Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

The United Nations charter was drafted under this roof, and Japanese sovereignty was restored on its stage - not bad for a building whose day job is Puccini. The War Memorial Opera House, at 301 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco's Civic Center, opened on October 15, 1932 with Tosca. Architect Arthur Brown Jr. - the hand behind City Hall across the street - designed the Beaux-Arts monument to the city's First World War dead, one of the last great classical public buildings raised in America, its paired Roman Doric colonnade modeled on the Louvre. The auditorium seats 3,146 with standing room for 200 beneath a massive aluminum-and-glass chandelier set in a blue vault, the gilded proscenium framing a stage 123 feet wall to wall with an orchestra pit that holds ninety players. Two resident companies share the calendar: the San Francisco Opera, which has played here since opening night under founding conductor Gaetano Merola, and the San Francisco Ballet, America's oldest professional ballet company; the San Francisco Symphony also lived here until Davies Hall opened in 1980. History keeps intruding gloriously - the 1945 United Nations Conference drafted the charter in the building, the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco ceremony restored Japan's sovereignty here, and TIME called it a house made possible by all the people of San Francisco. A complete seismic retrofit followed the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, finished in 1996, preserving the California Historical Landmark as the centerpiece of the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center campus alongside the Veterans Building and courtyard. More than ninety seasons on, the formula is unchanged: forty-plus opera performances a year, a full ballet season, and an auditorium that still makes grand opera feel like the civic event the builders intended.