Symbol of a New San Francisco Symbol of a new San Francisco Soaring Salesforce Tower reflects a changing city By John King

It is the nature of some buildings, if nature is the word, to loom even larger as symbols than they do in real life.

This was true of the Ferry Building, which opened in 1898 and immediately became San Francisco’s portal to the world. It was true of the Giants’ AT&T Park, which established a southern anchor for the Embarcadero and turned neighboring Mission Bay from a planning theory into a functioning neighborhood.

About the project The Chronicle has been exploring the changes reshaping the area between the Embarcadero and the Yerba Buena district. Part 1 examined the new Salesforce Transit Center and its troubled history. Still to come: The new neighborhood growing up around the transit center.

And it is true of Salesforce Tower at First and Mission streets — even though San Francisco’s new tallest building won’t open for months.

The main tenant is a technology firm not yet 20 years old, underscoring combustive shifts in the regional economy. The tower’s link to the $2.26 billion transit center being built next door reinforces the city’s quest to wean commuters from their cars. The presence of a 1,070-foot-high shaft of glass and metal on the skyline makes the former peak, the 853-foot Transamerica Pyramid, seem almost petite.

None of this happened by chance, or in isolation. And as workers complete the plaza outside and prepare the upper floors for their future tenants, the building’s impact on San Francisco’s physical and social landscape already is profound.

Allison Day stood on the shoreline of the Rosie the Riveter World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, catching up with friends and talking about the tower 9 miles away, easy to see.

“It captures the symbolic power of tech right now, this massive change we’re experiencing,” she said while looking south. “It’s on everyone’s mind.”

Day wasn’t fixated on the newcomer’s height, as older Bay Area residents might be. Instead, she and many others see it as a physical manifestation of tech’s growing presence within San Francisco and the region as a whole.

Thirty-six of the tower’s 61 floors will be leased by Salesforce, a software firm founded here in 1999 by San Francisco native Marc Benioff, now 53. He grasped that computing’s future would be tied to the storing of information online — a storage system that could be painlessly updated through subscriptions, rather than having to be purchased and installed again and again.

This breakthrough may not have been as cool as an iPhone or as catchy as a hashtag, but it has paid off. When a public competition was launched in 2006 to select the developer and architect for the city’s first super-tall tower, Salesforce had 1,600 employees worldwide. Now the firm is on track to employ 10,000 people in San Francisco alone by 2020. Another sign of the company’s local prominence is Dreamforce — an annual conference that this week attracted 170,000 customers and vendors to Moscone Center.

Two towers at Fremont and Mission streets, down the block from Salesforce’s new headquarters, already hold company employees. Alongside the newcomer, the transit center that opens next spring will be named Salesforce Transit Center: The company has a 25-year, $110 million sponsorship agreement with the Transbay Joint Powers Authority.

The 5.4-acre park atop the center will be, yes, Salesforce Park.

Salesforce Tower John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com Emma O'Neill • eoneill@sfchronicle.com Source: Boston Properties

“This is such a crossroads — buses coming in, BART coming in, the ferry coming in,” said Elizabeth Pinkham, who started with Salesforce in 2000 and now is the executive vice president for global real estate. “Our employees really like that they’re part of the city.”

Beyond its urban setting, Salesforce sets itself apart from other tech juggernauts by emphasizing philanthropy that’s local and long-term. Since 2013, for instance, public schools in San Francisco and Oakland have benefited from $35 million in Salesforce donations and 22,000 employee volunteer hours. Meanwhile, Benioff and his wife, Lynne, have donated or pledged more than $15 million in San Francisco to help fight family homelessness.

Yet this is an era when the boundaries between Silicon Valley and the city have blurred. Some people see tech not as a benevolent force, or a source of jobs, but as a jarring presence.

Streets are clogged by Uber and Lyft cars. Building owners use Airbnb to turn apartments into tourist crash pads. Tech workers commute from San Francisco to Santa Clara County on posh buses with Wi-Fi, a mode of private transit that drives up housing prices in the neighborhoods where well-paid young workers want to live.

These are stereotypes, absolutely — but stereotypes that for many people have the ring of truth. And Salesforce, by definition, is part of that world.

