It’s all about communication
The Pacific Telephone Building rose up at 140 Montgomery Street to be San Francisco’s first skyscraper. It was built in 1925 for $4 million and provided offices for 2,000 workers, mostly women. With its fresh look of verticality and its Art Deco lobby, including the reddish ceiling full of unicorns, phoenixes, and clouds, the building suggested a new style of workplace. Dressed in highly reflective, granite-colored terra-cotta exterior panels, it presided over the city for 40 years.
The architect was Timothy Pflueger (1892–1946), a San Francisco native, who—in the wake of the 1906 earthquake—never went to college yet found his way to the field of architecture and interior design. Following Prohibition, Pflueger’s interiors graced the city’s most renowned cocktail lounges, most notably the Patent Leather Bar at the St. Francis Hotel. Other well-known Pflueger buildings include the Castro and Alhambra theaters (see p. 16), and 450 Sutter street. He also designed buildings for the Olympic Club, the quintessential West Coast men’s club, of which he, himself, was a member. One night, after his customary swim, he dropped dead from a heart attack on the street outside.
Info
Address 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA, 94105 | Public Transport Bus: 8X (3rd St & Howard St stop); 10, 12 (2nd St & Howard St stop) | Tip The restaurant and bar Trou Normand next door offers delicious charcuterie.
Pflueger’s inspiration for 140 Montgomery was a never-built skyscraper imagined by the great Finnish architect, Gottlieb Eliel Saarinen. Now, almost 90 years after it was built, the 26-story building is lost in the glass-and-steel forest that has grown around it. Yet it remains not only an architectural landmark, but also a symbol of the city’s focus on communications: Pacific Telephone was a cutting-edge company in its day. The building’s main client now is Yelp, the online review site. Today, the interior includes various “perks” typical of the modern, progressive, start-up workplace culture, such as showers for commuters and a bike repair shop built inside a former wood-paneled boardroom.
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