Exclusive: This rotating S.F. restaurant wowed its patrons before closing years ago. Now it will be revolving again

Nearly a year ago, Dennis Alcaire toggled a switch and listened to machinery grinding. “The big drive wheels were spinning, but the thing wasn’t moving,” he said. “I could hear rubber scraping on metal. It was like a car with the brake on but spinning its wheels.”

Alcaire, a staff engineer at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, and a few others were on the hotel’s top floor inside the former Equinox restaurant, which, for 34 years after the landmark Embarcadero structure opened in 1973, slowly rotated while customers dined and drank. Surrounding the crew, curved glass windows displayed views patrons had once watched float by: Bay Bridge lights and the pale gleam of the Ferry Building. 

It was 9:30 at night and they’d been trying since 7 a.m. — and off and on for the previous three months — to get the floor’s long-defunct turntable to start rotating again.

A feature that once delighted customers, the outer ring of the restaurant’s turntable made a 360-degree cycle that took 50 minutes to complete, presenting a panorama stretching from the Financial District to Treasure Island. The waiting line in the hotel’s vast atrium (still the largest hotel lobby in the world, says the Guinness Book of World Records) would run 40 people deep, while a hotel staffer ensured that only those with reservations for the restaurant boarded the hotel’s Wonka-esque glass elevators. (Film buffs may recall them from scenes in the 1974 blockbuster “The Towering Inferno” filmed there).

But when the Equinox closed in 2007, the famed turntable was stilled. 

Now, more than a decade and a half later, the outer ring of the rooftop venue will soon rotate again, taking its initial spin with a select group of hotel guests aboard this week. 

It’s the culmination of an effort that began about a year ago with an idle remark longtime hotel staffer Alcaire made to the Hyatt’s senior director of engineering, Darrell Johnson, while dining in the staff cafeteria: “Man, it’d be nice to see this thing running again.” 

Johnson took the idea to the hotel’s general manager, who ran with it. And since last summer, the hotel has been working to renovate the space and figure out how best to reintroduce the top floor’s best party trick.

The trick became possible again that fateful evening last year when Alcaire’s team decided to use hydraulics to brace against the foundation to move the turntable. They listened to the huge mechanism creak for five minutes, then saw it grudgingly move about a foot and a half. 

“It had just been sitting too long,” said Alcaire. “It got comfortable in that position and didn’t want to move.” The team powered the motor back on, and the mechanism’s drive wheels took hold; the floor’s outer ring began its slow, elegant turn for the first time in 16 years.

Alcaire and the team high-fived and fist-bumped, ebullient. The experience was “awesome, like waking a dinosaur,” said Alcaire, 68, who has been with the hotel since 1977. 

The floor operates with a central stationary pad encircled by the rotating floor. Beneath its surface are more than 200 8-inch-diameter wheels. In an inner ring, the wheels lie mostly vertically; in an outer ring, they are both horizontal and vertical. To keep it working, the crew has to prevent brushes inside the motor from wearing down, lubricate the wheels, and check the oil in the gear boxes. 

A control box allows for both forward (clockwise) and reverse movement. Reverse was often used for maintenance, and to retrieve silverware and other items dropped by diners, said Alcaire. It was also engaged at times for speed adjustments, which is why there are differing accounts online of how long the 360-degree circuit took to complete.

The mechanism worked well and only rarely broke down. Alcaire remembers that once when it did, a swing shift engineer had to lie on his back on a mechanic’s creeper in the 20-inch space between the floor and the turntable’s framing beams to fix it. When it came back on, customers applauded. 

On Tuesday night, overnight guests who pay an extra $100 to access the hotel’s Regency Club (or elite members who have complimentary club access) will get to experience the return of the renovated circulating space at a soft opening. A grand reopening of the space will take place on May 1, the hotel’s 51st birthday. 

Plans are also underway to open the space to the public as a ticketed happy hour venue called Club Revolve.

Rita Plank was a server at the Equinox from a few weeks after it opened to its 2007 closing. She says the decor was “very 1970s” with red plush seat coverings, black tables and a lot of mirrors. Some customers would get disoriented upon returning from the restroom since their table was no longer where they left it, she said. Sometimes people would stand on the stationary part of the floor and watch the room revolve. “A lot of times people thought the windows were moving; it was an optical illusion,” she said.

Plank, 77, recalls that New Year’s Eve in the Equinox would deliver spectacular views of fireworks for off-shift servers. Many celebrities came through, she said: Eddie Fisher and Robert Goulet came in singing at the top of their lungs; she offered Michael Douglas and Brenda Vaccaro guided tours; Dianne Feinstein once came in with Clint Eastwood. 

After the Equinox closed, she stayed a few more years with the hotel, working at the Eclipse restaurant in the atrium. She says, “We were surprised when it closed because we were doing well.”

So why did it close? There are various theories that have circulated online, from “people would nurse a drink for 50 minutes so there wasn’t enough profit,” to “the floor stopped working,” to “because of all the skyscrapers that went up around the hotel, there was nothing but a view of other walls.” 

The truth, according to Rob Ferguson, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing: “As the restaurant stood back then, there was not enough space capacity to serve enough people to really make it profitable.” 

On an online nostalgia forum called “San Francisco Remembered,” one contributor commented: “I remember stepping onto the moving floor and thinking, ‘This is the future.’ I guess that future died.” 

On Tuesday, the future will be turned back on. 

Editor’s note: The author of this story learned the news about the restaurant’s rotating mechanism returning while at work on another story, for which the hotel underwrote her stay. This story was reported independently, in accordance with the Chronicle’s ethics policy.

Erika Mailman is a freelance writer. Reach her at www.erikamailman.com