By Keith Menconi | Examiner staff writer
Aug 20, 2025 Updated 17 hrs ago
The San Francisco Gas Light Company building at 3640 Buchanan St. once served as the administration building for a sprawling industrial gas works.
Editor’s note: This article is part of an Examiner series exploring the history of some of The City’s lesser-known historic landmarks. Today, we consider Landmark No. 58 on The City’s local registry, the San Francisco Gas Light Company building located in the Marina.
With its thick red-brick walls and circular tower, the San Francisco Gas Light Company building bears a passing resemblance to a medieval castle with a steampunk twist, making it a strange neighbor to the Safeway that now stands just across the street.
But perhaps its keep-like appearance is entirely fitting, given that, today, the 132-year-old structure is the sole remaining stronghold for the Marina’s industrial past, having survived the 1906 earthquake, technological obsolescence and successive waves of redevelopment.
At the turn of the 20th century, the two-story building at 3636-3640 Buchanan St. served as the administration building for a sprawling industrial complex that, in its heyday, produced much of the gas used in San Francisco for heating, lighting and cooking.
Work to create the complex began in 1884, when S.F. Gas Light — which traces its lineage, through a series of corporate mergers and acquisitions, backwards to the Gold Rush and forwards to PG&E — bought up three city blocks that lie just to the west of Fort Mason and run to the edge of the northern waterfront.
When S.F. Gas Light completed construction in 1893, the complex, known as the North Beach plant, included an oiler dock, a gasometer, and two storage tanks. The larger of the two tanks had a capacity of 2 million cubic feet, making it reportedly the largest of its kind in the Western U.S. and also a highly visible neighborhood landmark.
Steampunk castle stands as last link to Marina’s industrial past
Greg