This is the fourth installment of Edificial, a column by Joel Rosenblatt about the buildings of San Francisco and the people who live and work in them.
- Location: 555-575 Market Street
- Neighborhood: Financial District, downtown
- Year Built: 1965, 1975
- Occupant: Waymo, Australian and Norwegian consulates, Gazetteer SF, and others
- Owner: Greg Flynn
- Architectural Style: Modern
- Building Area: 767, 215 square feet
- Unusual Feature: Private garden with ponds and waterfalls
For 24 years, Greg Flynn experienced love from afar. Day after day, he could only gaze upon the object of his affection but it remained out of reach.
At the start of the millenium, his beloved went to another, the sting of Flynn’s envy perhaps made sharper by the fact that it was a friend who swooped in and did the wooing. Years passed. Flynn watched and waited. His ardor only deepened.
Flynn was raised in the Marin suburb of Ross and lives in San Francisco. His company has amassed a fortune on thousands of Applebee’s, Paneras, and fast food chains, and real estate holdings that include more than 100 hotels and office buildings in the city, some of which he’s bought and sold more than once.
It wasn’t until May that he was able to acquire the property he coveted for decades: 555 and 575 Market, the two towers known as Market Center.
Flynn’s friend Stuart Shiff of DivcoWest had scooped up Market Center in 2003, after the dot-com bust. “Every time it has traded since then, you know, I’ve looked at it and thought about it,” Flynn said. During the second tech boom and before COVID, the buildings remained too expensive, frustratingly out of reach for Flynn. In 2012, Flynn moved into an 18th floor office at 225 Bush Street, where he could see the towers every day, a proximity that “just increased my interest,” he said.
Now, the towers are his at last. Since the pandemic, Market Center was well-maintained but mired in debt. It had also lost tenants. In a deal heralded as the biggest in years, Flynn and a partner picked it up for billionaire’s pocket change: $177 million for the same property that sold for $722 million six years earlier. Flynn also recently purchased the Huntington Hotel, and another building at 631 Howard. Though San Francisco’s office vacancy rate remains at historic highs and downtown continues to drag its Doom Loop narrative like a heavy boulder, his recent acquisitions are a big bet on the city’s rebound.
A Chevron obsession?
With sleek silhouettes dotted with uniform windows, the towers of Market Center are examples of modern design, a movement started in the 1930s that has produced minimalist and unsentimental architecture. Built as a new headquarters for Chevron, the 22 story tower at 555 Market was finished in 1965; the second 40 story tower, at 575 Market, was completed a decade later.
Flynn took exception to my suggestion that from the ground level, a passerby might find the towers unremarkable. (The Chronicle’s famed architecture critic Allan Temko critiqued the two “office blocks” as “simplistic, flat-topped, rectangular”). Flynn sees the juncture where Sansome, Sutter and Market converge as a “great triangular plaza,” with the funky circular American Trust Bank at 532 Market (now the Silicon Valley Bank Experience Center) at the center, and Market Center constructed in “what was then a pretty bold new style.”
“There’s something iconic about these two towers,” he said a bit defensively. “They’re visible from almost everywhere. Everyone knows about them. They sort of anchor Market Street, in a way.”
I asked if Flynn’s affinity for Market Center was in fact an obsession with Chevron. He sits in the wood-paneled office of Chevron’s former chairman, where he stocks its secret, Prohibition-era liquor cabinets with bottles of wine. The building, at the corner of Bush and Sansome, which Flynn also once owned, was the second headquarters for Chevron’s precursor, the Standard Oil Company of California. Previously, he owned and sold Standard Oil’s first San Francisco headquarters. He dismisses the pattern as “serendipity.”
A helipad of corporate power
Chevron moved on, first to San Ramon in 2001, and last year to Houston. A helipad on the top of 555 Market, now inoperative but said to be the last one used in the city for non-medical emergencies, is an unseen vestige of the petroleum company’s once-commanding corporate presence in San Francisco. The only visible evidence of the old occupant are the stained wooden chevrons on top of the entrances on the 40th floor of 575 Market.
Both towers get an unusual amount of natural light since they’re spaced farther apart than neighboring buildings. The fifth floor overlooking Market, where Gazetteer SF is situated, gets good sunlight, especially in the afternoon. From the higher floors, you can see the entire city and beyond. These are the kinds of views that mid-century corporate executives would take for granted. Today the offices are home to Waymo, the Australian consulate, law firm Mayer Brown, and accounting and consulting firm Crowe LLP.
For all the bold skyline features of the two towers, Flynn wants to bring a lot more attention to the ground level.
He has plans to convert the quiet, spacious lobby of the 555 Market (a kind of sanctuary, where I like to write) into what he calls the Break Room. The 30-foot ceilings inspired him to want to build a full basketball court and climbing wall. Pickleball courts will also be added. The plan includes a full bar, open to the public, overlooking Market. Flynn is considering converting the helipad into a rooftop restaurant.
A private garden
To me, these plans sound like a throwback to the gimmicky, on-site perks tech companies used to lure employees to the office and keep them there. It also sounds like a cheapening of Market Center’s elegant, if bygone, style. But then again, it’s the object of his adoration, and who is anyone to tell someone else how to express their love?
One of Market Center’s features that will not be changed is the often-photographed — but little-used — garden and water feature at ground level.
Designed in 1967 by the landscape architect Theodore Osmundson (1921-2009), the Center’s elevated plaza features a three-way bridge over water running between multi-tiered granite pools dotted with plants and trees. The effect is a soothing pocket of Zen amid Market Street’s bustle.
A visitor might get a deeper appreciation for the plaza’s beauty by wandering through it, maybe sitting in the garden and listening to the water flowing by, except for the fact that it’s off limits to the public. That is by design. Only tenants can enter the garden or cross through the garden (via internal doors) to Stevenson Street which runs parallel to Market. The space is not, in other words, a POPOS, or Privately Owned Public Open Space, a publicly accessible (though sometimes difficult to find) areas of private buildings.
Flynn prefers it that way.
“Many plazas are public open space, ours is not,” he said. “We can, and we do, control who’s in that plaza. So, you know, there are no issues of homelessness.”
I have seen a building security guard gently ask a woman wading in the water to get out. Months ago, someone threw a rock at a 30-foot tall window at the ground level, cracking it. It happened before Flynn’s purchase and he said it will cost about $200,000 to replace.
‘I wouldn’t touch it’
Nevertheless, some land use experts would like to see the garden opened up. Architectural historian and POPOS expert Rick Evans finds the lack of access draconian. Homelessness is rarely a problem at the dozens of downtown POPOS, he said. The woman in the water and broken window at Market Center are the most unusual he’s heard of in his 17 years of operating walking tours of the area, and should be treated as isolated incidents, he added.
A few years ago, Evans wrote to the Center’s management asking if he could bring his walking tours through the locked door on Stevenson Street. “I thought it would be really cool (and surprising) to have this ‘off limit’ experience,” he texted. He never got a response.
One wonders if the future foot traffic to the Break Room will result in more people gazing into the garden, hoping to drift into the flora or frolic amid the flowing water. I asked Flynn if he might consider opening up the area to the public.
“That is not something we’re currently considering,” Flynn said. “There are advantages to it being private. We can make sure that it’s neat, and clean, and safe, you know, with a little more certainty than public spaces.”
Even as he plans street-level renovations, Osmundson’s garden is here to stay — for now. “I wouldn't touch it,” Flynn said. “I think it's gorgeous.”
