St. Catherine's Academy, St. Thomas Hall, 1520 Grand Avenue, San Rafael, Marin County, CA

Significance: St. Thomas Hall was the second significant building built by the Sisters of St. Dominic at their San Rafael Convent/Campus. It was built in 1912 as a Secondary School and Boarding facility. At least two later buildings built on the Campus were patterned after it, and reflect a similarity of design. Many generations of young women were educated here, and resided in the quarters upstairs. In spite of what now appears to be rudimentary sleeping and bathing facilities, the building is recalled with fondness by former students who have returned to visit as adults. It was designed by prominent Beaux Art-trained San Francisco architect Albert Pissis, and is typical of his designs for institutional uses, although he is better known for an earlier series of office and banking buildings built in San Francisco at the turn of the century. The site is currently a small portion of a larger acreage that includes the campus of the Dominican College of San Rafael, which was once owned and operated by the Sisters of St. Dominic. The college has been controlled by an independent Board since 1971. The area has been associated with religious and educational uses since the founding of the Dominican Convent of San Rafael in 1889. Following the 1990 fire in the Motherhouse, St. Thomas Hall has served as home and administrative facility for the Sisters; new facilities are now nearing completion, on the site of the Motherhouse. These events have combined to render St. Thomas Hall, an unreinforced masonry building, obsolete. Following the move to the new center, St. Thomas Hall will be demolished. Its significance derives largely from its historical role as a parochial educational facility, but it is also acknowledged to have architectural value, for its association with Albert Pissis. It is not a particularly well-known structure in the general community, because of the semi-cloistered context created by the original site plan. It has remained relatively unaltered throughout its eighty-plus years, but the costs associated with State-mandated structural upgrades, when combined with the building's obsolescence, have brought about the conditions leading to its proposed demolition later this year.
Survey number: HABS CA-2354-A
Building/structure dates: 1913 Initial Construction