In the late 1970s, Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner packed up and moved the magazine's headquarters to New York, dismissing its former hometown of San Francisco as a “provincial backwater.” But its early home still remains — and is seeking some new tenants.
The magazine anointed as “the journalistic voice of its generation” had in its early years forged a symbiotic relationship with the city that hosted the Summer of Love months before the magazine appeared.
Much of the magazine's first decade — from about 1970 to 1977 — was spent at 625 Third St. in what has now become the city’s startup-studded SoMa, or South of Market Street, neighborhood. From that 42,429-square-foot building, Rolling Stone published an interview with Jimi Hendrix in March 1970 as well as a definitive appreciation when the famed rock guitarist died at age 27 later that year.
Today, the office is nearly half occupied by video game maker Ubisoft, and the remaining two floors are on the leasing market.
The four-story, red-brick building, a former warehouse built in 1909 to house the Transcontinental Freight Co., is currently leasing office space on its first and fourth floors, according to LoopNet, CoStar's online commercial property marketplace.
Offering “historic charm and contemporary convenience,” the renovated building features “soaring ceilings, charming brick walls, and exposed structural timbers that tell the story of its creative past,” in addition to a gym, a cafe and rooftop deck with city views, according to marketing materials. Transwestern is handling leasing for the property.
Rock-and-roll roots
Based on recent deal activity for the city, prospective new tenants for the office are likely to hail from the technology and artificial intelligence sectors, a bit of a departure from the rock-and-roll outlet.
Wenner, a 21-year-old University of California at Berkeley dropout, launched his publication about music and politics in 1967 with San Francisco Chronicle jazz and rock critic Ralph J. Gleason.
Rolling Stone magazine started in a small office at 746 Brannan St. in what is now the tech-centric SoMa district, but what was then a former warehouse district with cheap rents.
Inspired by the underground writing scene in San Francisco at the time, its early issues chronicled anti-Vietnam War activism and the arrest of members of the band the Grateful Dead on drug charges at their studio on San Francisco’s Ashbury Street.
Its 20,000-word cover story on the violence at the infamous 1969 concert that took place at the Altamont Speedway propelled the magazine from a music publication to a place for serious, long-form journalism.
In 1970, Wenner moved his growing staff of about 25 into a floor at 625 Third St.
A photo published by SFGate in 2009 depicted members of the magazine’s staff, including then-editor Ben Fong-Torres, huddled around a TV set at the Third Street offices to watch President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech in 1974. The 2000 movie “Almost Famous” depicts the offices in a dramatization of filmmaker Cameron Crowe’s experience writing for Rolling Stone as a teenager.
Tech zone
The former warehouse underwent renovations in 1995, as SoMa became the epicenter of San Francisco’s first tech boom. During the rise of the dot-com era, hundreds of startups populated the area of the neighborhood that became known as Multimedia Gulch. The French video game company Ubisoft moved into 625 Third St. in 2004.
The company, which is behind such titles as “Driver” and “Assassin’s Creed,” announced last year that it was pulling the plug on first-person shooter game “XDefiant” and closing its San Francisco studios, laying off 143 local employees, though a spokesman told the San Francisco Chronicle that it would retain business offices in the city.
After a long lull brought on by the pandemic shutdown, the SoMa neighborhood is enjoying a resurgence in activity thanks to the AI boom. Startups that have moved into the area in recent months include Harvey AI, a provider of automation services for the legal industry that occupies some 92,000 square feet at 201 Third St.; and Brex, a provider of credit cards and AI-powered banking software for startups and other businesses, which recently confirmed it had leased about 100,000 square feet at SoMa’s 270 Brannan St. in one of the year's largest office deals.
Chris Pham, a JLL senior analyst who tracks the artificial intelligence sector, told CoStar News that plug-and-play, fast-moving startups are clustering in the SoMa neighborhood.
“It’s a very tight-knit community in San Francisco, which is why a lot of them want to be here,” Pham told CoStar News.
AI companies have expanded their collective footprint in the city to more than 5 million square feet over the past couple of years, according to data from commercial property services firm CBRE, and the sector has the potential to stretch beyond 21 million square feet over the next half-decade. If that demand materializes, it could cut San Francisco's record-high vacancy rate by about half and catapult the city back to its pre-pandemic standing as one of the strongest office markets in the world, the report notes.
The city’s vacancy rate remains high at about 23%, according to CoStar data, a significant multiple compared to the rate of less than 6% reported in 2019.