of the second floor lit by the nave. By 1992, the nave had been turned into private offices and the loss of the foot bridge meant that all public approach to the building would be at street level, altering the way in which the building was understood and experienced. With the restoration however, the developers argued that the public's historic interaction with the space was defined by the natural light cascading from the nave, not by the elevated entry way. With the movement of the primary public space to the first floor, it became essential to their proposal that this historic experience would be recreated. Beyond removing an added third floor and restoring the nave to its two-story height, the proposal included cutting two openings, each at , into the floor of the second level. These openings would allow for this historic feature to be extended to the visitor's experience of the first floor. This was a controversial choice, and due to the building's historic status, the proposal had to be approved by the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO); this was the subject of multiple hearings. Marble mosaics The greatest debate raised by the opening of the second floor cuts, however, surrounded the treatment of the historic mosaic tiling of the second floor. The second floor Grand Nave was tiled with a mosaic marble floor of white and gray tesserae with a border of red and purple. In the center of the space at the top of the main stairway is a reproduction of the Great Seal of the State of California worked entirely in mosaics. At the time of the restoration, this surface was primarily covered with linoleum, and some small sections had been lost to prior alterations. This feature was considered integral to the historic character of the building, and as a primary public space, the tiling was a key component of community memory. In allowing the amplification of one feature (the nave), the loss of another (the mosaics) was inherently tied. The final agreement reached between the SHPO and the development team found that as long as the important decorative portions of the flooring were restored and extra tesserae would be used to repair damaged sections, the cuts would be approved. In order to restore the mosaic, the applied linoleum surface had to be carefully peeled away and a mixture of crushed walnut shells was then used