San Francisco Chronicle • May 23, 2018 • By J.K. Dineen
The grand opening of Salesforce Tower on Tuesday morning included all the self-congratulation and breathless superlatives you would expect at the unveiling of San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper.
One after another, speakers piled on the platitudes. The 61-story tower was called a symbol of “transformational optimism” that “courageously reaches up to the clouds” and creates a “seamless connection between heaven and earth.” It was labeled a “graceful silhouette,” a “magnificent edifice” and a “pinnacle of hope” that was somehow “liberating and revitalizing.”
“The character of the tower represents the city. It is immense yet elegant. Airy yet grounded. Permanent yet ever-changing,” said Ellen Quigley, a project manager at Clark Construction, one of the contractors that built the project.
But because the billion-dollar building’s anchor tenant is Salesforce — led by Marc Benioff, the famously relentless champion helping children and homeless people — the typical backslapping celebration of downtown development quickly morphed into something quite different: a plea to remember the city’s less fortunate.
While looking up at the top of the lofty tower, Benioff urged the hundreds of people in attendance not to forget those people. Benioff called San Francisco’s homelessness epidemic an “immense moral travesty” and said the public celebration of the 1,070-foot tower offered “an opportunity for deep reflection about who we are in the city and where we need to go as a community.”
“We all know this is the tallest building in San Francisco, but what does that really mean?” said Benioff.
Benioff, who over the past few years has led efforts to raise $30 million for homeless families, announced that he and Salesforce’s foundation had contributed a combined $3 million to the Hamilton Family Center. He acknowledged that the city is “booming” — the 2.1 percent unemployment is the lowest in San Francisco history — but is a place “undergoing major changes but also facing urgent challenges.” He pointed out that San Francisco “is home to more than 70 billionaires but also grinding poverty that exists in the shadow of this very building.”
Benioff pledged to raise $200 million to help the homeless. He spoke of the progress made by Heading Home, managed by Hamilton Family Services — so far the program has helped house 235 families, and another 121 families are in the process of being placed in housing.
“Kids in schools across the Bay Area, families walking down the sidewalk, families and children in shelters, sleeping in cars, they are all looking up at this tower,” he said. “I want to say to them, ‘When you look up and see this tower, I want you to know you are not alone. We are thinking of you and I hope you see this tower as a beacon, a symbol of hope, there is a company and city and a group of people all working together as one San Francisco.’”
It’s a building to inspire even people in the most difficult of situations. Salesforce Tower has 8,700 tons of structural steel. Its piles go down 310 feet — 70 feet into bedrock in some places. It has 1.5 million square feet of office space. It offers direct access to the 5.5-acre park atop the new Transbay Transit Center.
Other speakers included developers Paul Paradis and Gerald Hines of Hines, which developed the building with Boston Properties. Other speakers included Boston Properties regional director Bob Pester, San Francisco Mayor Mark Farrell, former mayor and current Chronicle columnist Willie Brown and Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the district.
“We have built a new city within a city,” said project architect Fred Clark of Pelli Clark Pelli. “Every new building is an optimistic affirmation of the future. We don’t build buildings, and we certainly don’t build buildings of this size and ambition, if we are not optimistic about the future.”