TPL president Will Rogers' office, July 15, 2010 - Photo: William Poole
As I may have mentioned, we’re moving. After 24 years in our current digs, TPL’s National and California state offices are packing up and relocating to the 9th, 10th, and 11th floors of a 28-story building on the other side of Market Street here in San Francisco.
Last week, our offices began to fill up with orange-colored crates. Everyone is packing madly following a month of document purging in preparation for the move. At close of business Wednesday, we are all banned from the office for four days while the movers wheel out the crates and dismantle the furniture.
For that period we will be officeless, and for part of the time we also will be without email and phone mail. (So be patient if you’re trying to reach us.) On Monday, we will be reunited with our crates at the new offices—and, theoretically, everything will begin getting back to normal.
TPL's first office, 1980s - Photo: Daniel Hoffman
TPL’s first office opened in 1973 above a Remington shaver-and-knife store at 82 Second Street in San Francisco. Appropriate to the spirit of the decade, the building was decorated with a mural of a tree, its trunk embracing the street-level TPL office door, its branches reaching among the building’s second-story windows. That year, TPL fielded a staff of 12 and completed 6 projects.
By 1987, TPL had completed projects in 29 states and seeded regional and local offices across the nation. In San Francisco, the Second Street office was bulging at the seams, so TPL moved a block to Rialto Building at 116 New Montgomery Street—the only TPL offices that most current San Francisco-based staff have ever known.
The Rialto is by any measure a grand and graceful building. With a soaring lobby, marble staircases and hallways, and huge windows, it has been a home to brag about. The building survived two major earthquakes, the disastrous one of 1906 and the destructive one of 1989. Last year, the management redecorated the lobby and hung a huge photo of the building after the ’06 temblor: an interesting and sobering image.
116 New Montgomery lobby - Photo: William Poole
In an earlier time of stricter dress codes, some of us used to characterize TPL project managers as wearing business suits with hiking boots. The phrase was meant to capture the unique nature of a staff that carried a love of the land in their hearts but whose heads were filled with the business, financial, and legal skills needed to conserve land in the marketplace.
It’s hard not to think of the move to a new building as shifting us, if only slightly, toward the organization’s business side. According to Wikipedia, 101 Montgomery Street, in the heart of the financial district, is currently tied for being the 42nd tallest building in San Francisco. The 404-foot building was built in 1984, its lower floors grafted onto the 1910 California Pacific Building to preserve that historic structure. For years, 101′s anchor tenant was the Charles Schwab investment services company. TPL is moving into three floors of the former Schwab space—how business is that?
101 Montgomery, incorporating the 1910 California Pacific Building - Photo: William Poole
Outside our current building, New Montgomery Street is alive with young dot-commers and creatively dressed students from a nearby art school. The new location, while only three blocks away, feels much more buttoned-down, and the streets are darkened by looming skyscrapers.
But TPL’s space, nine floors off the street, is lined with windows and full of light—especially where it meets a soaring two-story atrium at the top of the building’s historic section. And, of course, we are taking all our people with us, so it won’t be long before the place feels like home. I’ll try to post some photos to the blog after we get the pictures hung and the files put away.
So, no new posts on LandNotes for a few days. We’ll be back next week after the rendezvous with our orange-colored crates.
