 Thank you Daphne and and Charles, and I just wanted to thank some other people because it's the really the first opportunity I've had to I want to thank David Farrell who's sitting here in the front row because he and I worked on cooking this up together and Marshall Snyder who also worked on it and Daphne and Pat Akrae who's here someplace who runs the photo archives because this book has a lot of of Archival material out of both the Bancroft and the San Francisco Public Libraries. I also wanted to thank Mimi Manning. She was the Photo research person for me and she'll recognize a lot of this I said do you recognize this because she had this actually taped up on the wall by her her desk for a number of Months while we were working on this and then Dave Schwabbe and Joan Lefkowitz my neighbor across the street Or doing the multimedia presentation tonight What I want to do is I want to test What I call an arguable thesis and I want to emphasize arguable thesis So you know give me an argument about why this is nonsense when it's over or whether you believe it or think it should be very Changed at all and the thesis is that There has been a significant transfer transformation of San Francisco in recent years starting with a long long period of The rise of San Francisco as a world corporate world headquarters See followed by a decline that started in about the middle 80s and I think I can identify when it began and what the transition is like into a new economy for San Francisco and then I want to talk about the Architecture associated with this I Arrived here in in the beginning of 1968 So that would put me You see the skyline 58 and That would put me right in here someplace and as you can see that the skyline in 58 was fairly low rise Here's the ferry building and here's the southern Pacific and I Yeah, this is the southern Pacific building which we'll see later on you can see Some of the other features in the skyline, but it was fairly low rise and by 72 which is 14 years later You got the trans-america pyramid in the Bank of America building and you know eating that The ferry building is lost almost completely here. It is here. It is 14 years later So that the transformation the city was very very dramatic took place in a fairly short period of time This came about and I would argue it was the most Dramatic alteration of the skyline since the fire and an earthquake quake of 1906 and it came about Largely because of a very ambitious Planning effort that was carried out by a number of private sector organizations the city's planning department played a very secondary role in this and that Effort really started toward the end of the Second World War and and shortly thereafter When I got here you could see that there were epic changes taking place in San Francisco there was a wholesale attack on certain neighborhoods by the redevelopment agency and specifically the Western addition which was largely an african-american community hundreds of Victorians were torn down and and thousands of people were displaced There were creation of there was the creation of whole new neighborhoods such as diamond heights also under the ages So the redevelopment agency and then there was the Manhattanization what we came to call the Manhattanization of downtown the building of high rises Which San Francisco's compared to what had happened to Manhattan many years earlier? I moved to a Bernal Heights. I found widespread opposition to redevelopment in Bernal Heights. It was 1968 and the Mission District was actually taken out of Or was eliminated as a possible target for the redevelopment agency the year before and that was the end of Jack Shelley's Career political career. He'd been the mayor He was pushed aside Joe Alioto was really the darling of the downtown really real estate interest became the mayor and Was responsible for the beginning of this Manhattanization process a group of us founded a political review We moved our offices to 330 Grove Street, which was actually a black cultural center in a building that was run by the redevelopment agency and it is now the opera Plaza garage the opera house's garage and We saw firsthand this kind of carpet bombing of the Western Edition and a lot of the resistance that went on Bart was being built mission and market streets were a total disaster the mission although it stayed outside of redevelopment wasn't damaged in that way the The retail businesses along Mission Mission Street were were decimated for a number of years and there was a lot of Destruction of buildings downtown tearing down of old buildings building new buildings This is a Fitzhugh building in the Union Square. It became Sacs Shethaf and you This is the city of Paris On the other corner of Union Square and it became Neiman Marcus While these buildings were being torn down and replaced with upscaled department stores interestingly Based outside of San Francisco Other high-rises were going up. This was built in 1969 the one in the back Which is the Wells Fargo building at that time was built as the tallest skyscraper in the West, but it was quickly supplanted by The trans-america pyramid so the Wells Fargo building went up in 69 trans-america went up in Bank of America on the right went up in 69 and The trans-america period made went up in 1971 in our political review. We were interested in urban issues So a group of researchers in Berkeley Started to look at the history of San Francisco and particularly how the Decimation of the Western addition the changes in the downtown skyline and the mission had taken place and they stumbled across two organizations in particular called the Bay Area Council and the Blyce-Zellerbach committee and They were as I will demonstrate later on by looking at some of the slides. They were responsible for the plans That were drawn up to change San Francisco into a World Headquarters City And then in later years research was done by Chester Hartman particularly in transformation of San Francisco and also by Richard De Leon and left Coast politics that Added more information to our understanding of what had happened to San Francisco as a as a as a cityscape So over the 32 years I've been here. I've witnessed the continuing Manhattanization and the rise of an anti-high-rise movement the Proposition M 1984 stopping the building of high rises the rise and fall and resurrection the redevelopment agency and the emergence of the dot-com economy So here's here's my thesis that there's been a progression in the evolution of the city's economic life and The dates I'm going to give you are rough periods and there's a lot of overlap But initially the city was an instant city characterized by small startup companies It's interesting to use the term startup, but that's what was going on in 1849 and They dominated our economic life in the 1850s and 60s during the era of the Comstock load and the Construction of railroads which started in the late 1850s and then goes on into the 1890s really Economy was characterized by the development of companies were organized by individuals groups of individuals families and Union Ironworks Bank of California The De Young clan and the Chronicle the Hurst and the examiner the Stern Haas