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. 

Books I'm Reading: Barcelona

I don't know how long ago I picked up Barcelona, by Robert Hughes (Vintage, 1992). It's been on my bookshelf for a long time. Could it have been sometime after I visited the city, in 2010, prompted by that visit? It's a book I ought to have read before going to Barcelona, but, even long after my trip there, it was a worthwhile read. The book clears up a lot of misconceptions about the city and about Catalonia more broadly. Notably, it makes clear the relationship between Catalan and Spanish (Catalan is not a dialect or corrupt form of Spanish, as so many seem to believe) and it goes a long way toward explaining why Barcelona and the rest of Spain have so long been at odds with one another.

The book is dense, particularly in its first half, which devotes rather a lot of space to political history, with a long cast of characters that can be hard to keep straight, but Hughes is a consummate writer. His prose is lucid and he's a lot of fun to read almost regardless of  subject matter because of that and because of his inventive use of language. The clarity of his writing makes it possible to push through the more difficult sections until you get to what seemed to me more interesting material; Hughes really comes into his own when he turns to art and architecture.

When we think of art and architecture in the context of Barcelona, we tend to think only of Antoni Gaudí. This book puts Gaudí into his historical context and explains his relations with the people that became his patrons, mostly Eusebi Güell i Bacigalupi. Hughes introduces a host of other architects working at the time, several of them far better known in their day than Gaudí, most notable among these Lluís Domènech i Montaner, designer of The Palau de la Música Catalana, which is dissected in detail (as are many of Gaudí's most important projects, including Sagrada Familia, which, Hughes notes, has became a travesty of itself). Again, I would like to have read this before having visited Barcelona's many architectural gems years ago, but the critiques were very pleasurable to read nevertheless.

Likely to be a bit too demanding for readers casually interested in Barcelona, but a very satisfying deep dive for anyone with a serious interest in history, particularly history of art and architecture. Recommended. Read it before you go.

Miscellaneous: Odd Facade

I walk by this row of houses on the way to my son's school on mornings we get up early enough to walk--it's more than a mile each way. They've always struck me as odd. Here, the garage has completely taken over from the front door. No attempt has been made to create a sense of welcome. Guests aren't a consideration. Even the people who live here have been subordinated to their cars. Practical perhaps, but these houses always make me uncomfortable.

Planted along the street are several tall palm trees. I've always wondered if they were part of the development or leftovers from earlier landscaping. I've heard it was fashionable here in Victorian times to plant a pair of palm trees in front of your house and that the plantings were intended as a sign of welcome. I've never been able to confirm this, but I believe it's true because old houses in the area (especially in towns like Sebastopol and St. Helena, and in the older sections of Santa Rosa and Petaluma) often do have a pair of palms in front, usually straddling the driveway, and because in open country, an old house is sometimes discernible a very long way off because of its paired palms. I've seen a pair of palm trees, or just one, at the head of empty lots in positions that make it easy to imagine where a long-gone house once stood.

And so, I wonder about the palm trees that are planted seemingly haphazardly along the street here. They don't seem to have any relationship to the garage facades that now dominate the view. Perhaps they mark the entrances of a line of older houses that once stood along this street. I don't know. But I wonder about it.

Miscellaneous: Interesting San Francisco Houses--Webster and Filbert

Two San Francisco architectural gems. The one with the red domes is about the oddest Queen Anne-style Victorian I've ever encountered. Corner of Webster and Filbert--an old friend; I've always liked this one especially. The section to the right of the picture appears to be a later addition. On the side of the building not pictured there is another tower with castle-like crenellations. Today the building is painted an unfortunate shade of lavender (hard to see in the picture), although that may suit its present use as a temple of some sort.

[Update: in early 2017, the temple was completely repainted and the exterior considerably renovated. It's even more attractive now. See a photo here.]