Nearly 20 years have passed since the Oakland Tribune moved out of the downtown tower that still bears its name in 11-foot-tall letters that light up in red neon after dark.
Since then, the 120-year-old building at 409 13th St. has had four different owners and various tenants including restaurants, coffee shops, a call center and a cannabis delivery service.
Now the iconic 22-story tower, long considered Oakland’s main emblem, is mired in a $111 million loan default, according to public records. Highbridge Equity Partners faces possible foreclosure on a portfolio that comprises the Tribune Tower and two nearby properties, at 405 14th St. and 1500 Broadway.
Highbridge, an Oakland firm, paid $48 million for the Tribune building in 2019. A broker touted the tower at the time as an ideally located property a block from public transit that promised “immediate leasing upside in downtown Oakland, a submarket that is one of the tightest in the country with a vacancy of under 5%.”
Today, however, the picture is much darker in downtown Oakland, which has struggled with five years of shuttering businesses and an office vacancy rate that’s reached almost 20%. Oakland’s sister city across the bay, San Francisco, is seeing increased leasing demand thanks to the artificial intelligence boom. But in Oakland “there is currently no evidence of a significant rise in demand, and the forecast suggests that vacancy rates will remain elevated, with rent growth expected to be stagnant at best in the upcoming quarters,” according to a CoStar analysis.
Highbridge did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the loan default.
The Tribune Tower’s woes feel to some on the east side of the bay like a symbol of their city’s struggles.
“It’s easy to be negative,” said Riaz Taplin, an Oakland-based real estate investor and developer who heads Riaz Capital. He is one of a handful of investors working to reverse an image of the city he believes has worsened in recent years as leaders have failed to address basic problems connected to cleanliness and safety.
Beacons of truth
The Oakland Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its photographs of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, vacated the building for good in 2007 and ceased to exist within a decade. The building joined a long list of once-proud newspaper buildings that were sold off, demolished or redeveloped in the wake of the industry’s decline.
The Los Angeles Times building, known for its Art Deco lobby with a large rotating aluminum globe, has stood vacant since the departure of the newspaper’s staff to El Segundo in 2018. It is set to become a sprawling mixed-use complex.
The 1925 neo-Gothic Chicago Tribune Tower was converted into luxury condominiums. And the Miami Herald’s former home overlooking Biscayne Bay, which housed its newsroom and presses, was sold and torn down a decade ago to make way for a $3.8 billion casino that never was built because the developer failed to secure a gambling permit.
Downtown Oakland's troubles notwithstanding, the Tribune Tower has long been beloved as a mirror of the city's daring and diverse spirit. The 1906 building added a copper mansard tower, now green from oxidation, modeled on St. Mark’s Campanile in Venice, Italy, in 1923. That same year, legendary escapist Harry Houdini staged a widely publicized breakout from a straitjacket while dangling upside down from the building’s ninth floor. Later, after the novelist Gertrude Stein famously quipped that in Oakland, “There is no ‘there’ there,” the newspaper placed a flag atop the building emblazoned with the word “THERE.”
Then there are the building’s four giant clock faces, each famously stuck on a different time.
In addition to the Oakland Tribune, which began publishing in 1874, the building housed an AM radio station that broadcast from the 20th floor for years. Legend has it that veteran police reporter Harry Harris, who joined the Oakland Tribune in 1965 as a 17-year-old copy boy, was conceived in the Tribune Tower when his father worked there as a photographer. A former reporter wrote in an essay upon the paper's departure from the building that at least three “hard-bitten” newsmen had died at their desks over the years, and a baby was born in the tower's fourth-floor ladies room in 1973.
For some, there's nothing like it
The building has had a chaotic ride since the departure of the Tribune, changing hands multiple times. One former owner, businessman Tom Henderson, was ordered by a judge to hand over the building to a court-appointed receiver. He was later convicted on federal fraud charges. Emeryville-based investment firm Harvest Properties purchased the building in 2016 and had plans to stay, even making renovations — only to sell the building three years later, to Highbridge.
This year, Highbridge evicted Pierre Pierre, a Southern-style restaurant that occupied the ground-floor retail space, citing a year's worth of unpaid rent. Pierre Pierre's owner wrote on social media in May that he was considering moving to a safer location after two people were shot and wounded while dining at his restaurant.
The city has in the last few years faced rising concerns about crime and a cash-strapped government, not to mention the loss of all three of its major sports teams.
“People and businesses want the city to be cleaner, safer and more accountable,” Taplin told CoStar News.
For some, however, there’s no better place in town than the Tribune Tower. John Law, a Bay Area artist who is credited with cofounding the world-famous Burning Man festival that's staged annually in the Nevada desert, has kept a tiny office on the top floor of the Tribune Tower since the 1990s, after he was contracted to service the giant neon letters.
“There’s no other building like this, really anywhere,” he said in a YouTube video a few years ago, recording from the building's roof in shades and a Hawaiian shirt. The skyscrapers of downtown Oakland are in the background, and the San Francisco Bay sparkles in the distance.