Inside the most beautiful lobby in San Francisco

Born to a working-class family in Potrero Hill in 1892, Pflueger started sketching ideas for intricate building designs in his teens. After an apprenticeship with an architectural firm in the city, Pflueger’s unique design style — a melding of streamline moderne, neoclassical and Mayan revival — would soon be found across San Francisco’s most chic destinations.

Pflueger designed three of the most celebrated cocktail bars in the city: the Top of the Mark, the Cirque Room at the Fairmont and the Patent Leather Bar in the Westin St. Francis. He is also to thank for the iconic Castro Theatre and the Paramount Theatre in Oakland. Pflueger even helped design the Bay Bridge, and made his last mark on this city by crafting the white stone Macy’s building on Union Square in 1948. (Then the I. Magnin & Company luxury department store.)

But the towering art deco skyscraper on Sutter is as stunning as any of his other achievements.

The building cost $5 million in 1929, about $90 million today, and the 26-story skyscraper opened to great aplomb.

“Without doubt the world’s most modern building devoted to the sole occupancy of dentists,” the San Francisco Examiner wrote in a full page story that described the look as “severely modern,” but with an “interesting and decorative Mayan design.” (The pilfering of ancient Mayan design was a popular trend in architecture in the ’20s and ’30s, and reportedly even inspired the look of the Golden Gate Bridge.)

More than 200,000 square feet of office space customized to the needs of dentists and doctors became a hive of medicine in downtown San Francisco. The Examiner claimed it was the “largest medical commercial building west of the Mississippi.”

Outside of thousands of dentists using the building over the years, 450 Sutter was also once the workplace of a pioneering German doctor named Harry Benjamin.

Benjamin is said to be the first Western physician to differentiate between people who cross-dress and transgender people in the field of sexology, and aided transgender individuals in the nearby Tenderloin District with bespoke care and hormone treatment, despite the illegality of gender affirming surgery.

The building was the site of a bizarre kidnapping in 1958, when two men rushed into an office on the 21st floor armed with daggers, tied up a dentist and his secretary and kidnapped the patient — a wealthy socialite from Hillsborough. The men took her on what the newspapers described as a “nightmare journey” around town in three separate taxis to cash checks at banks at knifepoint. The victim, Margaret Taylor, remembered she was due to meet her husband at the bar at the Plaza Hotel, so she suggested that the kidnappers join her there for a martini in hope of rescue. To her surprise they agreed, but when they eyed Taylor’s husband approaching her at the bar, they grabbed her and hightailed it back out onto Market Street.

A few blocks away the men reportedly gave her $20 and said, “See you later, honey,” before disappearing into the downtown crowds. The secretary and victim were long suspected of aiding and abetting the kidnappers, but were eventually cleared of any involvement. The bandits were later captured in Miami and given life sentences.

More than 1 million visitors pass through 450 Sutter’s lobby every year. Outside of the medical offices, the ground floor features a Wells Fargo, a jewelers and a New York bodega-style deli that serves one of the best breakfast sandwiches in the city. (Hot tip from our editor-in-chief, order the “Sutter St. AM Special.”)

When you step back out on the street, look up to see a giant golden facade surrounded by more weaving neo-Mayan patterns that climb up the 300-foot terra cotta front of the building.

(Charles Russo / SFGATE)
(Charles Russo / SFGATE)

450 Sutter’s loftier, but aesthetically inferior, neighbors have grown taller and taller since its debut in the ’20s, crowding out the architectural gem. It’s now not even the second tallest building on the block, let alone the city. But on a recent visit, the majestic exterior still caught the eye of tourists and passersby, with many stopping to read the historical notes in the window, below the icon’s golden glow.