The Ferry Building as I remember it from the 1930s.

Mark  Bittman of the New York Times wrote an interesting article on April 30, 2006, on the Ferry Building. He called it "spectacularly renovated with a sprawling ground floor that is almost completely devoted to restaurants, produce stands and food stalls with unusually fine takeout."
I never thought I would read that the Ferry Building would be noted for takeout food.
It's not the Ferry Building I remember from the 1930s, when it looked like the above image.
It was the exciting hub of San Francisco transportation. Two competing street car line converged on it; the City owned Municipal Railway on the outside tracks and the privately owned Market Street Railway on the inside. 
Ferry boats departed to Oakland, Berkeley and Sausalito. The commuters did not have to brave the traffic. If they were walking from the Financial District they had their own pedestrian bridge to the second floor of the Ferry Building. They could go aboard from there or from the main deck.
Train passengers starting their journey to Chicago and points East left from the Ferry Building in beautiful ferries owned by the Southern Pacific Railroad. They were carried to the Oakland Mole which extended out into the Bay. There they boarded the Overland Limited and other great trains of the era.
You could eat at the Ferry Building but no interior designer had a hand in the workingman's cafes found there and at numerous places along the docks.
On the second floor a relief map of California stretched the length of the building. Behind glass it gave you a view of the Golden State as if you were in the air looking down.
Across the corridor the California State Bureau of Mines had a wonderful museum displaying every mineral found in the state, including a massive gold nugget.
The relief map is gone and so is the museum.
Too bad.

Bill Roddy,  2007 (age 85)
Mission Viejo CA
More of my San Francisco memories from the 1930s