Kosin clan which built Levi Strauss and a number of other companies Many of these were regional power houses economically and they had their Very they had very extensive ties with the Pacific Basin in the period 1890s to the Depression you have the rise of the modern corporation in the the emergence of of large San Francisco corporations such as PG&E Pacific Telephone and Telegraph the DeGiorgio Corporation Del Monte Bechtel Bank of America and Standard Oil of California and then with the Transformations after the depression with the transformations brought about by the Second World War and the emergence of the Pacific Basin as a major Factor in the world economy you have the kind of globalization of of major San Francisco companies like Utah International and the Bank of America Bechtel but this peaked in the 1980s and I'll show you this in the buildings and The wheels started to run backward Companies were sold off crown Zellerbach no longer exists Bank of America has been sold and is now headquartered in all places in North Carolina Pack Bell is part of SBC The Crocker Bank is gone So this is the fall the rise and fall. This is the fall aspect of my thesis San Francisco since the Middle Ages has been losing its identity identity as a corporate headquarters city And it's due to the globalization of the economy the emergence of new technology companies companies comms Do the emergence of Silicon Valley to our south as a locale for corporate headquarters? And I refer you today's paper in the last two or three days articles about this Cisco systems Campus that they're building in the coyote Valley south of San Jose Each of these periods the economic Forces that developed the city the companies developed the city the city Developed a certain kind of urban lifestyle that's associated with it associated with it and also there were political agendas and Architectural styles that were popular among people who built commercial buildings So let's go back and look at this evolution by looking at the buildings This is the waterfront in 1851. I think it's important to note that at the very beginning San Francisco Was a principal city in the organization of the Western economy Which was based largely on extractive industries and agriculture and that by extractive I mean mining and timber for instance But it was also an important global crossroads immigrants came here from Asia Latin America the East Coast and Europe This was an entropo through which European capital entered the West There was also a service center providing banking shipping insurance and warehousing for the Western economy So here's here's the city in in 1851 a lot of small brick structures Those are the ships that were brought here in that period 1849 1851 in abandon there 779 ships abandoned in the harbor as people took off for the Goldfields and the architecture was interesting this is the ship the Nyanic right here and There was a lot of improvisation of Buildings people were literally initially people were living in holes and tents and cabins in New England style houses The ship was turned into a hotel into a city jail and into a warehouse and eventually sank into the mud and is now under the building on the Northwest corner of clay in Sacramento and I think a lot of its artifacts were on display at the Gold Rush exhibit at the Oakland Museum It's a typical Small-scale startup company characteristic of this period of time. This is the Daniel give warehouse at front in Vallejo And it was built in 1852 the Gibbon his brother were Scots and They brought they're in the import business and they were supplying the city in the mines They brought in coal and iron products Blasting power corrugated siding which was used for buildings oatmeal bicarbonate of soda various things like that You see it's a very modest brick building and there's another one that they built later on just across the street to the right So you get these very small entities building very small Modest buildings Here's the Gibb warehouse right here in 1865 At this time this was where the you can see the beginning of construction of other warehouses the Broadway pier right here And this was a very popular area in here for Clipper ships to tie up and of course telegraph Hill in the background. This is the Lucas the Lucas Turner bank building at the corner of Montgomery and in Jackson it was actually built by William Tecumseh Sherman in the early 1850s and Again small building. He was the acting on the behalf of a St. Louis banking firm Came here and was loaning money to various businesses in the city and by 1857 it had had enough and threw in the town went back east This is the Jackson Square Historical District, which is the only remnant left After the fire and earthquake of 196 of the city in the Gold Rush era and again, you see that the buildings are fairly small so the huddling building and To the left This is the first your deli chocolate factory right here and then a warehouse that the gear delis bought later on The neighborhood is very interesting because at the time it was a The the people who live there they lived and work there people live in upstairs apartments many people lived in boarding houses Some of them lived in in hotels. There are a lot of residential hotels so as a 20 what they call a 24-hour city there was an inner mixture of of living in The work experience Barbie coasts, which was the most the side of the most notorious dives in San Francisco was the block away So everything was sort of bunched together This was actually at the edge of the waterfront because as many of you know the downtown area is filled So this was right adjacent to the piers that serve the city in the next period of time You get larger Signature buildings identify with specific companies and this is the Bank of California at the corner of California in Samsung in 18s it was built in 1867 designed by David Farquherson and You're looking up California Street, and this is old st. Mary's Cathedral, and I believe Well, it's hard to distinguish in these shadows. These are I'm not sure this could be the Academy of Science building which is where the Academy of Science started out We're now moving into another era you get these buildings that are identified specifically with corporations that are well known and powerful in the regional economy William Rawlson was the founder of the Bank of California and Rawlson's ring was notorious for trying to control the the mining and related activities in Virginia City associated with a Comstock load this Rawlston ended his career when there was a Bank holiday where they shut shut the windows refused to honor the attempts of their customers to withdraw their money in in 1877 causing a near riot He went off to swim in the in the bay and either drowned or committed suicide Other buildings from this period Charles talked about bank off. Here's the bank croft history factory at 721 market Built in 1869, and I don't know the architect. You know the architect. Nope Another Significant building and I don't know when this was built this is to the left It's the Alaska commercial building and this is the this built pictures probably from the 19 teens This is the Bank of California that