Parkmerced, San Francisco

Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architect Leonard Schultze and landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississippi River after Park La Brea in Los Angeles. It was a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments in southwestern San Francisco for middle-income tenants. It contains 3,221 residences (after sale of five blocks to San Francisco State University (SFSU)) and over 9,000 residents, and is one of four remaining privately owned large-scale garden apartment complexes in the United States. The complex is located south of SFSU, west of 19th Avenue, and east of Lake Merced and the Harding Park Golf Club. The far western boundary of the neighborhood extends to Lake Merced Boulevard, and the neighborhood is popular with students and faculty at San Francisco State University because of its proximity. The property was purchased in October 2005 for approximately $687,000,000 by a joint venture between Stellar Management and Rockpoint Group from a JP Morgan Chase and Carmel Partners joint venture entity.

The apartment towers were designed by Leonard Schultze and Associates, the post-War successor firm to Schultze and Weaver, in partnership with prominent landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church. The development was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, after their success with the Parkchester development in New York City. Development started in the 1939, but was slowed due to World War II. The first tenants moved into the Font Boulevard buildings in early 1944. The development was completed in the early 1950s and was a first home to many military families returning from the Second World War and the Korean War. Metropolitan Life has built similar apartment blocks in other large cities, including Park La Brea in Los Angeles, Parkfairfax in Virginia, and Riverton Houses, Parkchester, and Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan to name a few. Parkmerced’s unusual pie-shaped blocks were designed by its architect, Leonard Schultze, and shares many features with his Park La Brea design. Schultze worked closely with landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church, who often collaborated with cutting-edge, Modern architects, to refine the plan for Parkmerced. Church developed a unifying concept for the landscaping of each individually designed and graded garden courtyard, the different street types, open spaces such as Robert Pender Park in Juan Bautista Circle [dedicated May 3, 2009], the Meadow and the recreation area, aided by office intern Robert Royston.

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