(COLUMBUS TOWER to Kingston Trio fans)

NOTE: the red brick building seen over the back of Nick Reynolds head was the home of the 'hungry i' at 599 Jackson Street.

The Columbus Tower Building is located (red star on map) on the southern edge of the North Beach district of San Francisco.

This historic Italian neighborhood, which streatches north-west along Columbus Avenue toward Fisherman's Warf, has been a cultural center, of sorts, for over 50 years. The west coast proponants of the post World War II Bohimian or "Beatnik" movement took up residence here, and Columbus Tower was in the center of it all. Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti founded City Lights Books in 1953 two blocks to the north (261 Columbus), The Purple onion was on the next block (140 Columbus,) and Enrico Bandicci had relocated his Hungry i one block south (599 Jackson St.) by 1957, when the kingston Trio first opened there. This was a natural location for the corporate headquarters of the most successful popular music act that the business had ever seen. -- Jerry Kergan

The Sentenal Building (1999), with its copper-clad windows aged to a pastel green, is one of the few examples of "flatiron" construction remaining in San Francisco. Construction began before the 1906 earthquake, but the building was not completed until 1907. The infamous political boss Abe Ruef had offices on the top floor. An investigation on charges of graft ultimately led to Ruef serving time at San Quentin State Prison. Ruef was the undisputed "boss" of California, and served as the Southern Pacific Railway's political point man in San Francisco.

In its early years, The Sentenal Building was the home of "Caesar's," an establishment which is credited with creating the salad of the same name. The restaurant was closed during prohibition for violations of the 18th amendment.

Film director Francis Ford Coppola bought and restored the building in the early 1970s, and it is now home to his American Zoetrope Studios. The ground floor is occupied by the new (1999) Cafe Niebaum-Coppola, a bistro and wine shop satellite of the Niebaum-Coppola Estate Winery in the Napa Valley. -- Jerry Kergan

San Francisco Chronicle,
Monday, June 16, 1997

OBITUARY -- Rob Moor
Allan Temko

Rob Moor, a Dutch-born businessman who saved and restored the historic Sentinel Building at Columbus Avenue and Kearny Street, died of pneumonia on May 22 at his home at Yardley, Pa. He was 85.

Mr. Moor and his wife, Nella, came to San Francisco in 1957 after an adventurous career that took them from Holland to Shanghai in the 1930s. They returned to Holland shortly before the outbreak of World War II, where they joined the underground resistance against the Germans, were captured and spent the rest of the war in a Nazi prison camp. After liberation, the Moors returned to Asia, where they set up a prosperous import/export business in Hong Kong.

When they arrived in San Francisco, architect Henrick Bull, who designed a ski house for them in the Sierra, advised them to purchase the Sentinel Building, a late Victorian steel-framed ``flatiron'' structure, surmounted by a copper dome, which was threatened with destruction at a time when there was little interest in architectural preservation.

Yet the nine-story Sentinel was an authentic landmark on both historical and aesthetic counts because it had been built just before the 1906 earthquake and fire by the notorious political boss Abe Ruef, who later went to San Quentin for his transgressions.

The Sentinel survived the quake and fire, and was put right again. But it had deteriorated badly (although Enrico Banducci's hungry i nightclub flourished in the basement) by the time the Moors bought it in 1958 as an investment and renamed it Columbus Tower.

They never had cause to regret the stylish restoration by Bull, and they sold it at a profit 1 1/2 years later to a successful young singing group called the Kingston Trio. The Trio in turn sold it to Francis Ford Coppola, who changed its name back to the Sentinel and has his office there today. The building is now an official landmark.

Mr. Moor is survived by his wife and by his nephew, Franklin Van Weezendonk of Pennsylvania.