replaced the original Bank of California that was destroyed in the earthquake and fire in 1906 the Alaska commercial building is significant because it was the headquarters of the Empire trading Empire started by Lewis Gerstle and Lewis Sloss and They controlled the ceiling trade in Alaska and a lot of the trade with Alaska in the 1860s and 1870s It was said that they're lobbyists in Washington actually Made many political decisions that decided the fate of Alaska Sloss and Gerstle's daughters married and They are the patriarchs of the very complicated intermarried Clan of Gerstle's losses Hosses Branson's Lillian falls Stearns Cochens, etc. Etc. Etc. On your right is the Spreckles building which was built in 1898. It's the corner of third and Market and on the left is the Chronicle building built in 1889 The Spreckles building was designed by George Applegarth, and it was the headquarters of the San Francisco Call Klaus Spreckles was a German immigrant who got into the sugar business and at one time controlled half the trade with Hawaii and sugar His son John played a major role in the development of San Diego as a metropolis and This was an early example of a San Francisco high-rise tall by the standards of the 1890s Across the street is the Chronicle building built in 1899 By Michael de Young to house the Chronicle and it was designed by Daniel Bertram And this is probably one of the most significant buildings in the in the city and believe it or not both these buildings in very different form Are still there if I had the time I'd show you what they look like today, but I don't The Spreckles and the de Young's were involved in a continuing feud after one of Klaus Spreckles sons shot Michael de Young after Michael de Young Accused Klaus Spreckles of being a slave holder because of the way he treated his employees on his Hawaii sugar plantations This is a significant building because it's the earliest High-rise and it's designed by Daniel Burnham who was a Chicago architect and it's the introduction of what they called Chicago style Or neoclassical architecture in the San Francisco, and you'll see better examples of this later on but basically the notion here is that you've got the the base of the building and then the column and then the capital and this is this the designs were derived by Study in architecture schools of the architecture of renaissance France in Italy and broke France and Italian architecture So you get this kind of tripartite Definition of the building with the with the base and the column and then the cornice I can't tell if it's snow or just a bad picture. You mean down in here Yeah, it could could well be Twice since I've been here San Francisco was a manufacturing center in those days This is the Union ironworks founded by the Donahue brothers, and this is down at Petro point, it's actually right near Petro Hill and a couple of these buildings right in here are still there and In fact these two I think it's these two are still there perhaps this one And there's a still a dry dock here and if you go to Mission Rock, which is over here You can actually look into this dry dock and it was of a significant enough significance as a Manufacturing center that they were building battleships, and this is the launching of the Charleston in 1891 So I'd note that San Francisco companies have extended and consolidated their global reach specifically in the Pacific Basin San Francisco played a major role in the development of Alaska Hawaii San Diego. They're building battleships This is the beginning of the era of US imperialism in the Pacific which Really We really expanded our interests during the Spanish-American War. We took the Philippines Building that building battleships to be able to do that The city fathers were describing the city is the capital of a great Pacific Empire Excuse me. Just a second. This is the corner of Montgomery and Market and Post In 1920 and these are very typical Chicago style buildings You see the the base here With the arches and then the column part of it and then the the capital with the different kinds of cornices This is actually the Crocker Bank building and much of downtown in the period starting in the 1890s up into the early 1920s looked like this building is of About 12 to 18 stories in height The city was moving away from being a 24-hour city. There were still some light manufacturing In the downtown area. There were still residences there, but the starting really back in the 1860s The residential neighborhoods were developing and being differentiated according to class and ethnicity and The downtown area was was largely commercial and then coming with the coming of the The automobile after the earthquake and fire in 1906 The downtown changed quite a bit. It became more congested dirty or noisier and Less appealing as a 24-hour city anyhow neighborhoods, this is Webster Street Italian 8 Victorians built in the 1860s. So this would be a kind of a middle-class Neighborhood were white-collar types who who commuted to downtown and the cable cars lived Or the top of Knob Hill were the very wealthy railroad barons and the the owners of Big Mines in Virginia City lived so the Stanford and Hopkins mansion is built in the 1870s There are areas of the city were extremely shabby. This is Pine Street Looking down Pine Street in 1895 with the I think that's the Merchants merchants exchange building in the background and you can see the city was was quite a fire trap and It's not surprising that it burned as as rapidly as it did after the earthquake There were still areas of the downtown that were Residential and they were particularly along the waterfront, which was also very rundown and very sleazy. This is a a Sailors boarding house down at about somewhere just south of Mission Street around Stewart and Folsom in that area There were residences down there Boarding houses saloons whorehouses and it was a notoriously tough neighborhood In this kind of residential area ran up into the south of market then after the fire and earthquake Downtown was rebuilt again in the style of the Chicago buildings that I showed you earlier This is the southern Pacific building built in 1916 Designed by Blisson and Fayville and then going on up up Market Street This was just taken the other day. So you can see the Hyatt Regency right behind it This is the Mattson Steamship lines building on the left PG&E on the right the whole thing is PG&E right now Companies we no longer know anything about unless we're historians like the Robert dollar Line, which was another steamship line. This is the standard oil of California building Designed by George Kellum in the 1920s So I'm looking I'm showing you the the buildings of some of the real powerhouse corporations in San Francisco at the time standard oil of California for instance Was split off from the Rockefeller Empire in 1911 in the famous resolution the famous antitrust case and by 1919 was the largest producer of oil in the United States 1932 they made the first significant discovery of oil in the Arab world and Could well be the first truly global corporation in San Francisco Shell oil and this is Bank of America This was built under the direct