The Hearst Building in SF

The Hearsts were a rich, powerful family in the San Francisco Bay Area. They built the Hearst Mining Building at UC Berkeley, one of the oldest and most beautiful buildings on campus. (The family fortune came initially from silver mines.) They owned the afternoon newspaper in San Francisco throughout most of the twentieth century.  William Randolph Hearst, who built Hearst Castle, was the real-life model for Citizen Kane. Patty Hearst…well, enough about them. This is their old office building in San Francisco—no longer owned by the family, I believe, but still preserved as part of our local history.