The Armory was to be the new home of my office. The first time I saw it, I was mostly just floored by the sheer size of the place. It almost takes up a whole city block!

With four floors and a mas­sive base­ment, plus the huge drill court (pic­tured above) our com­pany has more room than the aver­age hol­ly­wood backlot.

from SFArmory.com:

This 200,000 square foot repro­duc­tion Moor­ish Cas­tle was com­pleted in 1914 and was used as a National Guard facil­ity until 1976. It is full of period detail includ­ing cav­ernous dungeon-like base­ments, stone stair­cases, sweep­ing cor­ri­dors, and a gigan­tic drill court span­ning almost an acre. Dur­ing riot­ing in San Fran­cisco in 1934, it served as both a bar­ri­cade and safety point for officers.

The Armory was listed on the National Reg­is­ter of His­toric Places in 1978 and has been out of offi­cial use since this time. Pre­vi­ous con­ver­sion plans through­out the years have been met with much com­mu­nity resis­tance for var­i­ous rea­sons includ­ing gen­tri­fi­ca­tion and broader con­cerns relat­ing to social and envi­ron­men­tal impact. Acworth plans to revive this his­toric build­ing in con­sid­er­a­tion of gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, and social and envi­ron­men­tal con­cerns while restor­ing and ren­o­vat­ing the Armory to its orig­i­nal splen­dor, style and beauty.

When I first got a tour of the place, I was fas­ci­nated by all it’s odd quirks.
When the Armory was built, many mil­i­tary facil­i­ties were inten­tion­ally built over a source of run­ning water (so as to pro­vide for it’s occu­pants if they were ever forced to remain there). The Armory is no dif­fer­ent, which means that Mis­sion Creek runs straight through the mid­dle of our building.

There are also a num­ber of other things in the build­ing left­over from it’s mil­i­tary days…like a shoot­ing range, a gym­na­sium, and a swim­ming pool. Unfor­tu­natly, some­where along the line some­one decided to fill the swim­ming pool with con­crete. Nobody knows why!

There was alot of work put into the place before it was ready for us to move in. The huge ball­room on the first floor had to be con­verted into a work­ing pro­duc­tion depart­ment (shown above). We also had to build a great deal of sets, includ­ing a full size ulti­mate wrest­ing ring!

Extra info:

New York Times arti­cle on Armory Pur­chase.
Armory build­ing Cursed?
Vio­let Blue writes about Armory protests.

I will return on mon­day to com­plete my tale of our armory move, and I’ll have more pic­tures, video and art to share. Have a great week­end everyone!!