supervision of a PG&E in 1908 designed by F.T. Shea He was PG&E. He was very concerned about the look of this building and particularly interior Which is very very elaborate. You get a chance to stick your head in It's now. I think the Bank of San Francisco and the shell oil building At 100 bush, I believe it is Again by George Kellum and it's interesting contrasting the earlier Kellum building, which was very traditional Chicago style with this Building built a little bit later in the 1920s When he's been there's a lot of deco detail on this building if you look look at it closely up in here and he's been influenced by in part by the the arrival of deco in the United States from France in the 1920s and also by the Cass Gilbert's Woolworth building the Gothic building in New York City and by Eli Saranen's building that he Never built but designed for the Chicago Tribune took second place in the contest but many architects were influenced by this particular drawing and What's interesting about this particular building as you can see that they're getting bigger and bulkier the power and range of San Francisco's corporations are growing and The downtown area is becoming Increasingly devoted solely to commercial use. This is Timothy Fluggers Pacific telephone and telegraph which is now packed Bell which is over on New Montgomery Street and another there's a lot of deco detail up in here This has been beautifully restored in recent years another building. That's symptomatic of the companies in San Francisco in the 1920s was this was built in 1925 and is one of the real gems is very nicely lit at night if you if you've seen it from the freeway This is a post war building. So in the depression The construction that you've been looking at took place and ended of course in 1929 during the depression There was almost no commercial construction going on in downtown San Francisco at all and the significant buildings that were built were public works starting after the war the It took a time it took a while to to for the city to get back on his feet and When construction of significant buildings began in the downtown area It was in the modern style. So this is the Zellerbach building and It's a building influenced very much by the Bauhaus in in Europe in the kind of sleek modernism as practiced by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and and by Their associates and interestingly this is a skidmore rowing's Merrill building. They built it in Conjunction with Let me see Hertzkan knolls in 1959 It looks a lot like the Seagram building which Mies van der Rohe designed 10 years earlier in New York City and some of the original Partners in in skidmore rowing's Merrill some of the original major architects in the firm were actually students It in Illinois of Mies van der Rohe So there's a very direct connection and you can see the contrast between this building in the foreground with his glass wall and Kellum's Standard oil of California building and at the back after the war San Franciscans were concerned about the future of the city and the business community started organizing in 1944 to remake the city as a Corporate headquarters city and the the effort began really with the formation of the Bay Area Council in 1944 Bank of America Standard Oil PG knee US Steel and Bechtel and they The in turn created a network of interlacking corporate sponsored organizations the Chamber of Commerce here Another organization called the Blyce-Zellerbach committee in San Francisco at the time Had a kind of small-town atmosphere if you've ever read Alan Jacobs book about his planning experience here He describes how virtually everyone seemed to be In the same club as or in the interlocking directorates of various corporations or shared Boxes at the opera or attended the same We're members of the same country club either down the peninsula or the Pacific Union Club in the city So it was a very small tight Business community so the kind of planning that they undertook was easy to do Because everybody was working on a kind of a face-to-face basis the idea with a The building of a corporate headquarters city was to construct a regional transportation system, which was BART Prove the airport make the downtown of San Francisco Hub where headquarters buildings for the major corporations could be built BART was the Bay Area Council's first project the funding for the bond measure was raised by the Blythe-Zellerbach committee Charles Blythe was a stockbroker who was also a Hewlett Packard director and JD Zellerbach was associated with the with the Crown Zellerbach company and and the family that that built this building This is a very interesting building because you can see one the transition from from neoclassical or Chicago style buildings to modern buildings But also it's still of a even though it's moving up in terms of its size. It's still of a relatively humane scale It was predicated on Le Corbusier's notion of the of the The tower in the park and it is actually a tower in the park You can see the the triangular triangular part of the block where it's situated and A little banking a very interesting modern banking temple here And then the the park area is down in here So I went down to look at it the other day to see how it worked as a public space because the idea was that that you could combine a Private corporate headquarters with a very attractive public space and in fact they did and it still works This is the park and and I don't know who the designer is on this whether it was Lawrence Halperin I'm not sure but this is the park that's below street level and it's where the bike messengers hang out today and it's very nice well lit and In a popular place to be The major project in the downtown area starting in the 1950s was the Golden Gateway project and this was something was carried out by the redevelopment agency and These are the principal buildings These three here They're residential towers and then down here you have sort of townhouses and again. It's a park in the In the tower in the park type of construction and you can't see but you'll see later on Here's what was called the Alcoa building which is now one maritime plaza also part of the redevelopment project and then the various Embarcadero towers and it looks at this point like only two of them have been constructed it had been the the produce market and the produce market was removed and and these buildings were built and Again, the idea was to combine a kind of a private and a public space So I went down took a look at this to see how this worked There's the produce market it was Justin Herman the Head of the redevelopment agency who is kind of the Robert Moses of San Francisco had a very profound impact on What happened in the city with Archbishop McGuckin and they're working on a Another international style or modern tower in the park development This is actually Cathedral Hill with the with st. Mary's and a number of apartment towers It's maybe symptomatic of way decisions were made in the city at that time And this is the Alcoa building by skidmore rowing's Meryl very interesting exercise in in functionalism the demonstration of the functionalism of the building with the