Mission San Francisco de Asís
— — the oldest building in the city.
Not only on a wall.
“A low adobe church on a quiet block of the Mission District, finished in 1791 and still standing through every earthquake the city has thrown at it. Founded five days before the Declaration of Independence was signed three thousand miles east, it is the sixth of the twenty-one Spanish missions strung along El Camino Real. The walls are four feet of mud brick. The ceiling beams are redwood, lashed with rawhide, painted by Ohlone hands with a chevron pattern still visible if you stand back and let your eyes adjust. The basilica next door is the loud one; the old chapel is the quiet one. — from the studio
Mission San Francisco de Asís, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mission San Francisco de Asís, commonly called Mission Dolores after the nearby Arroyo de los Dolores, was founded on 29 June 1776 by Father Francisco Palóu under the direction of Junípero Serra. It is the sixth of the twenty-one Franciscan missions established along El Camino Real in Alta California between 1769 and 1823. The current adobe chapel was completed in 1791 and is the oldest intact building in San Francisco, having survived both the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake without structural failure. The parish basilica next door was built in 1918 and replaced an earlier brick church destroyed in 1906.
The chapel is built of sun-dried adobe brick about 1.2 metres thick, on a foundation of stone laid directly on the sandy ground. The roof beams are coast redwood, lashed with rawhide rather than nailed; the ceiling chevron pattern in red, ochre, and white was painted by Ohlone neophyte labourers in the early 1790s, copying a design from Indigenous basketry rather than European liturgical art. The reredos behind the altar was carved in San Blas, Mexico, around 1796 and shipped north by sea. The cemetery beside the chapel holds roughly 5,000 Ohlone and Miwok dead, marked by a single memorial since their wooden crosses rotted away in the nineteenth century.
The mission complex is at 3321 16th Street, on the corner of Dolores Street, about a ten-minute walk from the 16th Street BART station. Self-guided visits run Monday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a small admission donation; audio guides are available in English and Spanish at the entrance. The chapel, the basilica, the small museum, and the cemetery are all included on one ticket. Mass is celebrated in the basilica next door, not in the historic chapel; the chapel remains a consecrated space and quiet is expected throughout the visit.