Chris Meany likes historical landmark buildings. A lot. And that's a good thing, because as he's found rehabbing them over the years, they are never quite what you expect.

One Powell is no exception.

Meany's desire to breathe life back into this historical structure started simply enough: Every day, for years in the early 1990s, while renovating the flatiron Flood Building across the cable car stop, he'd admire the 1921 building, which was constructed as the third branch of the then Bank of Italy, now Bank of America. After working jointly with BofA in 1998 on a project on Walnut Creek, he saw his opportunity. One Powell was desperately in need of a seismic upgrade. Meany approached the bank about a second joint venture. BofA agreed, and plans were drawn to update the building and create high-profile office space.

Then, BofA was bought by NationsBank. Soon afterwards, San Francisco's commercial real estate market collapsed.

"The NationsBank people were good to deal with, but they just kept coming back and asking, 'Why are we doing this?'" said Meany.

Suddenly, there was no more project.

San Francisco-based Gensler, who had drawn up the plans to convert the building from a branch and underutilized bank document storage building to more usable office space where workers could enjoy the grand architecture of the structure, was especially disappointed.

"We thought, 'What a missed opportunity,'" said Maureen Boyer, Gensler's project manager for

One Powell.

Six months later, it turned out that One Powell wasn't a missed opportunity, just a different opportunity.

Meany and his development company, Wilson Meany Sullivan, had purchased the property from BofA and the project was now a combination bank branch, retail space, and residential building.

"I think One Powell is a pretty spectacular building," said Meany. "Sometimes you embark on something hoping you can get it done."

Getting it done, though, was no mean feat.

Besides keeping tourists lined up to ride the cable car safe and expanding the number of entrances to the building from one to three, the One Powell team also had to deal with keeping the BofA branch fully functional and open during the entire renovation. The basement of the branch housed a massive steel bank vault in the building's basement that was filled with hundreds of safety deposit boxes.

"The vault would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars to disassemble and it would have taken a couple of years of customer notification and due diligence to clear out the safety deposit boxes," said project manager Boyer.

In the end, through various floor arrangements, BofA never lost a sales day.

"That was a real logistical feat," said Boyer. "Among other things, we kept the elevator working for them and made a plywood tunnel from the entrance of the building to the branch for their customers to pass through."

According to Meany, the folks at BofA headquarters in Charlotte couldn't have been more cooperative. "

"BofA empowered the bank manager here. She made it work," said Meany.

Then again, Meany was also pretty cooperative, maintaining an open book accounting policy throughout the whole project.

"When it was joint venture, it was all open book," said Meany. "We just continued to collectively work towards the best economic results for both parties even after we purchased the property. To make the project work, we had to rely on people being honorable people."

The end result: This February a flagship of the Forever 21 clothing store opened facing the cable car turnaround, BofA has a new branch and 44 tenants now have the opportunity to rent one of 44 luxuriously finished lofts housed about one of the biggest transportation hubs in the Bay Area - a place where the cable car, MUNI and BART all meet.