Radio City, San Francisco

This chonky charmer might be the least streamlined Streamline Moderne building I’ve ever seen. Built to serve as studios for NBC’s West Coast radio stations and designed by Albert Roller, the building’s last few years have been stereotypically SF—first home to some well-capitalized but utterly anonymous startups in the early 2010s, this building was Reddit’s HQ from 2016 to 2019, until the racist id of the American suburban busybody, Nextdoor, moved in. 

San Francisco’s gleaming glass block and concrete Radio City, with space for 11 radio studios, opened in 1942…by which point most West Coast radio network production had moved to Los Angeles—it was basically born a white elephant.

So, what's changed?

• The glass block was swapped out for real windows in the early 2000s as the building was converted into office space.
• The ground floor parking garage–in the 1990s the only active part of the building—was also converted into building space, with those openings and curb cuts removed.
• Let's see how those new street trees are doing in a decade.

While it never really panned out as San Francisco's Radio City, 420 Taylor Street is still a nifty little moderne cube. The studios here were set on springs—structured as a sort of a box within a box—to insulate them from outside sound or vibrations. Roller’s architectural designer, Gerald J. Fitzgerald, designed the building’s gorgeous ceramic mosaic mural, which depicts “radio as the means to communicate to the entire world”. Fitzgerald didn’t consider himself an artist and had only done one other mosaic mural like this—however, his other one was the bonkers mosaic on the facade of Oakland’s Paramount Theater, so the dude definitely went two for two.

The two local NBC radio stations, KGO and KPO (today KNBR), moved into the half empty building when it opened, but things got real awkward real quick when the FCC flexed its antitrust muscles and forced NBC to sell KGO in 1943. After only a single year in the building together, suddenly the two stations were competitors. The two stations cohabitated awkwardly until KGO moved out in 1954.

By the late 1940s a couple of the studios had been converted for television, and Kaiser Broadcasting converted a few more for KBHK after they moved in when NBC's lease expired in 1967. To celebrate their new channel—Channel 44—and make clear to all of San Francisco that a new broadcaster now occupied 420 Taylor, Kaiser hired designer Barbara Stauffacher Solomon to decorate the building facade. This was an early project for Stauffacher Solomon, a legend of supergraphics, and in a much more publicly accessible location than the Sea Ranch project that launched her career a couple years prior.

Stauffacher Solomon's supergraphics did cover up Fitzgerald's mosaic mural, but it doesn't look like they damaged it (a scribbled comment on a 1975 survey suggests that it may have even helped preserve the mural). The supergraphics were gone by the time KBHK moved out in 1992, and the studios sat vacant for most of the 1990s.

The glass block was traded for windows when a slightly sterile (but sure, practical) renovation converted the building into office space in the early 2000s, and Diane Winters restored the mural. Since then, a cavalcade of (mostly tech) companies has passed through 420 Taylor, including ABM Industries, Practice Fusion, Reddit, and now Nextdoor.

Further reading:

• Fred Krock, "A Backstage Visit to NBC Radio City, San Francisco, in the 1950’s"
• Bay Area Radio Museum on the conversion to offices
• The definitive article on the mural, by John Schneider
• and do yourself a favor and watch this delightful little interview with Barbara Stauffacher Solomon:

G.J. Fitzgerald was actually on the committee choosing which artwork would decorate the otherwise austere building. After looking at a bunch, an apparently unimpressed Fitzgerald submitted this design, depicting “radio as the means to communicate to the entire world". Gladding, McBean—a California ceramic and terracotta manufacturer that still exists—made the ceramics for Fitzgerald's mural.

The quirkiness of SF Radio City fits naturally in architect Albert Roller’s idiosyncratic career—he also designed the austere Nob Hill Masonic Center, the groundbreaking Sunnydale housing projects, and the Depression Deco of County Jail #3 in San Bruno.

Here's the full 1976 field survey from the San Francisco Planning Department's citywide inventory of architecturally significant buildings.

A few other odds and ends, articles from NBC Transmitter, the grand opening brochure, and the four page spread in Architectural Record in 1942. Plus a weird little Pynchonian thing where the Symbionese Liberation Army strong-armed a security guard into a delivering a letter to the station in 1974.