A Farewell to Frontier Tower

Core Memory episode exploring Frontier Tower

Frontier Tower is a sixteen-story building on Market Street in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, built in 1908 as the David Hewes Building. When its founders at Berlinhouse came to San Francisco from Germany with a vision to revitalize vacant and depreciated urban real estate as an experiment in alternative models for living and working in 21st-century cities, I was excited to participate.

Beginning in Q4 of 2024, I helped incubate the project by connecting the founders to local housing and communities and assisting with the fundraising pitch. I joined as a founding citizen and invited the communities around me to join too. That helped grow presale traction ahead of the building purchase. I spent the rest of the year shaping a proposal for a connected wellness lab, then stepped into a community lead role once leadership and I aligned on the mission: progressively develop a concept facility that illustrates the future of wellness by merging ambient intelligence, novel hardware, and social health programming. One part showroom, one part workout space, one part active performance lab.

The building was acquired a few months later and opened its doors to members in April 2025. What followed was one of the wildest projects I’ve ever worked on: a year and change of experimentation, hijinks, new friendships, chaos, and hard lessons. The same building housed a wet biochemistry lab, a modular makerspace, underground taser knife fights and humanoid robot boxing matches, an arts and culture venue, and a lovely space stewarded by the Human Flourishing Foundation. That floor was the heart and soul of the tower community; it asked critical questions about how the accelerating returns of technology can materially benefit the quality of our lives.

Frontier Tower in its first year was perhaps best captured by Kylie Robison’s walkthrough mini-documentary for Core Memory (I appear in a segment beginning at 12:47). Video journalist Ashlee Vance called Frontier Tower “perhaps the most tech-infused and strangest office building in the world.” I’ll remember it as a special nexus of practice shaped by the concurrent dawn of powerful artificial intelligence: a prism refracting a dozen different futures, each citizen inventing their own slice of tomorrow. I’ll be telling stories for years about the Chinese peptide rave that made The New York Times, and about the smell of crushed lobster ground into the floor like grout after a blockbuster week of OpenClaw launch events (including an Ashton Kutcher appearance).

For all its promise, Frontier Tower still ran like a zoo a year in, with roughly 750 citizens under one roof. At the root of most coordination problems was an ad hoc federated governance model: community leaders carried the responsibility for culture and membership, while absentee founders overseas held the decision-making power. After the tower’s first anniversary, nearly all of the founding community leaders (myself included) departed over the spring and summer of 2026 as those protracted tensions grew into deeper operational and ethical misalignments with the founders.

I chose to end my tenure as a tower citizen and founding community lead in June 2026, which meant a shutdown for Frontier Fitness Center. Below is the farewell letter I shared with the community, along with some original pitch slides and the proposed floor plan filed with the City of San Francisco for a renovated, permanent facility in the building.

Thanks for the Ride

The top-line update

• Frontier Fitness Center and Berlinhouse have parted ways, and I’ve chosen to end my membership.

What that means for you

• The space stays accessible to members for the time being.
• There’s still plenty of functional equipment inside to train in a lot of ways.
• Berlinhouse decides where things go from here now that Frontier Fitness Center has vacated the space.

Here’s how we got here. The build was pitched in three steps:

1. Stand up a basic movement space in the annex and pilot a few things.
2. Renovate a fully furnished floor: group fitness, knowledge sharing, social health.
3. Grow the community gym into an active-performance lab and concept showroom, partnered with the colocated BioPunk Lab and the longevity community, pushing the frontier of data-driven human physiology.

Frontier Fitness Center proposal, Frontier Tower Co-Creation Summit

Step one got done last summer, right after the tower opened. Dom ran training rentals, facilitators came through for group fitness, jiu jitsu and acro yoga happened on the mats, movement ran all through the Viva City popup, teams prototyped fitness hardware games, and we won a grant to place a novel UV-based sanitation device in the space, all while members got their sweat on daily. That was the whole point.

Step two was the plan for Berlinhouse: fund the 5th-floor renovation and drive construction operations, with my design input and curation, in exchange for free open-gym access for every member in perpetuity. It didn’t go as smoothly as a lot of us hoped, but we moved it down the field. Demolition wrapped in Q4; in Q1 the plans were drafted, revised, and filed with the city (Aboudi carried real weight on permitting and project management, thank you). Those floor plans are on the adjacent page. The tower’s leadership and business model are both in flux, so whether the rest comes to pass is up in the air.

Proposed 5th-floor plan for Frontier Fitness Center

When I started, I asked what would count as a win. The bar was low: a space where people felt excited to move every day, where movement was convenient inside their workday, and where that led to meeting each other and learning something about their own wellness. This experiment didn’t go as far as I wanted, and it still cleared the bar with room to spare. Thank you for showing up for it.

What’s next: I’ve raised money to keep building my vision for data-driven performance on my own. While I iterate, I’m also back at my boutique studio, where you can train with me privately: unlimited DEXA scans, VO2 max testing, private sauna and cold-plunge contrast sessions, and group classes. Scan below to email me if that’s you.

Good luck, thanks for the ride, and I’ll see you in the future.
— Stedman Halliday

Train with me
Scan to email me about private training, testing, and recovery.
Or reach out directly: stedman.rh@gmail.com

Do you have memories or stories from Frontier Tower? Message me on X (Twitter) and let’s swap them. I’d love to connect.