Besler Building

The Besler brothers built steam engines here — Besler steam cars, aircraft steam plants — in a daylight-factory concrete plant from the early 1920s, and the freight elevator was sized to carry the steam cars built in the building during the war. The 1993 conversion made it one of the first legal live/work loft buildings in the entire Bay Area.

Fifty-one lofts over three stories, with the vintage freight elevator still in service and a long-standing community of artists and designers. Legally zoned live/work matters if you actually intend to run a studio or practice at home — Besler is one of the few buildings where that's the design, not a workaround.