Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Building

Art by: Chris Hytha

Story by: Mark Houser

The craggy granite peaks of the Sierra Nevadas were the inspiration for the young architect who designed this as his first skyscraper, though its gray walls are terracotta, not stone. Despite a lack of formal training, Timothy Pflueger rose rapidly from apprentice draftsman to junior partner at his mentor's firm before the pair won this commission. It was briefly the city's tallest highrise until the Russ Building surpassed it by mere inches.

A newspaper poet dubbed the new phone company headquarters "a shimmery, gleaming monument to Talk!" For George McFarlane, president of Pacific Telephone & Telegraph, the California subsidiary of AT&T, fawning poetry was far preferable to the ugly headlines his company had endured in its rocky recent history. Besides labor unrest and recurring strikes by its linemen and operators, Pacific was the main culprit in a 1906 city hall bribery scandal that got the mayor's right-hand man sentenced to 14 years in San Quentin.

Now the headquarters of numerous high-tech companies, the building stood vacant for several years after the phone company left. Luckily, Pflueger's spectacular lobby has survived in nearly pristine condition, with its black mottled marble walls, lacquered multicolor trim, and orange ceiling embossed with Chinese animal prints.