Veterans Building (Herbst Theatre)

The Veterans Building opened in 1932 — "after much struggle and strife", as a later city planning study puts it — as half of a pair with the Opera House: the Opera House for the opera and symphony, the Veterans Building for the American Legion and the art museum. The two were designed to be read together, with deep setbacks on all street frontages and along the Fulton axis to leave space for the Memorial Court, and faced in terracotta made to simulate the grey Raymond granite of the older Civic Center buildings. The opening of the pair, alongside the Civic Auditorium of 1915, is what the planners credit with turning the Civic Center into the city's symbolic cultural centre. The building's interior has been repurposed more than once: in 1977 the Veterans Auditorium and the library within it were transformed into the Herbst Theater and the Green Room. Those rooms then became civic space in their own right — the Advisory Committee on Charter Reform met in Room 219 through 1994, and in 1999 the Taxicab Commission convened a special meeting in the Herbst Theater itself to take up the driving requirements of Proposition K.