the Armory is a 200,000-square-foot Moorish Revival castle at Mission and 14th Streets in 📝San Francisco, CA, built between 1912 and 1914 as a National Guard armory and arsenal.
The architectural firm Woollett and Woollett designed it to replace the armory destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, and drew the exterior — four octagonal towers, rough clinker brick, narrow lancet windows — to read as a fortress rather than a civic building. The National Guard occupied it from 1914 until 1976, using it for drills and storage and, during the 1934 waterfront strike, as a staging point for officers. It then sat largely vacant for three decades while successive redevelopment proposals failed.
In January 2007 the adult studio Kink.com bought the property for $14.5 million and began filming inside the same month, restoring the long-derelict brickwork and running public tours, live shows, and workshops out of the building alongside production. Rising operating costs ended filming there in January 2017, and the Armory sold for $65 million in 2018 to SF Armory LLC, an affiliate of AJ Capital Partners.