Just two years later, Pflueger became Miller’s partner and the small firm tackled its biggest project yet: a 26-story office tower in San Francisco’s South of Market district for Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. Pflueger and his draftsmen wanted to design something modern for the fast-growing telecommunications company, and they found inspiration in Chicago’s 1922 Tribune Tower competition––not the winning neo-gothic tower by Raymond Hood and John Howells, but rather the runner up, Eliel Saarinen’s set back tower design, the more deserving design, according to many critics. The Telephone Building, as it became known, soared 435 feet high, the tallest building in the city for two years.

Completed in 1925, a year before New York’s Barclay-Vesey building was finished, the Telephone Building is the West Coast’s earliest Deco, its verticality towering over more horizontally oriented office buildings. The San Francisco Examiner dubbed it a “shimmery, gleaming monument to Talk.” The white and grey speckled terra cotta of its façade evokes the granite in the Sierras near Lake Tahoe. Much of its ornament refers to modern communications, with a massive Bell System logo over the front archway and a series of small “baby bells” across one ornament course. Tubes beneath the big Bell may suggest the pneumatic tubes once used for inter-office communications, or as one employee speculated in an in-house newsletter, the receiver stem of the then-popular Candlestick office phone. Open books with wings on the second ornament course suggest faster communications in the pre-television, pre-internet 1920s. The setbacks are decorated with long-stemmed, angular lotus-like flowers. The thirteen-foot high eagles that crown the building seem ready to take flight at any moment. Inside, the stunning lobby is an unusual surprise of black marble walls, bronze metal details including bells over the elevator doors, and a plaster ceiling carved with a repeating pattern of two Chinese mythological creatures, a fenghuang and a qilin. The fenghuang is a Chinese mystical bird, the symbol of the empress and of good fortune, but it is also similar to the western phoenix, which became a symbol of San Francisco rising from the ashes of 1906. The qilin, a hooved magical creature, is seen walking on clouds, an auspicious omen of prosperity and success. The references to Chinese mythology and other Asian themes were bold and unusual in an era during which the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banning Chinese immigration was still in effect. The ceiling and other Chinese and Asian touches in the building, now known as 140 New Montgomery, show a clear appreciation of a culture deeply engrained in San Francisco’s history.