Olympic Hotel/Alexander Residence, San Francisco

Built as a mid-range residential hotel in 1928 when San Francisco’s Tenderloin was a socio-economically diverse neighborhood hosting nightlife, normie professionals, and vice, when the Yerba Buena Center Renewal project displaced more than 4,000 residents of SOMA into the Tenderloin in the early 1970s, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency engineered an agreement to turn the Olympic into a low-cost SRO and rechristened it the Alexander Residence. In the late 1990s the building’s owner attempted to force out the tenants and convert the building into market-rate housing. On the back of aggressive tenant organizing and political will, the Alexander Residence was purchased by the city in 2001 and leased to a non-profit to operate as affordable and supportive housing for 99 years. Given the way San Francisco has hemorrhaged affordable and SRO units over the last few decades, a success.

The Tenderloin took 25 years to fully rebuild from the 1906 earthquake, much slower than many other SF neighborhoods like North Beach, the Mission, and Nob Hill. The Olympic was part of that final wave that filled in the last remaining empty lots in the late 1920s. A utilitarian box with some Renaissance Revival & Baroque ornamentation, the Olympic was designed by the SF firm Clausen & Amandes. The firm’s partnership was short-lived—ended by the building bust that accompanied the Great Depression—but two other Clausen & Amandes buildings, 935 Geary and 270 Turk, are part of the same NRHP-listed Uptown Tenderloin Historic District that includes the Olympic. Fernand Amandes was the less prolific of the two, but maybe the more interesting—he designed a handful of neat Art Deco theaters. 

The Olympic was a mid-range tourist hotel and a middle-class residential hotel, home to sales people and dentists, stenographers and secretaries. In the 1940 census, the longterm residents of the Olympic were: entirely white, overwhelmingly US-born, and mostly men. A sizable minority had lived there for at least five years—like today, for many people this was their permanent home.  

Now the densest neighborhood of SROs left in SF, a key part of the Tenderloin’s story is the mass demolition and displacement caused by the Yerba Buena Center Renewal one neighborhood over. By the mid-1950s, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency already had plans to designate a broad swath of SOMA blighted and clear it for redevelopment, ultimately anchored by a new convention center. They officially announced the Yerba Buena Center project in 1964, throwing the lives of thousands of residents of the targeted area into flux as the city planned to demolish their homes. 

Many of the nearly 4,000 residents facing displacement were low-income seniors, some of whom lived in the more than 50 residential hotels located in the redevelopment zone. Pressured to leave but fighting to stay in their conveniently flat, centrally-located neighborhood, those affected organized the Tenants and Owners in Opposition to Redevelopment (TOOR). San Francisco’s business community and city government were ideologically committed and financially invested in the Yerba Buena Center project—the marginalized residents behind TOOR had little chance to stop the project, but their efforts did win a promise from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide at least 1,500 low-income, permanent replacement units. 

(...which, do the math, but still—better than nothing). 

Those displaced residents needed to end up somewhere, and the Tenderloin was right next door. To deliver on their promise of replacement units, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency either bought or negotiated agreements to convert tourist hotels and vacant buildings in the Tenderloin into replacement housing, including the Olympic. Many former Yerba Buena residents didn’t want to go there—too hilly a neighborhood for older people—but it was the politically expedient option for the SFRA and the city. 

Renamed the Alexander Residence and reopened in 1974, the preservation of the Olympic as an affordable SRO bucked the trend—starting in the 1970s, San Francisco lost more than 40% of its SROs to tourist hotel conversion and demolition between 1975 and 1988, and the city’s stock of SRO rooms dropped to less than 20,000 from a peak of 90,000. I’ve written about San Francisco residential hotels many times before—the Lankershim, the Crane, the Columbia—and while SROs have their flaws, they were and are a key source of flexible, affordable, and independent housing for people of all types. The monthly cost for the cheapest room at the Olympic hovered in the $800 range (in 2026 dollars), and the switch to government-supported and legally-restricted affordable housing in 1974 brought that cost down even further. 

By the late 1990s, the building owner’s Section 8 contract neared expiration, and they wanted to pay off their Federal Housing Administration mortgage early, which would have freed them up to convert the building into market-rate housing. To prevent the displacement of the building’s tenants and ensure long-term affordability, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation partnered to acquire the building for $6.4m in 2001. The SFRA owns the land while TNDC owns and operates the building, protecting 179 affordable homes in an agreement that runs 99 years. 

Further reading:

• Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States by Paul Groth
• Uptown Tenderloin Historic District NRHP nomination form

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A full production file in the Curt Teich Postcard Archives at the Newberry Library for this one, including a great letter on Teich & Co. letterhead from the salesman, Ed McCarthy, with detailed coloring, retouching, and formatting instructions. It also included a comparison postcard for what the neighboring buildings should look like.

Once the order was in, all the materials would go into this production file envelope, which sometimes would also have a schedule on it. Here, the Olympic Hotel ordered 25,000 copies of this postcard.

The retouching department would go to work airbrushing things out and accentuating various lines and shapes, then creating a proof for approval—here, you can see how McCarthy signed the frisket paper to give the proof the OK. Then various color prints, then the finished product (plus they had to approve the postcard back, obviously).

Some of the ads I used to put together that rent graph.

Plus a couple other neat random things—a different linen postcard and a matchbook.