 It was built by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as their "Pacific Coast Headquarters" and was called "1 Metropolitan Plaza".It was built as a modern replacement for their older headquarters on Nob Hill at 600 Stockton Street (now remodeled as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel).It was among the first buildings in San Francisco to have a high-speed transport system (a glorified dumb waiter) for computer data cards, files and inner-office mail, at the time a state-of-the-art system.