earthquake sway bracing looking outside It's now called one maritime plaza the thing that I found fascinating about this I'd never been up Onto the plaza that surrounds this building and it's supposed to be a public space So when you start walking along here It's very hard to figure out how to get up there and there's one very small entrance over here And there's another on the other side And when you get up there, there's a lovely public space in fact There's there are two lawns and four gardens and each of the gardens has Sculpture in it and it's a very very beautiful spot and there's nobody there And it's anybody been in this Yeah, so some people have found it. This was a discovery to me It's one maritime plaza Clay battery and Sacramento No, Sacramento clay Washington and battery in the waterfront And this is right next door and this is three minutes later. I crossed over the Over the walkway to the Embarcadero Center and you can see at the same time the Embarcadero Center Which originally was not very successful as the public space works very well as a public space This is the trans-america pyramid so you get these mega projects downtown and the construction of buildings like the trans-america pyramid and earlier The Golden Gateway project and an effort that was undertaken by Joe Aliotto and Cyril Magnin to attract Eastern corporations to San Francisco and they were going to bring us steel out here and us deal was going to build a tower On the waterfront that was going to be taller in the Bay Bridge And that was one of the buildings that really triggered the anti-hieryze movement The other was the trans-american building which is right here and the original plans called for this to be about 250 feet higher I believe I think it's something in the neighborhood of 750 feet It was supposed to be a thousand feet. There was a lot of opposition from the telegraph Hill Dwellers Association to blockage of the views and The building was reduced in scale somewhat to accommodate the neighbors, but it was Built and those two buildings in particular US steel building, which was never built and the trans-american builder building triggered the anti-hieryze movement the first Initiative went on the ballot in 1971. It was written by Alvin Duskin It lost but there were a series of of high rise initiatives after that that finally One was finally passed in 1984 The the corporate community downtown had very Different notions about how to deal with it one was to just pay a lot of money to make sure that the initiatives never won The other was a more accommodating approach taken by Walter Haas in particular of Levi Strauss Levi Strauss originally moved from its headquarters. I'm not sure where they were into the Embarcadero Center And it was said that Walter Strauss Did not like the impact of living of working in the Embarcadero Center on his employees He had to go up and down the escalators the elevators to to meet with people and he found it to be a very Unfriendly and hostile environment, so they moved over to the foot of telegraph Hill building the Levi's Plaza Levi Strauss Plaza in 1982 it was designed by Helmut the bottom and Casabon As earlier as 1971 Haas had been talking with Alvin duskin about working together to implement height height limits So as to head off any severe restrictions on the height of buildings by the way of a ballot initiative So you can see both the accommodationist approach of a man like Haas to the forces opposed to to large-scale buildings and the attempt to to build a more contextual and accommodating corporate headquarters, so you see here. We are at the foot of telegraph Hill One of the buildings is on the right It's a campus style development with lovely Landscaping by Lawrence Halperin and It's designed to fit in with the the old warehouses that are in this area that were Built in the 1890s some of them survived 1906. This is the Italian Swiss colony one with a balustrade on the right Actually William Worcester and his firm had gotten in here in about 1970 and done the ice house project And the telegraph Hill people of course were afraid these buildings would be torn down and high rises were to be built in this area Which was actually Cyril Magnin's plan so they were pleased to To see that these kinds of buildings were building built and that historically significant buildings were preserved and that the new architecture somehow fit into the the existing architecture And you can see the space that's available in the in the development To represented a major shift in San Francisco architecture But it was only one project really in the more typical of what went on This is the new standard oil building in 1975. This is five 75 Market Street another Hertzka Knowles building and this building was actually designed to accommodate Some height and bulk guidelines are written by the playing department in the early 1970s But of course, it's it's a mega structure so Manhattanization was continuing a pace despite the efforts of of the Haas is to be more accommodating. I don't think Most the companies in the city of that size had either the intention or the money Perhaps to acquire the land and build a sprawling Campus style headquarters. I found an appropriate quote in Peter Blake's book from Form follows fiasco why modern architecture hasn't worked. He wrote 1974 He was a practicing architect and wrote a lot about modernism and its impact on the cityscape He wrote that skyscraper curtain walls are no longer designed by architects, but by real estate salesmen Today the rentable square footage in an American office tower is measured from glass skin to glass skin This means that every skyscraper developer insists upon pushing the glass line of his building out as far as the laws Determining the shape of the envelope will permit the result is a building that will generate as much rentable interior space as possible And this is very typical of the buildings that were built along Market Street, and there was a kind of a a gesture made by standard oil toward the notion of the of the tower in the park I missed a spot there so this is this was the outcome of Of this kind of construction you get older buildings tremendously overshadowed by the new ones You actually get a client change of climate downtown. It's colder windier and darker and those of you have worked down there Well, no, this was Standard oils gesture toward the tower in the park. This is their park But when I went down to look at it carefully I'd walked by many times thought I'd seen people sitting there But in fact, it's just a flower display with a ramp an entrance ramp Going to the two standard oil buildings that goes through it And if you were if there was some place to sit in there, you probably wouldn't want to sit because it's so cold and dark Across the street directly across the street an interesting contrast. We're back to the Crown Zellerbach building and this is the same you know, this is five minutes apart on the same afternoon and It's sunny and warm and lovely over there. So mark market Street began to look like this with these huge refrigerator boxes Built all along Market Street and toward the end of the period of Manhattan station There's some