“There’s such a gap between tech and the rest of the workforce,” Day said as she stood on the Richmond shoreline. She now works in tech herself, having left her previous job at a domestic violence shelter so that she could earn enough money to continue to live in the Bay Area. “The cultural shift, the income inequities between classes. It (Salesforce Tower) adds insult to injury.”

Salesforce Tower, inside and out It’s 217 feet taller than the Transamerica Pyramid and 93 feet taller than Sutro Tower, but there’s more to Salesforce Tower than simple size. The high-rise set to open by January 2018 is an ambitious work of engineering, from the underground piles to the hazy artwork that will seem to float in the sky. An illuminated crown Artist Jim Campbell has conceived a set of installations for the summit of the tower that, he writes, are intended to be “part of the building, not a superficial add-on.” This will include low-resolution imagery projected onto the crown’s perforated metal skin by 11,000 LED lights. Rendering from Jim Campbell Sustainability The tower is designed to reduce energy consumption in several ways – including angled sunshades to deflect overhead sunlight, and a ventilation system that pulls in outside air through vents at ceiling level, purifies it, and then releases it into offices through ducts below each floor. Structural core Holds elevators, restrooms, mechanical spaces and storage rooms. Carlos Avila Gonzalez, The Chronicle Mission Square A half-acre plaza at the corner of Mission and Fremont streets will serve as the main entrance to the new transit center. It also will include a gondola taking visitors to and from the transit center’s rooftop park. Rendering from Mark Cavagnero Associates Seismic strength To keep the tower stable, 42 load-bearing piles were drilled as deep as 310 feet below ground level, anchored in bedrock. John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com Emma O'Neill • eoneill@sfchronicle.com

For anyone who wonders how an edifice of such height rose in a notoriously height-wary city, there’s a simple answer.

Decision-makers got their wish.

“We’re doing what every international city is doing,” Dean Macris, the city’s planning director from 2004 until 2007, said last month. “We’re rethinking density.”

Macris also was planning director in the 1980s, when downtown heights were capped at 550 feet. That move followed more than a decade of battles over what critics called Manhattanization and “a skyline of tombstones” — a phrase coined by media-savvy dressmaker Alvin Duskin, who launched a spirited but unsuccessful ballot initiative in 1971 to allow no new buildings taller than 72 feet.

That attitude still simmered in 2007, when the Transbay Joint Powers Authority invited design-development teams to submit proposals for a tower at least 1,000 feet high at First and Mission streets and the transit center that would be built alongside it.

“The uglification of San Francisco continues apace,” read one letter to The Chronicle after images of the three contenders were made public. Another complained: “The San Francisco skyline has already been ruined once by Manhattanization. Why do it again, only worse this time?”

But the mood among a younger generation was different. For them, the measurement of a tower is the advantages it might bring.

There’s no better example than Chris Daly, a former tenant activist who represented South of Market on the Board of Supervisors from 2001 to 2011. He also served on the Transbay Joint Powers Authority when it voted to embark on the design-development competition.

“My views on height were a different take than the older progressive approach,” Daly, now a union organizer in Nevada, said this month. “For me, it was never about whether or not there was a tower — I’m not a planner. The question was, how do you make sure that when you increase density there are benefits for the community that I represent?”

At First and Mission, the trade-off was clear.

By rezoning the old Transbay Terminal site to allow an extra-tall tower, supporters saw a way to help pay for the terminal’s replacement with an ambitious new transit center — one intended to serve not only bus patrons, but eventually to be the final stop for commuter trains and high-speed rail from the south.

Extra height on the block meant the value of the land would soar. And all sale proceeds would go to the Transbay authority, the regional agency created in 2001 to bring the new transit center to life.

Others at City Hall liked the implicit message that a city known for its Victorian homes was embracing the 21st century.

“There they are,” Mayor Gavin Newsom gushed when the competition models were unveiled at the Ferry Building in August 2007. “Today is a historic day.”

