A bit of history of the SoFA Market building. It was built by Willard Prussia, a successful businessman from New York, who moved to California and owned Prussia & Company, a high end women’s apparel store a few blocks up the street. He hired the San Francisco firm of Weeks and Day to design this building. Charles Peter Weeks was a prominent architect of the time (a contemporary of Julia Morgan) and was responsible for noteworthy local landmarks such as the St Claire Hotel and the Fox Theater on the same SoFA block (we initially mistook the architect to be William H. Weeks, another prominent San Francisco architect of the same era, who designed many notable public buildings in the area). The building became known as W. Prussia Building, which on August 8, 2001, was declared a historic landmark by the San Jose City Council. The building changed hands several times. In the 1960’s (we conjecture although we have no record of this), the top floor was converted from an airy factory into a maze of eight-foot ceiling studio apartments. The openness of this space was completely lost. In the 1980’s, the ground floor became 3 separate businesses, which closed up perhaps in the late 1990’s. This retail space remained vacant until it reopened as SoFA Market in 2014.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 06:19:31 +0000
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