some very beautiful buildings that were built and if I had time I'd point them out to you today I invite you to look at my book and you'll see some of the descriptions of these buildings and by 1984 the anti-high-rise forces had been able to broaden their coalition been largely a kind of a middle upper-class type of movement among Wealthier people in San Francisco are concerned about their views and about the sort of the environment downstairs Downstairs downtown and there had been a kind of a coalition of corporate leaders and labor unions backing the the construction of high-rises by the early 18 1980s that coalition fell apart and 1984 proposition M was passed and it was a very very significant Had a very significant impact on San Francisco It limited the height and bulk of buildings It specified what the tops of the buildings would look like what architects came to call the the funny hat regulations It was a plan of national significance. It was greeted by the New York Times Calling for the San Franciscoization of Manhattan and we talked about Manhattanization they called for the San Franciscoization of Manhattan, but it's important to understand why prop M1 I said earlier The coalition that had supported high-rises fell apart The Chamber of Commerce did not back prop M nor did organized labor But the fact was that there was excess capacity in terms of commercial space downtown and Manhattanization was essentially over. There were no more Clients to build a headquarter buildings So we fast forward to the present and this is the new gap building Which is just about to be completed at Embarcadero and Folsom And this is an interesting commentary on the whole concept of the corporate headquarters city because this is designed by Robert Stern Who is one of the Advocates of contextualism and architecture and it's designed specifically to fit in with the Hills Brothers coffee building down here and with the the brick style of warehousing south of market and a lot of glass And it's it's a modest building Stepped back so that doesn't look too overpowering what I found very interesting about it was when I talked to their PR person about the building I said well is this the gaps corporate headquarters and they said no This is the the gap is headquartered in the Bay Area So the whole notion of a headquarters building is kind of disappeared I don't quite understand what they mean that gap is headquartered in the Bay Area But they were not interested in identifying the gap as building a world headquarters building in San Francisco I think the other interesting thing about this building was originally it was designed to accommodate a trading floor for Montgomery securities Montgomery securities belong to Bank of America Bank of America was sold Montgomery securities I'm not even sure if it exists anymore the trading floor is not in that building and that to me is symptomatic of Not only the fact that there are no more clients to build World headquarters type buildings, but that many of our most important corporations that have been identified for a Century or more with the history of San Francisco or not San Francisco companies and specifically the Bank of America was sold southern Pacific It's disappeared into Union Pacific and then maybe into another transportation company Southern Pacific does remain in the form of the Catelas Corporation, which is building Mission Bay Crown Zellerbach is long gone Madsen's long gone Robert Dollar. Most people don't even know about The Crocker Bank was sold the Chronicle the de Young's Terriott clan sold the Chronicle to the hearse But the hearse aren't even a San Francisco based corporation. They're New York based So this is a building for for the new year But even more characteristic of the new period is of the of the dot-com economy is This 1996 Fisher Friedman building that's built in the Oriental warehouse Down behind Delancey Street. This is Delancey Street right there This was in the ruins of a building that was damaged in 89 Then there was a fire and then Fisher Fisher Friedman built live work spaces Inside the remains of the building another view of it and here's the building in the probably of the 1880s or 1890s when it was the warehouse of the Pacific and Orient steamship line This is actually steamboat point where the new Packville stadium is What you get is you've got a new economy the economy that we identify with the dot-coms. They're not interested in High-rises downtown. They're more drawn to the to the warehouses of the South America market area And you're seeing San Francisco returning at least in that area around steamboat point in South of Market to a 24-hour city where there's an intermingling of light industry industry as long as it lasts a lot of it's being driven out But there's still a lot of traditional light industry South of Market. There are a lot of residences People all the way from the people who are accommodated by low-income housing Built by Todd co and other organizations around the Moscone Center around 6th Street There are a lot of is a large immigrant Asian immigrant population South of Market, and then they're the dot-comers in their lofts so we're kind of Returning in some ways to The city as it was Many years ago So just to give you a kind of a quick tour of the present the future I went down yesterday afternoon and look through this area and it's all zoom down there and There's a politically correct advertising. These are the heroes are being recruited to be employed in this building across the street and A lot of radical posturing more with selling fashion with clenched fists and Here's where they're all going to be working. This is the Fowl architects building at on Brandon Street 475 Brandon Street, which is just Opening and So the old traditional buildings, I don't know what this was, but it wasn't a warehouse I don't think the old traditional buildings are sprouting these interesting new appendages and the Fowl architectural firm if you don't know has Done the design for the new gay lesbian bisexual and transgender center on Market Street When I went in there to ask who the architect was they said it was for people in the internet economy And I gather that comm is a dirty word I Live work lofts The architecture is on a smaller steel scale comparable in in quality with what went into the standard oil building in 1975 This is a Famous old warehouse called the hazlet warehouse. It was built for southern Pacific in 1904 designed by McDonald and Ark and apple garth and it's being being turned into Offices for the internet economy new project next door or three or four lots down This is Heller and Manis's new building that's designed very much in the style of the Of the gap building with the attempt to use brick and glass to emulate the the style of the traditional warehouses next door and the contextualism contextualism is interesting you've got The ballpark which is a imitation of an old-timey ballpark next door to this new Heller Manis Development which is an attempt to to emulate the the warehouses next door And it starts getting very confusing There's Zuma X which I couldn't tell whether this was a dot-com or a Christian church or a strange cult And