History

California Hall, at 625 Polk Street in San Francisco, was built in 1912 as "Das Deutsche Haus" (The German House), designed by Frederick H. Meyer in a German Baroque style said to echo Heidelberg Castle, originally a meeting place for German societies. By the mid-1960s it had become one of the city's secondary venues for the new psychedelic dance-concerts; reportedly the Family Dog mounted productions there in 1965, and over the decade it hosted Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Moby Grape. The building still stands, became a San Francisco Designated Landmark in 1984, and is now part of the Academy of Art University.

Its Place in the Scene

California Hall functioned as a complementary ballroom in San Francisco's dance-concert circuit — a smaller, German-heritage civic hall pressed into service alongside the marquee rooms like the Avalon and Fillmore. It is best remembered today through the Art of Rock poster series documenting its mid-1960s shows. Never the scene's headquarters, it helped absorb the rapid growth of the psychedelic dance phenomenon when demand outran the few dedicated ballrooms.

The Facts

Shows at this Venue