9 structures that embody SF’s spirit at crucial eras San Francisco’s tumultuous history includes a succession of structures that embodied the aspirations or conflicts of their time. Here are nine of particular note. Montgomery Block, 1853 This big brick building was meant to show that the Gold Rush boomtown would endure. The structure also endured the 1906 earthquake — only to be levelled in 1959 for a parking lot. Cliff House, 1896 This Victorian extravaganza celebrated the bayside city’s embrace of the Pacific Ocean. Neither the first nor last Cliff House — it burned down in 1907 — it’s the most fondly remembered. Ferry Building, 1898 How does a regional metropolis and national destination make a grand first impression? With a ferry terminal topped by a 245-foot clock tower. City Hall, 1915 With its immense dome and classical granite columns, the home of city government told the world by its regal presence that San Francisco had put the 1906 earthquake behind it. Palace of Fine Arts, 1915 Not only was the crowd favorite of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition saved by public demand, it has been rebuilt twice — a testament to San Francisco’s fascination with its past. Russ Building, 1927 Every big American city in the 1920s wanted a jazzy skyline to call its own. This high-rise by George Kelham said San Francisco was growing up. Golden Gate Bridge, 1937 Need we explain? Transamerica Pyramid, 1972 For critics at the time, William Pereira’s insurance shaft symbolized a city out of control. For fans, a city like no other. Now, pretty much everyone agrees it’s a civic icon. AT&T Park, 2000 In a city where almost everything built since World War II had detractors, this one was embraced from opening day — a reminder that big new buildings aren’t all bad. John Blanchard • jblanchard@sfchronicle.com Emma O'Neill • eoneill@sfchronicle.com

The winner of the competition is the skyline’s shimmering new peak, a symmetrical tower with no sharp corners and a tapered form. A half-acre plaza doubles as the main entrance to the transit center. A fifth-floor bridge leads from the high-rise to the center’s rooftop park.

The first 26 floors of the tower are identical, one atop the next. Then it narrows gently floor by floor, concluding with a largely ornamental summit to accent the height.

“The bigger the tower, the simpler it should be,” said Fred Clarke of Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the firm that designed Salesforce Tower and the transit center. “The proportions had to be really thought through.”

Detractors have likened the result to everything from a Sharpie to a sex toy. Clarke describes it as a modern take on a classic obelisk, such as the Washington Monument.

“Extra-tall buildings need to have an enduring idea,” Clarke said. “Here, the single powerful gesture became the right answer for us.”

For the developers, the visual impact is a selling point.

“The wow factor is definitely there,” said Bob Pester, executive vice president at Boston Properties. The firm owns 95 percent of the project. Hines, the developer that hired Pelli for the 2007 competition, owns the remaining 5 percent. “This tower is the first thing you’re going to see from any direction.”

As for the lead tenant, “We’re extremely happy to have Salesforce,” Pester said. “They’re young and they’re hip. It creates a sense of vibrancy.”

Even if the tower at First and Mission streets were filled with old-school office tenants, it still would be one of a kind.

Its foundations are the deepest in the city, with piles driven down as much as 310 feet through thick layers of sand and muddy clay to bedrock. The height from floor to floor is nearly 15 feet, an unusually generous amount. The crown’s LED lighting installation by local artist Jim Campbell will be the nation’s highest piece of public artwork.

There’s also the $1 billion cost — the first time that a private building in San Francisco has hit that rarefied financial height.

But eye-popping novelties and numbers aren’t nearly as important as the long-term question of how the tower will settle into the landscape, once the shock of the new fades away.

“Ultimately, this aims to be a building about San Francisco,” Clarke said last month. He emphasizes such details as the facade’s grid of silvery aluminum sunshades, which relate more to such structural high points as Coit Tower than to the clutter of thin-skinned glass towers nearby.

A Skyline Transformed

“Many architects today approach tall buildings almost from a wholly artistic point of view,” Clarke said. “We’re much more comfortable with buildings that feel quietly confident and that ultimately are good citizens of their community.”

That community will include other towers far higher than anything allowed here in 45 years.

One is nearly complete: 181 Fremont St., which uses a spire at one corner to reach a height of 802 feet. That’s 23 feet taller than 555 California St., a tower built by Bank of America in 1969 and longtime runner-up to the Transamerica Pyramid as the city’s tallest building.

Oceanwide Center, a 910-foot high-rise at 50 First St., is scheduled to open in 2021. On the 500 block of Howard Street, just south of the transit center, Pelli Clarke Pelli is in the design stages for a tower likely to top 800 feet.

San Francisco’s center of gravity has been shifting southward for the past 25 years. Salesforce Tower confirms this reality once and for all — and makes it impossible to ignore.