when I started to take this picture you see the guy scurrying inside. That's what made me very suspicious He didn't want his picture taken And you get wine bars, and I like to drink wine, but I don't understand wine bars This is part of the 24-hour city south of market And then you get things like this and of course here's Starbucks Which is always a sign of the decline of Western civilization And you can go here, and I couldn't figure out this place. Oh, yeah, I don't know what that is But if you go over here, and you get money and Starbucks out of these machines I couldn't figure this out. I kind of walked around it for a while and then left and I wanted to find some kind of architectural statement that that we could recognize and identify with so here's Here's a neoclassical McDonald's. I Don't know the architect or the date And eventually I just gave up and the urban iconography of south of market was really too much for me I didn't even know what wild Billy was or who he was But I wanted to comment on another thing a number of things about the future of San Francisco I put this in for one purpose not because I'm particularly interested in the ballpark What I'm interested in is the the slope of the skyline and according to the guidelines defined by proposition M The taller buildings can be around Market Street and if you look at the maps which I have in my office they they step down and When you get into dot-com country You're into low-rise buildings and then I was speculating about well, what's going to happen in this area in the future? As we know the dot-com economy is showing signs of weakening and I think it's going to go the same way as The the earlier hardware and software businesses did that is we'll have a lot of consolidation Many many companies will drop by the wayside there'll be some some large companies like Cisco that will emerge and Perhaps they'll want to build headquarters buildings again and south of market if you look at it is filled filled with empty space and What from a real estate developers? Perspective is underutilized buildings. So we could see in the future the development of some significant perhaps even headquarters Buildings in this area and there is very much a foot a discussion carried on by architects about the the return of the high-rise right now The characteristic buildings south of market toward Mission Street are called mid-rises and this is at 101 second Street I think it's also a skidmore Owings Merrill building and it's about two years old and this is the kind of quintessential Mid-rise and it was the first building built During at the end of a period of 1991 to 1998 when there were no high-rises built downtown at all So we'll see more buildings like this and this is you know It's it evokes to me the crown Zellerbach book building that we looked at earlier It's got so there's kind of a return to modernism in the sleek glass look and as I was looking at What you could distinguish of the drawings for Mission Bay and the paper the other day they did look quite a bit like this building so we might see the Return at least of the mid-rise to the area I'm not sure there will get high-rises on the scale of the trans-america pyramid or the Bank of America and You could see some Significant changes in the architecture of south of market because from a developer's point of view it really is open space Then I refer to the interest in the re in the construction of high-rises if anybody listened to Michael Krasny the other day he had Kathy Simon the head of spur and Aaron Bedski from the museum of modern art talking about high-rises and architecture in San Francisco and Skidmore o'ings and Aaron Bedski and a number of architects have argued for the the importance of building high-rises in San Francisco So this is sort of you know, what could be happening in 2049 to our city if if we Experienced the return of the high-rise But given the amount of open space south of market in the low density of the development there I'm not sure that This is what's going to come about So thank you for your attention and any questions Questions arguments could you wait till somebody hands you a mic please? Okay, we had go ahead you're next Bob Woodman here. I live on Cathedral Hill. I've been in the city coming from Boston three years ago St. Max Church, which is a historic building was once the only building left on that lot when the urban renewal was done in the Western addition Perhaps you have a comment for what went on up on the hill other than the flatland and And and the development even of that lot if you know something about yeah, the Initial response of the parish and if you look in the book, there's a whole Thing about St. Mark's I can't remember the name of the pastor and the initial response of the parish to the notion of redevelopment was positive because it was described or Regarded as what they called a blighted area but when the when the The minister there saw what the impact was which was displacing the people who lived in the neighborhood who were low-income people He became very upset and they actually built two buildings there St. Mark's did one was the Building that's on Franklin Well, that's one of them. That's the second one that was built as a co-op and the idea was to attempt to How some of the people who were being displaced by redevelopment now What actually happened in terms of who got in that building? How long they stayed and what happened to it as a co-op? I don't know because I couldn't find anybody at St. Mark's who could tell me the story, but the minister has written a book about the early experience of Supporting redevelopment then being appalled by what it was doing in the neighborhood because it was a very carefully designed plan to Change the class nature and the racial balance in that neighborhood. It was you know, it's all spelled out fairly carefully Hi We were talking toward the end about the South market as I understand it part of why it's Been developing slower than it might have is because it's a public transportation desert There's a lot of talk these days about redoing the Transpay Terminal What do you think the impact of that will be if they ever It sounds like they might have actually decide agreed on something and The arguments over that have been going on for decades now So what do you think that'll I think the the most immediate impact will be from the Third Street light rail Which seems to be moving along? The Transpay Terminal, I'm not sure that it's any farther than in the discussion stage and the discussions I've The articles I've seen about it in the paper, which I'm sure everybody else has seen has to do with building Something adjacent to it or on top of it or I'm not sure exactly where they would build it in relation to that the the other notion that's been Talked about a lot is is creating a transportation system that would bring the trains in or some connector in from this the old well, what do you call it now the Caltrans terminal to that area so that you wouldn't have this kind of disconnect where you get off the trains and at Caltrans and then have to get into the downtown area, but you know Public transportation is the only way to go San