Architect John Galen Howard designed this 1907 bank building to replace a bank that was destroyed by the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. The construction is steel-frame and concrete with granite columns in the Tuscan style. Howard was best known as the supervising architect of the Master Plan for the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. He personally designed many of the most distinguished buildings on campus, including Sather Gate and Sather Tower (the campanile), the Hearst Mining Building, the Greek Theater, Doe Library, California Hall, Boalt Hall, Hilgard Hall, Stephens Hall, the Architecture Building, and the Women's Faculty Club.

In an act of extreme and multiple façadism, the architectural firm of Roger Owen Boyer and Associates gutted this building and the neighboring Borel Building (San Francisco Landmark 109) to create a ground floor for a highrise office tower.

Historian and architectural critic , Randolph Delehanty, notes that 456 Montgomery Plaza is notable for its column free interiors: the walls of the new structure are load-bearing. While the preservation of the old banks was a good idea, and the modern silver tower is competent, the entrance between the historic banks is clumsy and unsatisfactory.... from Ultimate Guide: San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1989.

Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny in her Architectural Guidebook to San Francisco and the Bay Area (Gibbs Smith, 2007) is less forgiving: Two small, very fine, granite banking-temple façades were retained as the entrance for a mid-1980's office building. This is one of the saddest examples of façadism in the city.

I concur with Ms. Cerny. Whenever I pass this corner I want to avert my eyes as if I had stumbled upon a scene of delicate living things being heedlessly crushed by something monstrous.