This half-empty office tower could help transform downtown San Francisco

John King

Dec. 28, 2022 (SFChronicle.com)

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Salesforce West (center left) and Salesforce Tower dominated the Financial District skyline.
Salesforce West (center left) and Salesforce Tower dominated the Financial District skyline.Roland Li / The Chronicle

Marc Benioff is the rare tech mogul who appreciates hometown pride and physical space.

The CEO and co-founder of Salesforce has donated $110 million to public schools in San Francisco and Oakland through the giant firm’s foundation. He led a successful 2018 ballot drive to combat homelessness by taxing corporations like his homegrown tech behemoth.

Now I’d like to see Benioff explore ways to make San Francisco’s sagging Financial District into a robust mixed-use neighborhood — starting with Salesforce West, the 43-story office tower that Salesforce owns at 50 Fremont St., a half-empty monolith from early 1985 that could become a test lab for turning old towers into new strongholds of urban life.

This may sound presumptuous, but Benioff hasn’t been shy in airing his concerns about the commercial heart of the city where he was born, and where his company occupies three towers at Fremont and Mission streets.

“We’ve a very homogeneous downtown. You have to rebalance,” Benioff told The Chronicle in September, when the company’s extravagant Dreamforce conference returned to Moscone Center.

He did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

He did, however, expand on this in December when talking to the Bloomberg Media website Citylab: “We need more residential downtown. We need more museums downtown. We need more clubs downtown.”

The man has a point. The sidewalks below our skyline remain mostly empty. Upscale food trucks, that barometer of tech bro abundance, are few and far between. Empty storefronts include the large fifth-floor cafe space in Salesforce Tower that opens onto the adjacent transit center’s sumptuous rooftop park.

Which is where Salesforce West comes in.

The travertine-clad shaft at 50 Fremont St. has a vacancy rate of 55%, according to the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, mostly due to a 350,000-square-foot chunk of space that the firm put on the market this summer. Salesforce East is fully leased, as is Salesforce Tower, but I’ll wager that neither tower is bustling with life.

So here is my modest proposal: Integrate the firm’s remaining space at Salesforce West into its neighbors to the south and east. Then, treat the vacant shell as a petri dish where new forms of high-rise urbanism can be hatched.

The tower starts with several advantages. With the travertine skin and the notched corners of vertical glass that give it a telescoped silhouette, the structure designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill is handsome — 1980s corporate modernism with a hint of 1920s style. The front door is one short block from BART to the north, the futuristic transit center to the south. Take a 10-minute stroll and you’re on the Embarcadero.

At the very least, it’s easy to imagine 20 floors turned into housing and 20 retooled as of-the-moment offices. Clearing out the tower and starting fresh would allow for a full seismic upgrade of the steel hiding behind the stone wrapping. Unexpected spaces could be added within — perhaps carving out two or three stories for an internal town square where residents and workers could mingle.

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Another option: Change the lower floors into exhibit space, satellites for such cultural institutions as the de Young and the Legion of Honor. A small performance lounge could be tucked into a corner of the second or third floor, cool music with a cool view and a top-flight sound system.

After all, Benioff has grumbled in a text message to employees about the difficulty of “building tribal knowledge … without an office culture.” He’s not the only only one grumbling: Mayor London Breed took a swipe at Benioff in October over the dearth of Salesforce workers who have returned to the office.

If we want people to head downtown more often, creating a sense of anticipation might help do the trick.

Salesforce taking the lead would also help because there are undeniable challenges posed by towers that went up between the 1950s and the 1980s. The floors tend to be large rectangles with the elevators and restrooms concentrated in the middle, a layout that isn’t conducive to apartments. The ceilings often are relatively low; windows don’t open; and there’s no outdoor space below the rooftop that, more likely than not, is jammed with mechanical vents and the like.

You get the picture: boring.

But if Benioff hired good designers to rethink the structural paradigm, we might be surprised at the result.

One example: Perhaps the sleek travertine-and-glass facades of the floors converted to housing could be opened up and given depth. Instead of small balconies sticking out like diving boards, each apartment would have its own deck within the tower’s volume, reached by a sliding glass door. Anyone looking up would wonder what it would be like to live inside.

Experimenting at this scale would be complex and costly, no question. But Salesforce already owns the building, so there’s no acquisition cost. And as Benioff told Bloomberg’s Citylab, lapsing into a regrettable bit of techspeak “We’re in a post-pandemic reality …. Downtown is going to have to get rearchitected.”

When I asked about the feasibility of such a conversion to Craig Hartman, who designed the tower now known as Salesforce East as a partner for Skidmore Owings & Merrill, he said that similar modern boxes already have been reimagined along these lines.

“This is a moment of enormous disruption for downtowns and in the long run, that’s a good thing,” Hartman said.

Trivia note: Benioff was all set to build Salesforce a corporate campus in Mission Bay back in 2012, where the Warriors are now. Then he changed course to focus the firm’s growth downtown. Salesforce turned old-school urban density into a selling point — a template that Facebook and other Silicon Valley firms have emulated since.

“He’s already shown he cares about cities,” Hartman pointed out, referring to the downtown towers as well as investments in larger civic issues. “He’s a proven leader.”

There’s no easy path to remaking the future of San Francisco’s Financial District. But the journey begins with creative people who have the will and the resources to experiment. If Benioff and his company lead, it will be fascinating to see what follows.

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron

Written By John King

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, taking stock of everything from Salesforce Tower to sea level rise and how the pandemic is redefining public space. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of two books on San Francisco architecture, King joined The Chronicle in 1992 and covered City Hall before creating his current post. He is an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.VIEW COMMENTS

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