Landmark public square with shops and restaurants and a 5-star hotel in the Marina area of San Francisco

Ghirardelli Square is a landmark public square with shops and restaurants and a 5-star hotel in the Marina area of San Francisco, California. A portion of the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 as Pioneer Woolen Mills and D. Ghirardelli Company.

The square once featured over 40 specialty shops and restaurants. Some of the original shops and restaurants still occupy the square.

History

In 1893, Domenico Ghirardelli purchased the entire city block in order to make it into the headquarters of the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. In the early 1960s, the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company was bought by the Golden Grain Macaroni Company which moved the headquarters off-site to San Leandro and put the square up for sale.

Ghirardelli Square

San Franciscan William M. Roth and his mother, Lurline Matson Roth, bought the land in 1962 to prevent the square from being replaced with an apartment building. The Roths hired landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and the firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons to convert the square and its historic brick structures to an integrated restaurant and retail complex. It opened in 1964. In 1965, Benjamin Thompson and Associates renovated the lower floor of the Clock Tower, keeping the existing architectural elements, for a Design Research store. The lower floors of the Clock Tower are now home to Ghirardelli Square's main chocolate shop.

Design

The plaza is at the eastern end of the Golden Gate National recreation Area, connecting the Embarcadero waterfront promenade to the natural parkland of the Marina Green, Crissy Field and the Presidio Parkland.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ghirardelli Square", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0