The Hearst Corporation is looking to revive a stalled condo tower project on the site of the former SF Examiner offices — a building at 110 Fifth Street that is connected to the Chronicle headquarters by a bridge over Minna Street.

As the Chronicle tells us today, the newspaper's entire staff, along with the staff of SFGate, will be relocated downtown to a 16-story building that Hearst is in the process of purchasing at 450 Sansome Street. The move is expected to happen this summer.

The 100-year-old Chronicle building, which just had its 100th anniversary of opening in November, will not be touched in the planned construction of a 400-unit condo tower behind it, at 110 Fifth Street. However the bridge that connects the building to the former Examiner headquarters is getting demolished along with 110 Fifth Street, and the two buildings share an HVAC system, among other things, so both buildings reportedly need to be evacuated before demolition can begin.

110 Fifth Street, at left, is slated for demolition. Photo via Google

There's no word on how long the newspaper staff will be displaced — the Chronicle's longtime ground-floor coffeeshop, operated by the same family since the 1990s, would probably like to know when they can expect their customers back.

The tower at 110 Fifth Street, which has been fully entitled since before the pandemic, represents the last phase of the 5M project — which also includes the 25-story office tower at 415 Natoma, completed several years ago, and The George, a 302-unit apartment tower at 434 Minna Street. Hearst will be the sole developer of the condo tower, the Chronicle tells us.

The paper of record in San Francisco was once the San Francisco Daily Examiner, owned by William Randolph Hearst, and first owned by his father, former SF Mayor George Hearst.

By the 1920s, when the Chronicle's current headquarters was built, both papers were vying for supremacy. The Chronicle building was built for 20th Century newspaper production, with an enormous printing press in the basement, and long horizontal floors where teams of reporters, editors, copyeditors, and photographers worked in tandem.

The Hearst Corporation didn't acquire the Chronicle until 2000, at which point it divested itself of the at-that-point diminished Examiner.

110 Fifth Street had been the home to Yahoo offices for over two decades, but Yahoo gave up their lease in 2023.