Historic building a hurdle for massive office project
Developer wants to demolish former bank building, but preservationists want it designated a landmark
For developer Jay Paul, the former Bank of California site in downtown San Jose is just a building standing in the way of plans to construct a mega campus of gleaming glass office towers.
But for preservationists, the nearly 50-year-old building with its rigid geometric shapes is a historical architectural gem.
And now they are on a mission to save it — a quest that could cause a significant and unexpected hurdle for Jay Paul Company, which has plans to demolish the building.
At the request of the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission has unanimously decided to move forward with plans to designate the former bank building — at 170 Park Center Plaza — as a historic city landmark.
Although the proposed historic designation would not guarantee the building’s preservation, it would put the site in the spotlight and likely add pressure on elected city officials to more deeply consider the impacts of its potential demolition.
“This is an important moment for Brutalism in general and for this city,” Landmarks Commis
sioner Anthony Raynsford said during Wednesday night’s meeting. “In 20 years, people might have a very different attitude toward this, just as we’ve seen with many other historic styles.”
Completed in 1973 as part of the city’s first urban redevelopment project, the former bank building is San Jose’s “best example” of Brutalist architecture — a style known for its blocky, rigid geometric shapes created from poured concrete, according to Juliet Arroyo, the city’s historic preservation officer. The building is vacant, but it previously served as the home of several banks and the county’s family court services.
“Overall, the building is significant because of its
quality of design, attention to design detail, materials and construction method,” Arroyo said.
According to the city, the building’s architect was internationally renowned César Pelli, who designed some of society’s most iconic structures, including San Francisco’s Salesforce Tower, the Ronald Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C., and the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia — the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004.
But not everyone sees the two-story cement structure in downtown San Jose as something worth preserving.
In an email to city officials in March, real estate developer Lew Wolff, who constructed the building nearly 50 years ago and now supports its demolition, said it was “quite a reach for any party or group to claim
any importance to the concrete building.”
In fact, Wolff alleges that it was an intern of Pelli’s who drew up sketches for the project.
“I like the building, but please don’t insult César or (Sidney) Brisker by overidentifying the build with those fine gentlemen,” he wrote in his email. “The real credit, if anyone is interested, should go to the intern who completed the plans.”
Last year, veteran developer Jay Paul purchased the 8.1-acre Park Center Plaza site — now dubbed Cityview Plaza — and announced plans to demolish the entire 10-building site, including the former bank building.
The project site is bounded by South Almaden Boulevard, West San Fernando Street, South Market Street and Park Avenue.
In place of the current
buildings, Jay Paul has submitted a proposal to construct a trio of 19-story glass towers — connected by bridges as the centerpiece of the project — that are estimated to accommodate 20,000 employees in downtown San Jose.
The massive CityView Plaza redevelopment would total 3.79 million square feet, including 3.57 million square feet of offices, 65,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and lobby areas totaling 24,000 square feet.
Representatives from Jay Paul could not be reached for comment Thursday.
The project is expected to go before the city’s planning commission and the City Council for approval within the next couple of months.
But the Preservation Action Council and the Historic Landmarks Commission hope that a historic
city landmark designation could force the developer to preserve the former bank building as a condition of the site’s redevelopment.
“This could be one way to preserve a part of that block that would be at least stuck in the time of the 1970s, which isn’t our city center’s beginning, but it would at least show we have other historic eras,” Vice Chair Paul Boehm said during the meeting.
Ben Leech, executive director of the Preservation Action Council, called it “shortsighted” that the developer failed to consider an option to build the proposed campus while simultaneously saving the building, which sits on only .5 acres of the 8.1-acre site.
Leech said his organization has studied the project and believes the developer could reach the same square footage of office space planned for the project site while also preserving the former bank building.
“We see this as a real opportunity to make downtown San Jose — and the project site itself — an eclectic, vibrant, architectural mix of buildings from different eras,” Leech said in an interview. “We wouldn’t want to see that thrown away for what we see presented as an architectural monoculture.”
The City Council is expected to consider both Jay Paul’s project and the proposed historic landmark designation in concert during the same meeting this summer.
“Obviously, it’s important to enter this into the timeline in the appropriate time so we can actually have a nomination be considered and save the building before the overall development is approved,” Commissioner Rachel Royer said.