Academy of Art Sells Union Square Church Building

Union Square has been humming back to life in recent years with a wave of retail and office tenants, but the latest entry to the neighborhood appears to have come from the heavens.

Epic Church San Francisco has “officially entered the process to purchase [its] future church home at 491 Post Street,” Pastor Ben Pilgreen told congregants, according to the San Francisco Standard. The building, listed for $15 million, boasts 40-foot ceilings and a 1,000-seat sanctuary.

The seller is the Academy of Art University, which purchased the building in 2001 and used it as a student auditorium. The school is in the midst of a citywide real estate selloff valued at $130 million, most recently trading away a Fisherman’s Wharf building earlier this month for $18.3 million. The Post Street sale isn’t the first disposition of a church property in the Academy of Art’s portfolio, as the school offloaded St. Brigid Church at 2151 Van Ness Avenue in Pacific Heights last month for $4.7 million to Fremont-based home furnishings company JLA Home.

By planting its flag in Union Square, Epic Church will be moving into its fifth home since its founding in 2010. Its first meetings were held at the W Hotel, and the religious organization moved into a 6,000-square-foot space on Howard Street in 2011. Roughly three years later, it relocated to a basement at 250 Stevenson Street. In 2023, the church acquired the 20,000-square-foot 414 Brannan Street building in SoMa for $12 million. It has been in operation on Brannan Street since then.

Epic Church’s new base in Union Square is nearly double the size of its current digs, which span 39,936 square feet, according to Loopnet. The structure was built in 1913 as the First Congregational Church and has a notable architectural pedigree, with designs from the Reid Brothers, the duo behind landmarks like the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco and the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland. The religious organization will use the new space “to expand [its] kids and students ministries, foster community and deepen [its] impact in the city for generations to come,” Pilgreen said.— Chris Malone Méndez