I had no idea ! But so glad to hear that G2 Insurance is re-using it as an entry door to a lounge area on their 21st floor tenant build-out.
Now…to find out why NOBODY from Plant Construction let me know about this old safe !
From theregistrysf.com:
140 New Montgomery’s Modern Revival
Posted on October 31, 2013 by publisher in Commercial, INDUSTRY news
140 New Montgomery captures city’s tension to reinvent and preserve itself.
By Hayden Dingman
“The nice thing about the building is that people sense the history right when they walk in the front door,” says project manager Josh Callahan of investment firm Wilson Meany, which is overseeing renovations at 140 New Montgomery.
San Francisco is obsessed with new—a young city in a young state in a young country. A city associated with cutting edge technology and an economy heavily weighted towards an endless supply of start-ups.
Yet what little history the city has, it protects fiercely. The cable cars. The Painted Ladies of Alamo Square. The Dutch windmills in Golden Gate Park. And 140 New Montgomery.
One-Forty New Montgomery, or the PacBell Building, is a San Francisco landmark. It’s a Timothy Pfleuger-designed tower that still dominates the SoMa skyline nearly a century after construction, a soaring white monument to Art Deco that originally housed Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co.
For much of the last six years, however, 140 New Montgomery has stood…empty.
AT&T sold the building to Wilson Meany in 2007, and the original plan was to transform the building into condominiums. That plan was put on hold in 2008 when the economy crashed, and the question then became how do you update a nearly century-old building to fit modern San Francisco’s needs?
Step one, it turns out, is knock down a bunch of walls.
“The building we inherited was largely double-loaded corridors, very dark corridors, with private offices on either side of the corridors. It was sort of the opposite of the open, collaborative work style you see most companies engaging in now,” says Callahan. “We have big open floors where everyone is near a window and has really flexible space so that tenants can really design spaces that match their brand and their work style.”
Famed design firm Knoll, for instance, occupies 8200 square feet on the 25th floor and explicitly mentions the open floor plan as an asset, saying, “The absence of structural columns at 140 New Montgomery provides a flexible footprint to showcase the range of Knoll brands for the office and home,” while capitalizing on the abundant natural lighting.
Then there’s all the behind-the-scenes work tenants expect from a modern high-rise: Wilson Meany worked with Perkins + Will to accomplish a full seismic upgrade, new mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, updated elevators, improved windows and fiber-optic cable. “We basically built an entirely new building on the inside,” says Callahan.
Except they didn’t really. What’s so special about 140 New Montgomery isn’t the things Wilson Meany and the tenants changed—it’s how much has remained.
“One of the things we think is so great is the tenants have really embraced the history of the building,” says Callahan. “We salvaged about 150—basically all of the remaining office doors in the building that were still original from the ’20s. Yelp actually took half of them, so their conference rooms all have doors that were original to the building.” Yelp has leased multiple floors of the building for its new headquarters.
“It has become the perfect mix of history and modern technology,” said John Lieu, Yelp’s Head of Facilities. “We absolutely loved the history of the building but did recognize that improvements needed to be made to both modernize the space for our workforce and ensure the building is earthquake safe. While making those updates, we made a point to preserve many of the historic elements that make our building so unique, like original doors, elevator numbers and a mail slot in the lobby.”
“The space is a testament to San Francisco’s ability to preserve local culture while also innovating and moving forward,” Lieu continued.
Then there’s G2 Insurance Services, another tenant at 140 New Montgomery. “We tried to retain as much as possible and combine it with new and modern elements to achieve a raw yet refined look,” says Lisa Wai of architecture and design firm EHDD.
EHDD worked with SC Builders to accomplish this look. “There was a large walk-in safe in the building. EHDD saw that, so we asked Wilson Meany if we could have it,” says Kirk Wagerman, Project Manager at SC Builders. “We’re incorporating that into the entry door to a lounge at the back of their space.”
SC Builders and EHDD also ensured none of the perimeter’s original brickwork was covered or the floor’s ten-feet-tall windows blocked.
And as for Wilson Meany and Perkins + Will?
“We basically removed a lot of stuff that had been done that made it worse,” says Andrew Wolfram, Principal at Perkins + Will.
“We completely renovated the historic lobby on the ground floor. We kept all of the original ceiling and the marble walls and the floor,” says Callahan. “We recreated some pieces that were lost over time. There was bronze work on the elevators that had been lost over the decades so we recreated that from moulds and pieces that we had.”
“So those kinds of things made it better, but also made it more like it was historically,” says Wolfram.
Walk into the lobby and you might as well step into Pfleuger’s 1925. The restored ceiling is a marvel—a hand-painted, Chinese-inspired design decked in horned deer and phoenixes. The horned deer symbolize longevity. The phoenixes are emblematic of San Francisco, adopted after the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire to symbolize its rebirth from the ashes.
Appropriate ornamentation for a building that’s reinvented itself yet again.