SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Watching crews put the finishing touches on a Presidio building renovation, you might not realize the bulldozers are working directly beneath one of the oldest operating rooms in the Bay Area. An octagon-shaped tower, attached to an early military hospital, is still standing in San Francisco’s Presidio.
To help us find our way to the O.R., archaeologist and Presidio preservation officer Rob Thomson first agreed to walk us through more than 150 years of history. Back to a time when the building then known as Wright General Hospital was first commissioned in the shadow of the Civil War, and one of the most famous speeches in American history was given.
“So the contract for the construction of this building was signed on November 20, 1863, but just so happens to be the day after the Gettysburg Address was delivered, 2,700 miles away by Abraham Lincoln,” Thomson says.
The site, now known as Building-2, or the Old Post Hospital, is being leased next year to a private elementary school. But experts from the Presidio Trust say renovators are taking extraordinary steps to preserve its historic detail. From the original coal-burning fireplaces to the raised exterior faades.
“So this is one of the only porches on building two that has remained open air for its entire history. And as a result, it needed a lot of work,” Thompson said. “In particular, these spindles, which we had hand turned, by a local craftsman. And we actually found some of the original spindles elsewhere in the building. So we had those restored and then the columns themselves.”
Project manager Jason Hemp says the challenge is bringing Civil War-era engineering up to modern safety standards, reinforcing concrete, masonry, and the original wood framing and windows.
“And then everything above the ground floor has all new, not all new, but substantially added on wood frame. Easily 40% of the wood structure has been added onto with new wood. So it’s, in my opinion, possibly the strongest wood frame building in the park,” Hemp believes.
Just before the turn of the century, Wright was part of a major expansion. Construction began on nearby Letterman Hospital, named for the Civil War field surgeon Jonathan Letterman, known as the father of battlefield medicine. Around the same time, engineers also added the octagon tower at Wright Hospital, creating an operating room that had natural light available from multiple directions.
“So this building in 1897 would have had surgical equipment. The Army was performing surgeries in this space,” says Thomson, showing off the top floor of the octagon, which still contains a surgical sink.
The small original hospital continued in use to care for post personnel and their families. While the larger Letterman Hospital ultimately took over much of the patient load through two World Wars, along with Korea and Vietnam. And while Letterman was eventually torn down in the early 2000s, Thomson believes the legacy of the two Presidio hospitals is tightly woven into the history of Military Medicine.
“So that military history runs through, Mexican period and pretty much every major war, or military conflict of the 19th and 20th centuries in the United States. So that continuity of history is exactly why this place is nationally significant,” he argues.
The Adda Clevenger School is set to expand into the refurbished building. And will occupy two sites at the Presidio.
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