Building: Rockefeller Center West

In 35 years, nobody has built anything quite like Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center, the world’s largest privately owned business-and-entertainment center. With its labyrinth of underground shopping arcades, sunken plaza, theaters, television studios, 25 restaurants, 70 retail stores and 50,000 daytime inhabitants of 16 slab-sided office buildings, it remains the quintessence of skyscraper civilization. Last week a combine including two Rockefeller brothers —President David of New York City’s Chase Manhattan Bank and Governor Winthrop of Arkansas—brought forth plans to build a similar, if smaller, office-hotel-and-cultural complex a continent away, close to the downtown San Francisco waterfront.

Above the Traffic. The $150 million project is officially named the Embarcadero Center, but San Franciscans immediately dubbed it “Rockefeller Center West.” Its heart will be three slender office towers 25, 45 and 60 stories tall. At one end of the five-block site will rise an 800-room convention hotel shaped on one side like a terraced pyramid, equipped on another with a 16 story enclosed garden court. There will be three theaters (two of them for live drama), art galleries, shops, restaurants and even a wine museum. A fountain-dotted pedestrian mall two stories above traffic-clogged streets will link the buildings with one another and with the adjoining $150 million Golden Gateway renewal project of elegant apartments, town houses and offices. The developers budgeted $1,000,000 for art.

Starting this summer, construction will take six to eight years, require 9,000 man-years of labor, create enough office space (2,800,000 sq. ft.) for 15,000 employees. The 81-acre plot, long the ramshackle home of the city’s wholesale produce market, will soon be cleared by urban renewal. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency sold the land for a bargain $11.5 million, but the city expects a $3,000,000-a-year bonanza in realty taxes, plus increased convention and tourist trade. Says Redevelopment Director M. Justin Herman: “We held out to find one buyer who had the strength and sophistication to do the whole project. You can’t get design value except with size.”

The Rockefeller brothers, whose father built Rockefeller Center, will own only half of the Golden Gate version. The other half is split equally among three fast-rising developers whose offices, apartments, hotels, shopping centers and warehouses span the nation. Atlanta Architect John Portman, 42, designer and managing partner of the San Francisco project, and Trammell Crow, 52, a wealthy Dallas realty investor, have already transformed the downtown skyline of Atlanta with their $50 million Peachtree Center of offices, a hotel and a trade mart. Dallas-based Cloyce K. Box, 43, onetime (1949-54) speedy end for the Detroit Lions professional football team, is chairman and chief executive of Manhattan’s venerable George A. Fuller Co., builder of such landmarks as the new Metropolitan Opera, United Nations and Seagram buildings. Crow brought in the Rockefellers and negotiated for the San Francisco land; Box will build the complex—if the city approves Portman’s plans.

Only No. 2. San Franciscans like to complain whenever a skyscraper threatens to block any portion of their cherished vista of San Francisco Bay. Predictably, rival realty interests last week began battling for a 25-story ceiling on Rockefeller Center West, but few seemed to take their outcry seriously. For one thing, though the 60-story office building would soar to a height of 714 ft., the 53-floor Bank of America headquarters rising four blocks away will be 62 ft. taller. And as Portman explained it, vertical fluting would make the towers look thinner and so help view lovers to enjoy the scenery.