The Grubstake Diner on Pine Street has catered to a late-night crowd for decades, many spilling out of the nearby Polk Gulch bars and clubs at closing time.
Next week, the Board of Supervisors will hear a last-ditch appeal by neighbors who want to block plans to replace the eatery’s funky 94-year-old footprint (the descendant of a 1916 lunch wagon), with an eight-story building. The rebuilt diner is slated to be on the ground floor underneath 21 units of housing.
[UPDATE 10/19: After a two-week delay, the Board of Supervisors denied the neighbors’ appeal. The project will move forward. For play-by-play of the late-night hearing, via Twitter, start here.]
“One thing I strongly believe in and try to bring together in our community is family, and I’ve met and stayed in this place many nights — way after they were closed — just hanging out, talking, and having a good time,” said drag impresario, activist, and Empress of San Francisco Juanita More (or, as she styles it, MORE!), who lives nearby and testified at a rally this week with two other LGBTQ legends about the diner’s bona fides while adding a plug for the new housing: “This building needs to get rebuilt.”
The supervisors’ vote comes after six years of design, neighborhood outreach, and redesign, along with a thumbs-up earlier this year from the city’s Planning Department.
But residents of the Austin luxury condominiums next door (luxury is their word, not ours), which were completed in 2017, have continued to oppose the Grubstake plans, citing incursions on their sunlight and air, the new building’s lack of parking, and other complaints.
The saga began in 2015 when longtime owners Fernando and Linda Santos sold the business to Jimmy Consos and Nick Pigott, who once owned an oyster bar around the corner. Speculation began immediately about the Grubstake’s fate, and Pigott promised to keep the diner as is, which soon turned out to be open to interpretation.
If it goes according to plan, the Grubstake 2.0 will keep a lot of its flavor, including the murals on the wall, which will be preserved and moved into the new space, as well as the menu mix of greasy-spoon favorites (nugget burger, anyone?) and a few Portuguese dishes like caldo verde.
Consos and Pigott have said they would try to find a temporary location while the new building is under construction.
The diner has been an LGBTQ hangout for decades. Harvey Milk was said to hold court there, talking politics until dawn. More was joined Monday by Sister Roma, one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (and temporarily defrocked), Donna Sachet, 30th Absolute Empress of San Francisco and former Pride Parade Grand Marshal, and Gary Virginia, voted Mr. Leather in 1996.
(More’s photo on the Grubstake wall — which, as Virginia joked, was posted so the wait staff could make sure she always paid her tab — will also remain in the renovated diner.)
At the rally, The Frisc asked Consos if there had ever been thoughts of preserving the diner in its current form. “The housing complements the refurbishing of the diner and vice versa, so it’s important that both of them exist as proposed,” he said. “If any of that is changed, one cannot exist without the other.”
With all the talk of the project bringing affordable housing to the neighborhood —More emphasized the high prices of the condos in the Austin next door — it’s important to note that of the 21 new units, only two, both studios, will be rented well below market rate. (The developer has avoided including more below-market-rate units by paying into the city’s affordable housing fund.)
But those are two affordable units that would otherwise not exist. They serve another purpose as well: The developers were able to expand the project from 15 to 21 homes thanks to a state law that rewards the inclusion of affordable housing.
It’s an example of recent legislative action at the state level that’s chipping away at the housing crisis, even as bolder, broader strokes have failed to pass.
The project also serves to show how San Francisco’s byzantine process empowers an individual or small group to halt or delay a project, which forces builders to make costly concessions, reduce the housing altogether, or to walk away from a public fight. To wit, the project architect told The Frisc that she and her team agreed to a redesign that gave the Austin residents more light through a light well and other elements.
“We met before the pandemic with the neighbors and noted that concern,” said Amélie-Phaine Crowe of Kerman Morris Architects. “So we have a matching light well to their light well — that’s not something we are required to do, but we want to be good neighbors.”
The Austin residents signed a disclosure that acknowledged a new building would rise next to them, added Crowe, “so it is a bit frustrating.”
She wasn’t the only one expressing frustration Monday. Taking her turn at the podium, Sachet told the small crowd: “I didn’t want to be here today. I shouldn’t be here. None of us should be here. You know who should be here? U-Hauls. People moving in … let’s get this building up.”
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.
Max Harrison-Caldwell contributed to this report.
