In any reasonable community, a plan to create thousands of new homes as part of a reimagined mall, bringing a small army of new shoppers to dozens of beleaguered retailers, would be as close as anybody ever gets to a sure thing.
Then there’s the Stonestown plan in the southwest corner of San Francisco.
The proposal now winding its way through the guts of the city’s approval process would build some 2,930 units in a city that needs every single one of them. But one SF commission that has purview over the plan objected yesterday to the removal of a questionably historic movie theater, potentially adding delay or denying homes to hundreds in the midst of a housing crisis.
The plan should please almost everybody. It’s on San Francisco’s west side, where housing hawks and the city’s own planners have long demanded more new homes to balance the east side’s building boom. Meanwhile, the Stonestown site is nowhere near neighborhood areas that NIMBYs have zealously guarded from upzoning and height increases.
While many regional malls have floundered in recent years, the Stonestown Galleria has proved resilient. Old anchor tenants Nordstrom and Macy’s have been replaced by Sports Basement, Whole Foods, and Target; most storefronts remain occupied, and shoppers crowded in to beat the heat this week.
The plan would leave the mall intact, with homes built on what’s currently a surrounding sea of asphalt. (The proposal would also include thousands of parking spots, space for a future hotel, and six acres of open space.)
A few smaller buildings on the parking lot periphery would also be replaced — and therein lies the oh-so-San Francisco catch.
One building slated for removal is the apparently historic United Artists Stonestown Twin movie theater, located rather obscurely in the back parking lot, and it may qualify for special protection as a significant cultural resource.
I say “apparently historic” because it came up at yesterday’s meeting of the Historic Preservation Commission, a body most people pay little attention to but which has power to trip up housing plans that tread on the feet of artifacts from SF’s past.
The two-screen, 900-seat UA theater opened in 1970, designed by local architect George K. Raad. It replaced a gas station (which as far as we know was not championed as an historic artifact), and it plugged along for 50 years until switching off the projectors for the last time in March 2020.
A faded sign taped to the door still advertises the movie house as “temporarily closed” due to COVID-19 restrictions.
As if to plant the UA Stonestown Twin’s tombstone more firmly into the earth, a fancy 12-screen multiplex opened in the mall proper a year ago; the glowing orange Regal cinema sign towers over the derelict older theater.
It is well preserved, yes, but the interior is brown formica and synthetic red carpet. We need housing, particularly for seniors, at this site.
Sup. Myrna Melgar
But architectural historians must have their say: A memo by Page & Turnbull noted that “while Raad has not been identified as a master architect and none of his known works have been identified as historic resources,” the front of the theater is “an excellent example of the New Formalist style” and potentially eligible to be registered as a historic place. (Raad built nearly identical theaters in other states, but all have since been demolished.)
Yes, the building has its charms. It was a great venue in its day, long before Netflix and chill. I used to see movies there all the time when I worked at that mall, and I’ll be sad to see it go. Historic preservation may be vital, but not every old building warrants it.
“Tacky from the day it was constructed”
At Wednesday’s meeting, city planners floated alternatives to save the theater, or at least parts of it, by keeping some of the old theater’s architecture, which would cut 70 homes from the final project. (Or 100, if the theater is completely preserved.)
Commissioner Chris Foley was having none of it. “It’s just another old theater,” he said, calling its preservation “fairly ludicrous” in light of the state’s new mandate that San Francisco must build 82,000 new homes by 2031 to ease the housing shortage. “The state has told us we need 82,000 units; the only way we’re going to solve this is by letting these large projects” build, Foley added.
He was more or less a lone voice on the commission. Commissioner Richard Johns, an historian, called the old theater “tacky from the day it was constructed,” but said his personal distaste was not enough reason to condemn it.
Commissioner Kate Black, an architectural historian, called the UA “a superb example of this type of Formalist style,” adding that “we have few examples of this style in the city” and pleading to give it more consideration.
Commissioner Lydia So, an architect, also cited the paucity of Formalist buildings in SF and suggested that the developer Brookfield Properties could build taller to make up for the units lost through preservation.
Fellow architect Ruchira Nageswaran also pushed for saving not just the entire theater but a small church nearby, and creating a vista between them — as “places like Rome” do to “create a sense of space.”
Yes, this is the Historic Preservation Commission’s job, haggling over these sorts of details. But there comes a point at which a reasonable observer must ask: Is this a housing crisis or merely a housing inconvenience, such that a commission can call into question an otherwise straightforward plan like this?
This was just a preliminary discussion. A more formal consideration by the same commission is scheduled for 2023. This is the beginning of a long road for the Stonestown plan. Once the preservation commission signs off, it goes to the Planning Commission, and then almost assuredly the Board of Supervisors, which can step in and overrule projects that city planners say have checked all the right boxes.
“Whether the building should be preserved will eventually be up to the Board of Supervisors,” Commissioner Johns said yesterday.
(UPDATE: Sup. Myrna Melgar, whose District 7 includes Stonestown except for the sliver of land where the theater sits, thanks to this year’s redistricting, tweeted on Sept. 9 that the theater is “an unremarkable structure that has outlived its purpose.”
“It is well preserved, yes, but the interior is brown formica and synthetic red carpet. We need housing, particularly for seniors at this site. It is not a value trade off for the community,” Melgar wrote.)
What’s at stake, near term, is whether there’ll be 70 or even 100 fewer homes on a site that should have as many as it can.
Longer term, while it’s unlikely a big plan like this will be rejected outright, the preservation commission’s nitpicking over the theater could foreshadow a lot more nipping and tucking that can happen along the way: lower unit counts, fights over parking and shadows, months or years of delays that drive up construction costs and push housing goals further into a hazy and unpredictable future.
The UA Stonestown Twin had a good run, but the show is over.
This story was corrected to reflect that the UA Stonestown Twin is no longer in District 7.