The first Merchants Exchange was a three-story brick building on Battery Street, two blocks from the current site. It served as a clearinghouse for trade information, with a library and meeting room where bulletins listed arriving ships and cargoes. The second building, on California Street, added a tower for ship-watching since the new location was farther from the waterfront. In 1904, the third and current building was completed: a fifteen-story Beaux-Arts skyscraper designed by Daniel Burnham and Willis Polk, with a steel-frame skeleton clad in Tennessee granite and brick. It was one of the tallest buildings in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake.

After the 1906 earthquake damaged the building, architect Julia Morgan, who would later design Hearst Castle, was commissioned to redesign the interior. She created a skylit marble lobby leading to the great hall, which she adorned with marble Ionic columns, a coffered ceiling, and vaulted skylights. Morgan commissioned maritime artist William Coulter to paint five 16-by-18-foot murals depicting sailing scenes, each one a window into the seafaring commerce that the Merchants Exchange was built to facilitate. The hall, originally the main meeting room, is now occupied by California Bank & Trust. Morgan's Beaux-Arts lamps and bronze eagles on the exterior complete her vision of a building that honors commerce as civic architecture.

The Merchants Exchange Building sits on California Street between Montgomery and Leidesdorff, in the heart of San Francisco's Financial District. Unlike the flashier towers that surround it, the building speaks in the vocabulary of an earlier era: granite, marble, and craftsmanship that values permanence over novelty. The rooftop watchmen are gone. The ships they watched for no longer carry cargo to the city's wharves. But the murals in the great hall still show sails filling with wind, a reminder that San Francisco's financial district began with men running from a rooftop to the docks, chasing profit with their own legs.