Timothy L. Pflueger - 1940s

1940s

In 1938, Pflueger sailed to Paris with Grover Magnin, head of the I. Magnin department store chain, aboard RMS Queen Mary. The two men investigated French shopping ideas that could be brought back and used at American department stores. Pflueger gained ideas from the ship's famous Art Deco adornments. Magnin and Pflueger went to Venice and Milan as well, but found very little of use to them on their short European trip. The $3 million I. Magnin store on Wilshire (currently the Wilshire Galleria) opened in Los Angeles on February 10, 1939 with an interior completely devoted to Pflueger's concept of luxuriously separate boutique spaces within which individual sales items would receive unique attention. Pflueger's interior was attuned to women's fashions: the ground level floor was laid with rose-beige marble from France, pink velvet counter tops held gloves for trying on, rose-beige leather panels covered the walls of the shoe salon and the same leather served as covering for sofas and chairs that were provided by Neel D. Parker, interior designer and Pflueger's fellow club member from The Family. Grover Magnin continued to work with Pflueger on three more stores into the 1940s.

In 1939, plans for an underground garage at Union Square were given to Pflueger for political reasons. George Applegarth's 1935 design was actively opposed from several directions and Pflueger's social contacts and his friendship with mayor Angelo Joseph Rossi were needed to get the project started. Union Square garage opened in 1943 with Pflueger's touch making it a full-service valet garage complete with a waiting room and rest rooms for shoppers and the option of having shopping packages sent directly from a nearby store to the garage or for the car to be delivered to the store. The concept of an underground garage below a city park was influential: New York builder Robert Moses requested copies of Pflueger's plans (little changed from Applegarth's) and Pershing Square in Los Angeles was excavated and rebuilt in 1952 along the same lines.

In 1942, while America geared up for front line involvement in World War II, Pflueger received fewer assignments than he had been seeing previously. Grover Magnin kept a flow of work with I. Magnin designs, and Pflueger also helped the Army with a depot building in Ogden, Utah. He began to draw up plans for a 12-story cross-shaped medical teaching hospital for the University of California, San Francisco (eventually to be built at 505 Parnassus in 1955 with additional design work performed by his brother Milton Pflueger). His firm accepted a commission to excavate below the Mark Hopkins Hotel in order to create a bomb-resistant radio transmission center for AM station KSFO and shortwave programs of the Voice of America. This space became the hotel's underground parking garage after the war.