Day 152: California Department of Food & Agriculture Building on N Street

The final building on the block of N Street between 12th & 13th Streets is the California Department of Food & Agriculture:

This building was clearly designed and built by the same team that created the Department of Transportation building, which I wrote about earlier this week, as the vertical stripes above the entry and carvings in the green stone around the door are almost identical, except for the subjects portrayed in the carvings.

Originally, this block of N Street was all residential, but by 1940, the former boarding house at this site on 1220 N Street had been torn down to make room for the Department of Motor Vehicles (note that N Street is at the top of this diagram, so it's opposite the view presented in all of the photos, which show N Street at the bottom):

The tower in the left background of the photo above looks as though it may belong to the Westminster Presbyterian Church, which still stands today, so I'll have to do some research into the history of that structure for a future blog post.

A current aerial view of this block shows, from right to left, the Department of Food & Agriculture, the Thayer Apartments, and Park Place Apartments:

This is definitely an example of mixed-use, medium-density urban development.  At least the pedestrian street-scape remains relatively appealing along N Street, thanks to the setbacks from the sidewalk and the street trees and the view of Capitol Park across the way.