110 Plaza

110 Plaza, also known as the Commonwealth Building or the 110 Tower Building, is a 266 feet (81 m) modernist office building in downtown San Diego, Civic / Core Neighborhood. The address of the building is 110 West A Street, San Diego, CA 92101 and is bordered by Front Street, A Street, 1st Avenue, and Ash Street.

When the building opened in 1971, it was the first all-glass high rise in San Diego. The 18-story building has a bronze plate-glass exterior and can be identified by the Commonwealth Financial Network sign located on the top of the north- and west-facing sides.

The building is currently owned by Forester Properties, Inc. It was acquired for $80 million, or about $245 per square foot, in September 2011. Cushman & Wakefield handle the leasing for the property.

History

110 Plaza opened on September 14, 1971. Construction was completed in less than a year at a cost of $14 million. Built originally by the Bank of California, the building gained fame as a landmark consisting of 142,000 square feet of bronze plate glass. News articles of the day suggested the all-glass building might be an inviting target for “social dissidents”, but the concern was unfounded. One of the outstanding features of the building, and still remarkable today, is the 32 tons of granite in the building header. Quarried in Quebec, Canada, the granite was shipped to Querceto, Italy where it was cut and polished. A longshoreman’s strike stranded the granite in Central America, and it had to be flown to Los Angeles and trucked to San Diego in order to complete the building.

Plaza

A plaza /ˈplɑːzə/ is an open urban public space, such as a city square.

Throughout Spanish America and the Spanish East Indies, the plaza mayor of each center of administration held three closely related institutions: the cathedral, the cabildo or administrative center, which might be incorporated in a wing of a governor's palace, and the audiencia or law court. The plaza might be large enough to serve as a military parade ground. At times of crisis or fiesta, it was the space where a large crowd might gather. Like the Italian piazza, the plaza remains a center of community life that is only equaled by the market-place.

Most colonial cities in Spanish America and the Philippines were planned around a square plaza de armas, where troops could be mustered, as the name implies, surrounded by the governor's palace and the main church. A plaza de toros is a bullring.

In modern usage, a plaza can be any gathering place on a street or between buildings, a street intersection with a statue, etc. Today's metropolitan landscapes often incorporate the "plaza" as a design element, or as an outcome of zoning regulations, building budgetary constraints, and the like. Sociologist William H. Whyte conducted an extensive study of plazas in New York City: his study humanized the way modern urban plazas are conceptualized, and helped usher in significant design changes in the making of plazas.

Plaza (surname)

Plaza is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Plaza (disambiguation)

Plaza is a Spanish word for a city square; it may more specifically refer to:

People

Places

See also