Dean Browning

One of the many graduates of Purdue University to work for the Pankow companies, Dean Browning began his career in 1974 as a field engineer on the construction of a parking structure associated with the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Walnut Creek, California.

Browning was promoted to project engineer during his next assignment, a bachelor-enlisted quarters at Camp Pendleton, California. After the completion of that project, in 1976, Browning returned to Northern California, and worked in the company’s casting yard in Milpitas, a small city adjacent to San José. There he oversaw the manufacture of precast concrete elements for the AT&T office building then under construction in San Francisco.

In 1977 Browning returned to Southern California as a newly promoted project superintendent to oversee the construction of a non-commissioned officers’ club at the El Toro Marine Base in Orange County.

In 1980 Browning transferred to the San Francisco office. He was still a project superintendent, but business in the region was slow. Over the next four years, Browning took on more and more of the responsibilities of a project sponsor and, in 1984, was officially promoted into the position. The construction of a fitness center and elevated parking structure for the YMCA in the Lake Merritt district of Oakland, completed in 1986, was Browning’s first project on which he carried sole responsibility in his new role.

In the fall of 1990, Browning was sent to Honolulu to manage the ambitious redevelopment of the city’s historic Aloha Tower property. By the fall of 1993, in the wake of a severe slump in commercial construction, the project had been reconfigured as the 190,000-square-foot Aloha Tower Marketplace, a cruise ship terminal, parking for 1,000 vehicles, and the renovation of the landmark tower, built in 1926. Just as construction of the project was to begin, Charlie Pankow decided to withdraw his company as the project’s builder. Browning remained in Hawaii as the project sponsor on the 10,000-seat Special Events Arena on the campus of the University of Hawaii, Manoa. It was the first design-build project undertaken by the State of Hawaii.

In 1995 Browning returned to the Northern California office and spent considerable time working with Catellus Development Corporation on planning Mission Bay, the redevelopment of industrial property around the railway station at Fourth and Townsend streets in San Francisco. Catellus had begun its corporate life as the real estate subsidiary of the merged Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads, and had worked with Pankow for many years on developing its property around historic Union Station in Los Angeles. Indeed, in 1995 Pankow was completing construction of the 28-story headquarters for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. The tower was part of Gateway Center, a 2.2-million-square-foot transportation complex. As a development effort, Mission Bay was similar in scale and scope. The project materialized in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but Pankow did not participate as contractor.

In 2000 Browning was promoted to vice president and Northern California area manager for Pankow Special Projects, the division of the company that focuses on tenant improvements, historic restorations, renovations, and related work. The next year, he was reassigned as vice president of operations for Charles Pankow Builders in the Northern California region. In 2010 he took over as implementation project executive, overseeing the rollout and adoption of the company’s multimillion-dollar Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Browning retired from Pankow the following year. As of 2012, he served as a consultant to the Charles Pankow Foundation, providing oversight and management of ongoing research grants and technical expertise and assistance to the board and executive director.