This is the first installment of Edificial, a column by Joel Rosenblatt about the buildings of San Francisco and the people who live and work in them.
Location: 554 Market Street and 27 Sutter Street
Neighborhood: Downtown / Financial District
Year Built: 1907
Occupant: Sutter Station Tavern; Northern Pacific Securities, Inc.
Architectural Style: Eclectic, Neoclassical
Owner: Walter Seput
Land Value: $828,031
Building Value: $1,895,253
Parcel Area: 1,873 square feet
Building Area: 5,898 square feet
Unusual Feature: A generous landlord
If buildings were haircuts, the two-story structure at 554 Market Street would be a reverse mullet: The party is in front, but out back, it’s all business.
Situated adjacent to the Montgomery BART station, on the side that could be considered its front, the building advertises the durable Sutter Station Tavern. Inside on a Friday afternoon is a quiet, small party of genial customers sipping drinks and making conversation. Cutting through to the back, outside and directly to the left as one faces the rear, is a stately door with a different address, 27 Sutter Street.
A bronze plaque bolted to the Sutter side facade reads: Northern Pacific Securities, Inc., Corporate Headquarters. It’s a suspiciously bland name for a company occupying the second floor directly above the tavern. Its glass door, covered with a reflective film, is completely blocked by a sturdy metal gate, preventing passersby from seeing in or even knocking. There’s no doorbell, and little public information about the company.
Barbara Alessi, the barkeep and owner of Sutter Station, says a man named Walter Seput owns Northern Pacific Securities — and the entire building. Though she has known her landlord for decades, she claims to know nothing about the company operating overhead.
“I have no clue, I never ask him, that’s not my business,” Alessi said.
It appears that Seput and his family for a long stretch also owned Sam’s Grill, according to the restaurant’s website. From behind the bar, Alessi easily got Seput on the phone to tell him about a news story being written about his building. The owner didn’t want his name mentioned, she said. Told it was too late, he declined to comment.
Two-story buildings are unusual but peppered throughout downtown, said Richard Sucré, a deputy director at the San Francisco Planning Department. The structure’s 1907 construction date makes sense given its size and location, he said, because it likely went up in the aftermath of the famous earthquake a year earlier that left little standing in the surrounding area.
Adding to its intrigue, the Planning Department doesn’t have detailed property or historical reports for the building because, for decades, no serious construction has been undertaken at either address that would trigger such a review.
“No one has done anything here in years,” Sucré said. Even so, the building earns an “A” for its historical resource status, meaning it could be eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
“The architectural style itself is pretty eclectic,” Sucré said. He surmised the ground floor was altered at some point, which matches Alessis’s memory of a once-beautiful but now long gone glass entrance.
The window on the second floor is decorated in a Beaux-Arts style with a shield and scroll works above it, Sucré said, adding that at the top, there’s a cornice and a pent roof.
“So it has some kind of neoclassical flair, like what you would find downtown, but it's not strictly neoclassical,” Sucré said.
Alessi holds the secrets of the building’s soul. Speaking with an Italian accent, she says her full name is Roma Barbara Alessi. She moved to San Francisco from Italy in 1979 to help her aunt, Margaret Tolomei, run the tavern that Tolomei bought in 1969. Alessi believes the building was previously also a bar.
Six days a week, Tolomei arrived at the tavern at 3 a.m. to open by 6 a.m., Alessi said. She is nostalgic about earlier days, describing a brisk business resembling scenes that could be out of “Mad Men,” with mortgage underwriters and traders at the nearby San Francisco Stock Exchange drinking martinis at opening, and throughout the day.
“It was more friendly then, not so racist, not so horrible. It was very nice, and people got along so good,” she said.
Alessi remembers remodeling the Sutter Station Tavern’s interior with her aunt. Pointing to the building’s original exposed red brick, she recalls pulling wood paneling off the walls to find them lined with a burgundy colored carpet decorated with unicorns.
The tavern’s business was hit hard first by the pandemic, and more recently, she said, by the “drilling and drilling and drilling” from the construction of a giant canopy over the BART station. The project was supposed to take three months but has dragged on for nine, Alessi said.
“Business sucked, it still sucks, the mayor sucks,” she said.
A bright light through it all has been Seput, her landlord. When Tolomei was first running the tavern she was paying $26,500 per month in rent, Alessi said.
When Seput bought the building, he cut the tavern’s rent to $15,000 per month, according to Alessi. When the pandemic hit he cut it in half once again, to $7,500, she said.
“He’s the best owner you can have in San Francisco,” Alessi said. “An absolutely amazing man.”
