Tech Boom Driving Reinvention Of Historic SF Structures For Office Space

Source: San Francisco Chronicle, Carl Nolte
Photo: Now called Landmark at One Market, the former Southern Pacific Building provides office space for Google. (Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle)

I was having a drink with my friend Bradford Whitaker the other afternoon at Sam’s Tavern, a new addition to the venerable Sam’s Grill on Bush Street. Whitaker suggested I try something new: Mount Gay rum and soda. While trying something new, I noticed something old: bricks, blackened and scorched by fire that formed the wall back of the bar.

As it turns out, this brick wall had been covered over by plaster when the place housed a coin-and-stamp shop and was only discovered when this portion of the building was converted into a sports bar last fall. The bricks dated from the 19th century and were scorched and burned in the firestorm that followed the great 1906 earthquake. When workers rebuilt the city, they took bricks from the ruins and used them to build a new San Francisco.

Then it dawned on me. Old San Francisco is not vanishing. It’s just being recycled.

Right next door was a perfect example in the old Mining Exchange building, a 1923 Greek revival structure designed to look like a temple of commerce. It has been repurposed to become the front entrance to a brand new 19-story glass office tower.

There’s a small museum in the lobby featuring a film with Jay Turnbull, an architect specializing in historic preservation. He talks about how difficult it is to make something old into something new.

“It’s always a gamble,” he said. And when it is done correctly, “it’s a miracle.”

Putting new wine into old bottles has been going on in San Francisco for years. Take the reinvention of the 1898 Ferry Building, for example. But the tech boom has put historic recycling on steroids.

The first big reinvention by the tech boom was when the old Merchandise Mart on Market Street was re-purposed in 2012 to accommodate the world headquarters of Twitter.

Other buildings followed, notably the handsome Pacific Telephone Building on New Montgomery Street. When it opened, in 1925, it was the tallest building west of Chicago and an instant San Francisco landmark. But the phone company moved away, and it sat vacant for years. Now Yelp, which occupies 13 floors, is the biggest tenant.

But now, the real boom is really booming. Last fall, Google announced it would lease 300,000 square feet of office space in the Landmark at One Market, a building with a past. It’s part of a huge expansion of tech firms in the city that will change it completely. The Chronicle reported earlier this week that tech companies have leased 2.2 million square feet of San Francisco office in the first three months of this year. That’s enough space to fill nearly two Salesforce Towers. And that’s in only three months.

A lot of those new offices are in shiny glass towers, but many are in famous old landmarks, familiar to generations of San Franciscans.

In my youth, when I was considering a career as either a lawyer or a captain of industry, I figured I’d start at the bottom and work my way up. I signed on as a junior clerk at the Southern Pacific Co. headquarters at 65 Market St.

The SP at that time was one of the biggest employers in the city. Not only did it run one of the biggest railroads in the country, but its land division owned half of California, including what is now Mission Bay. The company even had its own hospital, out by Golden Gate Park.

Southern Pacific was in decline when I was there, but was still a big player in the West. The headquarters was as formal as the estate of an English country gentleman. The office workers wore suits and ties. They wore hats when they left the building. Anyone above the rank of clerk was addressed formally: “Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones.” The executives were all men.

The big, square building, faced in red brick and dating from 1916, housed the company’s corporate headquarters with hundreds of workers and thousands of pages of paper. It was a paper world. Every transaction from freight waybills to memos to paychecks was printed on paper. My first job on my first day was stacking up carbon paper. “Neatly, now” was the instruction. I never bought a hat and lasted only one summer.

The company faded gradually, like the smile on the Cheshire cat, and in 1996 was taken over by the Union Pacific Railroad.

The Southern Pacific name is still over the entrance on Market Street, but now it is called the Landmark at One Market complex, the new home of Google. I peeked in last week. All is different. The atrium, once a dreary courtyard, is full of young techie men and women, all busy inventing a new world. The only man I saw wearing a tie last week was a security guard.

The Mining Exchange, the Merchandise Mart, Pacific Telephone, Southern Pacific all are in the recycling bin. Bechtel Corp., which built the Bay Bridge and BART, moved out of San Francisco last winter after 100 years. Slack is taking the office space Bechtel left behind.

They say old San Franciscans won’t recognize the new San Francisco. But I think they will. It’s like going to your old high school reunion. The school looks the same. Only the people are different.

Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Tech-boom-driving-reinvention-of-historic-SF