Francisco and it's very hard for them except with except With the experience of the ballpark is very hard for them to accept the notion That public transportation is the way to go I think the ballpark experience was very instructive and that is if There's just no parking People get up on the trolleys and get down there Yeah, this isn't meant to be a political question But I'm just wondering what effect if any you think the passing of prop L would happen the return of the skyscraper You know, I haven't read I haven't read the measure in detail and the devil's in the detail with those things So I can't really comment on it I think What we do see and what the live work experience tells us that if there are planning guidelines and rules and regulations That they're very easily circumvented if you have a mayor In a compliant planning commission that have certain objectives in mind and one of the interesting things I discovered about the whole Effort to build the 49ers a new stadium Which was it was actually it blew a hole through prop M and permitted the construction of high rises above the designated height limit in the area out there where they're going to build the the the mall and Everybody missed that and I almost missed it too. I thought oh, this is really this is really interesting. So You know again, it's it is a political question. It's a very political question I mean you can have those guidelines, but if they're not enforced or deals are made Yeah So if someone wants to build high rises and they got the political Power and and the economic backing they'll do it. Yeah, I have a question that Concerns me and you didn't cover it in your your presentation That's the role of the grand hotels in San Francisco over the last 150 years and the fact that we keep building these large large larger hotels and I'm just curious what role that they play or have played in the city and why do we still have them building That that building I was going to talk a little about that. That's a residential building I Maybe part of it is but when I went down I actually took a slide of it because I thought it was supposed to be a hotel Is it mixed use and It's gonna have a four seasons in it Well the whole history hotels in San Francisco some of what I know some of what I don't know But you know the the notion that one of the drivers of the economy here Which I didn't really talk about at all as a tourist trade and the convention business And those are built to to accommodate both of those and they're built on short-term estimates of What's required in the terms of accommodations for them whether they'll be over capacity at some time I'm doing that. I don't know. I think the interesting thing about the Four seasons is that it does have a very large residential component And there is also another high rise in San Francisco that has penthouses in the top of it So you get this kind of 24-hour city notion returning to the market street area But you got to have big big bucks to live in any of these places I'd like to know if you could touch on the demise of the great and barcadero freeway and Yeah, I talk a lot about it in the book, but I didn't want to bore you with that one tonight Well, this gives an idea how The thought maybe you know a little bit about well I was thinking of the architects has changed with that with it being gone Yeah I mean it was it was a design disaster and it had a really negative impact on the downtown and I think the most important thing about it was it triggered a very very strong response in the neighborhoods Because it wasn't just the embarked arrow freeway was a whole network of freeways It went through Golden Gate Park and and they were supposed to come running down the panhandle and connect with the downtown and go through Pacific Heights and When they didn't like it in Pacific Heights They're gonna put it over in the mission because it was a working-class neighborhood And it really was a very very important the so-called freeway revolt which started in the late fifties preceded the whole fight about the high-rises and Some ways preceded the fight over redevelopment particularly in the western edition in the mission So it was part of that mixture of events that took place it inspired neighborhood politics in San Francisco And really laid the foundation for the the kind of politics that we have today Which is fundamentally different from what it was for that event, but I do talk about that a lot in the book because when you get into neighborhood politics you get into issues of What neighbors want, you know, what kind of buildings they want their neighborhood and and sort of local control issues and that sort of thing Okay, we have time for one more question, and then Peter will sign books and talk to you further at the Stacey's desk Thank you I judge from some of your comments that you feel that The development of high-rises both commercial and residential has been detrimental to the sort of traditional fabric of San Francisco In light of the astronomical rents for both residential and commercial uses in the city How do you now feel about high-rises and how they might actually expand supply? I think they're what? You know being sort of a I would character myself characterized myself as having been a knee-jerk opponent of high-rises and I think that I try to give Equal time to the opposition in my book and particularly talking about an article that Aaron Betsky wrote About the need for high-rises and talking about Skidmore, Owings, Merrill's arguments I mean there is an argument that says that You know you need to concentrate You know you got to prevent Urban sprawl prevent high-rises from sprawling all over the place. So you concentrate them in one area and You provide public transportation to them and that that's and then you space them out So you go back to the tower in the park Notion and I think in that article that Betsky did in San Francisco magazine There was actually a drawing showing a series of towers Along the waterfront and you space them so that they don't block Views as much as they would if they were a solid shoulder-to-shoulder rank of high-rises So I think there's there's some legitimacy to the argument You know do you want to high-rise or do you want macro media located in Petro Hill or you know You know those decisions are Difficult ones to make but I do think that that the high-rise environment that we constructed constructed downtown was not a very Humanly satisfying one and I think the you know I was trying to show that the the whole notion was actually a really interesting notion and look for who see a was a very progressive Kind of utopian thinker and it just got completely out of control because what drives those kinds of decisions is not planning Not the work environment not people's Basic social and work needs. It's the economics of the corporation to drive them So you don't want to maximize the space build the building as tall as you can you don't get the seagrams building is great It's set back from From Park Avenue and no one would ever be able to set a building back like that It's just too expensive to do it Thanks so much Peter and as I said, he'll be signing books in the back with Stacy