the main rooms and a two-story colonnade and protruding cornice as a capping. Next door is the more modest former YMCA building, now a college dormitory.
Like the Women's Athletic Club, many of these buildings hint at a great room. Usually a row of grand windows - often arched - tells you where it is...leaving its exact size and shape and decoration to the imagination, except at night when the interiors begin to be revealed.
Back down on Post Street, between Mason and Taylor Streets, there's a pair of clubs that make a great urban composition - the Olympic Club and the Bohemian Club. I used to think they were rival clubs but they're complimentary, the Olympic for sporting, the Bohemian for socializing. Whereas the Olympic Club is a confident if normative classical composition of beige brick and limestone, the Bohemian Club is much more unique. At some indeterminate point in the spectrum between Arts and Crafts and Art Deco, this 1933 palazzo has thick walls of red brick that are opened up with a silent order of window bays, dressed more with articulating layered brickwork that with minimal amounts of light stone. The corner site perfectly profiles the uppermost two-story colonnade of brick pilasters, marching at a rhythm unique from the great window bays below. The ornamental program includes sculpted square keystone blocks over the windows and main doorways, and the club's Owl is a recurring motif, most notably in the frieze topping the structure.
The recently opened Battery is housed in an old brick warehouse building, without particular distinction, in the historic waterfront district. Will the Battery's members of city elites tire of this old shell and opt for a new contemporary building expressing its time? For now, the structure is just a framework for their collegial exchange of cultural and culinary services. Only time will tell if the members prefer their dining room at street level, behind frosted glass, or raised to a piano nobile, with views of the Bay and the world beyond their valet team.
