With a proven and award-winning combination of expertise in roofing and a passion for Marin, Sonoma and San Francisco historic architecture, the Wedge Roofing historic roof restoration team takes great pride in preserving San Francisco Bay Area’s treasured landmark buildings. More than just a job, these landmark building projects stir us with pride for California and its storied traditions, along with a sincere appreciation for those home and building owners of the past who passed these structures safely down to us today.
In planning phases, the historical background of these buildings is as imperative to study and understand as the building materials themselves. Knowing about the building, its owners, its story, will be important to applying the perfect historical restoration. A recent project of note was for the Rosenberg Building in Santa Rosa. Still a prominent name in California, “Rosenberg” is well-known in Santa Rosa architecture, and also connects to the past through California pioneer history, and finally to the future with a cure for Alzheimer’s disease.
In 1896, Max Rosenberg, a Jewish immigrant from Poland joined his family who had settled in Sonoma County after being the first overland pioneers to follow the Donner party over the Sierra Mountains in the 1840’s. Thirty-three year old Max, who started his career as a door-to-door salesman, rose to be one of the leading merchants in Santa Rosa, a real estate developer and a prominent leader of the first Jewish Temple of Santa Rosa.
Built in 1921, the six-story Rosenberg building at the corner of Fourth Street and Mendocino Avenue in Santa Rosa’s Courthouse Square was designed by San Francisco architect Sylvain Schanittacher. The elegant Renaissance Revival style structure features stone masonry with symmetrical facades in a clear definition of floors and a flat roof covered by an elaborately detailed overhanging cornice. Nearby is another prominent Max Rosenberg building built in 1937. The Rosenberg Department Store is a national landmark building highlighting the art deco period of architectural design.
Today, a Rosenberg descendent is dedicated to finding a cure in the near future for Alzheimer’s disease. In 2011, Douglas Rosenberg, a venture philanthropist founded the Rosenberg Alzheimer Project. With an initial donation of 3.5 million dollars from the Ellen and Douglas Rosenberg Foundation, the Rosenberg Alzheimer Project is funding research to cure the degenerative brain disease that affects 5.3 million Americans.
