San Francisco Chronicle
The "Chronicle" was founded by brothers Charles and M. H. de Young in 1865 as "The Daily Dramatic Chronicle", and inside of 10 years, it had the largest circulation of any newspaper west of the Mississippi River. The paper's first office was in a building at the corner of Bush and Kearney Streets. The brothers then commissioned a building from Burnham and Root at 690 Market Street at the corner of Third and Kearney Streets to be their new headquarters, in what became known as Newspaper Row. The new building, San Francisco's first skyscraper, was completed in 1889. It was damaged in the 1906 earthquake, but it was rebuilt under the direction of William Polk, Burnham's associate in San Francisco. That building, known as the "Old Chronicle Building" or the "DeYoung Building", still stands and was restored in 2007. It is an historic landmark and is the location of the Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences.
The San Francisco Examiner
Through the middle third of the twentieth century, the "Examiner" was one of several dailies competing for the city's and the Bay Area's readership; the San Francisco "News", the San Francisco "Call-Bulletin", and the "Chronicle" all claimed significant circulation, but ultimately attrition left the "Examiner" one chief rival — the "Chronicle". Strident competition prevailed between the two papers in the 1950s and 1960s; the "Examiner" boasted, among other writers, such columnists as veteran sportswriter Prescott Sullivan, the popular Herb Caen, who took an eight-year hiatus from the "Chronicle" (1950–1958), and Kenneth Rexroth, one of the best-known men of California letters and a leading San Francisco Renaissance poet, who contributed weekly impressions of the city from 1960 to 1967. Ultimately, circulation battles ended in a merging of resources between the two papers.