Academy of Art sells historic St. Brigid Church for $4.7 million

St. Brigid Church has stood on Van Ness Avenue through the 1906 firestorm, the 1989 Loma Prieta quake and more than a century of neighborhood change. Now the 20,000-square-foot landmark at 2151 Van Ness Avenue has changed hands for $4.7 million, with the buyer described as an entity linked to Fremont-based JLA Home.

The sale is more than a real-estate transaction. St. Brigid is one of San Francisco’s recognizable Romanesque churches, a building that was dedicated in 1904, rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and reopened on Dec. 21, 1906, only months after the disaster. Its facade was assembled in part from curbstones and crossing stones taken from city streets after the quake, a detail that ties the church as much to San Francisco’s civic history as to its Catholic past. The building also contains a pipe organ and soaring ceilings that have long made it a distinctive presence on Van Ness.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco closed St. Brigid in 1994 and sold it to Academy of Art University in 2005. The university restored the church after that purchase, turning the old parish into one of the most visible pieces of its property portfolio in the city. With the latest sale, the building leaves the academy’s hands and enters an uncertain next chapter. The new owner has not publicly laid out plans for the site, leaving open whether the landmark will be preserved as-is, adapted for another use or folded into a larger redevelopment strategy.

For San Francisco, the deal also points to a broader retreat. Academy of Art University has been slimming down a large local footprint that once anchored downtown and stretches along Van Ness. In 2025, the school listed 10 major San Francisco properties totaling almost 375,000 square feet, signaling a continuing unwind of its real-estate holdings as higher education shifts toward online and hybrid learning and the costs of maintaining a sprawling urban campus grow harder to justify.

That makes the sale of St. Brigid especially resonant in a city where historic buildings are often the last physical link to a neighborhood’s identity. What happens next at 2151 Van Ness Avenue will say as much about San Francisco’s preservation priorities as it does about one university’s changing footprint.