Anson Parsons Hotaling was one of San Francisco's leading liquor merchants in the nineteenth century, and his warehouse on Jackson Street stored some of the most valuable spirits on the West Coast. The building's survival in 1906 was not divine favoritism but rather a combination of the building's brick construction and the heroic efforts of a naval crew that pumped seawater from the bay to save the block. Jackson Square, the small district around the building, emerged as one of the few intact commercial areas in post-earthquake San Francisco, and the buildings that survived became the nucleus of what is now one of the city's designated historic districts.

The Hotaling Building is a San Francisco Designated Landmark, recognized for both its architectural significance and its role in the 1906 story. The building's Italianate commercial facade is characteristic of San Francisco's pre-earthquake commercial architecture -- the kind of building that once lined entire blocks of the city but now survives only in Jackson Square. The district's survival made it invaluable to historians and preservationists, providing a physical record of what San Francisco looked like before the earthquake reset the architectural clock. Today the building houses commercial tenants, its brick walls still bearing the traces of a fire that consumed everything around it but stopped just short of the whiskey.

The survival of the Hotaling Building and its neighbors in Jackson Square gave San Francisco something rare among American cities that experienced catastrophic destruction: a physical link to its pre-disaster self. The district's buildings date from the 1850s through the 1900s, representing the commercial architecture of Gold Rush-era and Gilded Age San Francisco. Their preservation was not planned -- it was luck, geography, and a navy crew with a hose. But the result was a neighborhood that carries the texture of a city that otherwise exists only in photographs and memory.