Places I'm Visiting: 140 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco

Yesterday, I drove into San Francisco to attend an open house at Crown Point Press, on Hawthorne St. I had to leave the event fairly early to take part in a zoom call about Art Trails, Sonoma County’s premier open studios event scheduled for the second two weekends in October. I had brought my laptop along in the car to join the meeting. I parked on the street near The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SF MOMA) after leaving the Minna St. Garage to listen to the call and left the key in the ignition. It must have been turned to the standby position as, 40 minutes later, my battery was dead.

I called AAA and, while I waited for a battery jump to arrive, I strolled around the neighborhood and found myself in front of the building at 140 New Montgomery Street, a building I’ve often admired looking up from the patio outside the café at SF MOMA. It has some great exterior decoration in the Art Deco style, especially near the top of the tower, but I had never been in the building, so I stopped in for a look at the lobby. 

According to Wikipedia and other sources, it was built as the headquarters of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, completed in 1925, so it has now stood for a century. It is 26 storeys high. Apparently, it was referred to as simply the Telephone Building although its official name was the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company Building (not surprisingly), and, later (after 1984), as The Pacific Bell Building or The PacBell Building. 

At completion, it was the tallest building in San Francisco, and, along with the Russ Building, which was the same height (built two years later), it retained that honor until 1964. AT&T sold the building in 2007 after which it remained empty for about six years before a renovation that updated the interior and adapted it to mixed office use. It was designed by architects Timothy L. Pflueger, James Rupert Miller, and Alexander Cantin of architecture firms Miller and Pflueger and Perkins & Will. Construction began in 1924. The doors opened in May 1925. Wikipedia says the building's design was influenced by Eliel Saarinen’s Tribune Tower, in Chicago, particularly the stepped setbacks on the upper floors (Eliel Saarinen was the father of Eero Saarinen, who designed the beautiful TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport, probably the first important building I ever experienced, as a child living in Brooklyn).

Reflecting its connection with the Bell Telephone company, terra cotta decorations on the façade and decorations in the lobby feature bell motifs. There is a large bell over the arched front entryway, for example, and there are bells in the metalwork around the elevators inside. It was the large statues of eagles at the top of the building that first caught my eye when viewing it from SF MOMA (always putting me in mind of the main train station in Milan; I neglected to photograph the eagles yesterday). According to Wikipedia again, the eagles are each 4m high and originally made of granite, but those visible today are fiberglass replicas of the originals, which were damaged beyond repair in the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. 

In the lobby, most striking are the superbly polished stone floors, the dark marble walls, intricate metalwork detailing, the chandeliers, and the fancy ceiling decorated with botanical motifs, clouds, dragons, and phoenixes. The ceiling looks like a Chinese textile. Wikipedia also notes that Winston Churchill visited the building in 1929 and that from it he made his first transatlantic phone call, to his home in London (presumably routed through somewhere like New York on the East Coast). As I’ve always wondered about 140 New Montgomery St., I didn’t let my battery issue perturb me too much. I enjoyed the opportunity to see the historic lobby and to learn a little about this interesting structure.