Location: One Stockton Street, San Francisco CA

Number: 77

Grand Opening: February 28, 2004, 10 a.m.

First in Line: Ulan and protegé, a 9 p.m. on Thursday night

Building: Located at at the tri-corner of Stockton, Ellis and Market Streets., a major intersection in downtown San Francisco just south of Union Square. The site is 90-feet on the Ellis St. side and 60-feet on the Stockton St. side (see map), and is listed by the owners as occupying 5,866 square feet (total site space). A CompUSA store is one block to the east, Virgin Records is across Stockton St., a Gap store is one block west, and other high-end stores are clustered around Union Square about two blocks north.

The original 1973 building when occupied by the Sephora cosmetics store offered 16,986.5 square-feet of commercial space on three floors. Sephora reportedly was paying $1.7 million a year for a 15-year lease that runs through 2013, and Apple may be paying that much to Sephora for a sub-lease on the property.

Apple decided to craft their own customer experience by tearing down the orignal building and building an entirely new two-story plus basement structure, offering 10,800 square-feet of retail space. Demolition was completed during the first weeks of September 2003 by DPR Construction, a firm that has done lots of other work for Apple Computer and Pixar Animation.

Features: This will be a block-buster of a store, or in Apple's terminology, a high-profile store. The corner location gave the designers and architects great latitude in coming up with something impressive. It will include a glass stairway to the second floor like other high-profile stores, topped by a large skylight in the second-floor roof. The top half of the store is finished in bead-blasted stainless steel, while the lower half on the Ellis St. side will be medium-gray stone. There are two back-lit Apple logos set in the upper stainless steel portion of the building, on both the Ellis and Stockton St. sides.

The main entrance is on the Stockton St. side, surrounded on either side by top-to-bottom windows. There is a one-door entrance on the Ellis St. side for employees and deliveries. There are no windows on the second level. The "pro" and "home" sections will occupy the ground floor. The second floor will consist of-- a 6-seat "kids" section with a new-style square wooden table; a 32-foot long, 14-seat Genius Bar; a 12-computer, Internet café of 20-inch iMacs, all with iSights attached; a software section, and 32-seat presentation theater. The full basement will be used for storage and other purposes.

There is a BART entrance within the property line of the building, leading up from the underground tunnel directly to Stockton St. The escalator has glass on both sides, giving a view of the inside of the store and the adjacent sidewalk as you come up the stairway or escalator.

Media: Apple's official store page / e-mail announcement / grand opening press release /

Photos - construction Sept. 2003 / Nov. 2003 / construction Jan. 2004 / update Feb. 2004 / night photos Feb.2004 / Apple's gallery

Video - construction update Nov. / intro video /

as of Jan. 9 2004

as of Jan. 6, 2004

as of November 23, 2003

building after demolition in September 2003