Historic California Posts, Camps, Stations and Airfields

San Francisco Page and Gough Street Armory

(2nd Artillery Regiment Armory, 1st Infantry Regiment Drill Hall)

An 1891 San Francisco Call drawing of the Page and Gough Street Armory.

 

 

 

History

by SGM(CA) Dan Sebby

Military Historian, California Military Department

 

Located at the southeastern corner of Page and Gough Streets in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, this armory was dedicated on 21 November 1891. The armory served as the home of the regimental headquarters and eight batteries of the 2nd Artillery Regiment, National Guard of California. The regiment consisted of many of the oldest units in state service including Battery D which was formerly the First California Guard that was organized before statehood.

 

The armory had a two-story administrative building that measured 50-feet x 120-feet and had twelve offices for the regimental headquarters and one each for individual batteries. There was also a gymnasium/squad drill room that took up one-half of one of the floors. Attached to this building was an assembly hall that measured 84-feet x 118-feet and had a hanging mezzanine gallery.

In 1895, the regiment was reorganized as infantry and absorbed by the 1st Infantry Regiment. In 1898 that regiment volunteered en masse to serve in the Spanish American War as the 1st California US Volunteer Infantry Regiment and serve with distinction in the Philippines.

 

A custom made chandelier donated by the veterans of Company F (former San Francisco Light Guard)

 

 

After 1895, the armory was also known as 1st Infantry Regiment Drill Hall.

 

Unfortunately, this beautiful armory, which included a custom chandelier made of muskets, bayonets, and a drum that was donated by veterans of Company F, 1st Infantry Regiment, was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. Today an apartment house occupies the space where the armory stood.

 

Remains of the armory following the 18 April 1906 earthquake and fire.

 

In 1912, a new state-funded armory on Mission Street was built to replace this and other such armories.

 

 

 

First Intercollegiate Women's Basketball Game, 4 April 1896

by Stanford University

 

 

 

American life was already changing when nine Stanford women strode onto the court April 4, 1896 at San Francisco’s Page Street Armory to take on the University of California in the world’s first women’s intercollegiate basketball game.

 

That September, the state’s male electorate would weigh a proposal to give California women the vote. (It lost, finally passing in 1911.) Automobiles were already starting to appear on the streets.

 

As the Armory game tipped off, many of the 700 women spectators felt themselves witnesses to similar societal change. All three big San Francisco newspapers sent women writers and artists to cover the historic contest, for men were banned for modesty’s sake. Denied admission, men climbed the roof and peered in the windows. Women inside fended them off with sticks.

 

“There is not an instant of ennui in basket ball. All is motion, change, excitement,” the Chronicle reporter wrote.

 

Yet it wasn’t, not by modern standards.

 

The game invented by James Naismith only four years earlier quickly became so popular among women that a Smith College instructor adapted the rules for what were thought to be women’s physical and psychological frailties.

 

Each half of the Armory court was zoned in thirds according to the so-called “half-court” rules that prevailed in the women’s game with few changes through the 1960s. Three players were consigned to each zone. Each could possess the ball for five seconds and dribble it twice. Only the “home” players at the net could shoot.

 

And at the net, Berkeley’s players, though said by reporters present to be taller and have better hair, were weak.

 

“The girls they had depended upon to score for them missed the basket repeatedly,” the Chronicle observed.

 

The game was tied at 1-1 when Stanford’s Agnes Morley, ’00, executed “a long, fine, straight throw clean from the shoulder” for the win. Morley was a rancher’s daughter from New Mexico who had already hunted bears – real ones – and once subdued a rowdy teenager at the rural school where she briefly taught by punching him in the gut.

 

She and her teammates returned to Palo Alto as heroes, met by cheering male crowds and a Stanford Band serenade.

 

But it was all too much, too soon. In December 1899, Stanford put an end to women’s intercollegiate team sports, according to the faculty, “for the good of the students’ health” and, according to the Daily, for “the unpleasant publicity accompanying the contests.”

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Written and posted 16 October 2021