This is the third installment of Edificial, a column by Joel Rosenblatt about the buildings of San Francisco and the people who live and work in them.
Location: 1 Montgomery
Neighborhood: Financial District, downtown
Year Built: 1908
Occupant: Vacant
Owner: Empire
Architectural Style: Italian Renaissance Revival
Building Area: Square Feet: about 84,000 indoors
Unusual Feature: A sheet copper canopy, and its sculpture
As is often the case with San Francisco’s most interesting structures, a historical secret at One Montgomery is hiding in plain sight.
The landmark Crocker National Bank Building has always been prominent, if somewhat forgotten and neglected recently until Ghazi Shami, the founder and CEO of independent music label and distributor Empire, bought it earlier this year for the reported fire sale price of about $25 million. It sold six years earlier for $82 million. Another measure of Shami’s bargain: One Montgomery cost $1.4 million to construct 117 years ago, which adjusted for inflation equals $47 million today.
The building is one of downtown San Francisco’s “most imposing publicly accessible spaces,” containing a “monumental, double-height, open volume interior,” according to San Francisco Planning Department filings in support of its landmark status. It achieved the status, belatedly it would seem, in 2022. Its accessibility is debatable. The building hasn’t seen a tenant since Wells Fargo left in 2019, and the stench of urine and smeared feces mark its rotunda entrance at Montgomery and Post streets.
Nonetheless, the property’s grandeur remains abundantly clear. The paired Tuscan columns on pedestals at its entrance are key features marking it as a “banking temple.” Clad with Sierra granite and limestone, with interior travertine floors inside bordered by black marble, even a cursory inspection reveals stunning details. One example of hundreds, if not thousands, contained in the Planning Department’s tribute to the building’s treasures: the “marble spiral staircase with bronze squirrel capping the newel post.”
“Even amid the dense high-rises, One Montgomery still catches everyone’s eye and sparks curiosity,” Rick Evans, an architectural historian, told Gazetteer SF in a text. Though it has been empty, “it remains a proud symbol of the area’s financial history – almost as if it’s still saying, ‘Look at me,’” he wrote.
One of One Montgomery’s most intriguing features, easily missed in a building filled with them, is a sheet copper canopy hanging above what served as the bank’s secondary entrance on Post street. It supports a sculpture with decorative motifs, including a nude man and woman, and between them the banking-friendly inscription: “Systematic Saving is Key to Success.”
A central reason the Planning Department pushed for One Montgomery’s landmark status was the renown of its architect, Willis Polk, and craftsman, Arthur Putnam, who was responsible for much of its decor. Polk himself supervised the fitting of the the exterior granite columns, quarried whole in the Yosemite Valley, over steel columns, according to the Planning Department.
The agency cited a San Francisco Call story at the time of construction noting the method as a first in building construction. But the sculptor for the Post Street awning was Emily J. Michels, who is briefly referred to in Planning Department records but otherwise skipped over and almost lost to time – if not for Cindy Casey.
“People don’t look up,” said Casey, the creator of the blog Art and Architecture SF. “But I do. I’m always looking to see what’s on the top of buildings.”
Casey noticed the canopy about a dozen years ago and began researching the sculptor. “It took me a long time to find her, but it was just really a pretty piece, and I just started digging,” Casey said. At the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, she found a 1984 interview revealing Michels as the artist.
“I found a lot of mainly female artists this way, because they’re the ones that get lost the most,” Casey said. While architects are almost always contained in planning records, she said, artisans are not.
Born in New York City, Michels settled in San Francisco in the early 1920s where she studied at the former California School of Fine Arts and taught at Mission High School. Michels made the sculpture for One Montgomery in 1924, according to the Planning Department. She died in 1991. Most of what Casey uncovered about the artist is contained in a blog post she wrote in 2013.
If something seems amiss about One Montgomery, it may be the ten stories that were lopped off the top starting in 1979, around the time that several other surrounding buildings of the same period were demolished, according to the Planning Department. The segmentation “diminished the setting” of One Montgomery, as well as its “integrity of design, feeling and association,” according to department documents.
Even so, the building’s facades and banking halls remain in “excellent condition,” according to the agency – another factor that helped its cause as a landmark. But the building, and its many historical details, may face new challenges as Empire moves in. The Examiner reported in March that Ghazi, One Montgomery’s new owner, wants to “punch a hole” (the newspaper’s words, not Ghazi’s) in one of the banking hall floors to let light into the basement. (Empire didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.)
“Of course, I find it appalling,” Casey said, referring to the idea, adding that she takes some comfort in One Montgomery’s historical protections. “I have seen nice work done by quality architects that can, in fact, enhance a space while altering it. So it remains to be seen if he can do it at all, and if so, how sensitive to the historic nature of the building the architect is.”
