In September 1776, Spanish colonizers built San Francisco’s first Presidio. Within a few years, most of the buildings were in ruins. It turns out adobe wasn’t the ideal material for our foggy, rainy, wind-cursed coastline.
San Franciscans have since learned quite a bit about preserving historic structures. These days, they have to contend with very different elements: politics, money, and warring concepts about whether it’s more important to keep bits of the past or prepare for the future.
In recent months, City Hall has decided to do both. Via last year’s Family Zoning Plan, lawmakers and Mayor Daniel Lurie have opened huge swaths of the city to taller buildings and denser residential tracts, knowing that new homes will require extensively altering or knocking down many existing structures.
But they’ve also agreed to landmark dozens or possibly hundreds of sites, a designation that greatly limits the possibility of new homes on those sites if they require alteration or demolition.
Some of these new landmarks are unambiguous historical assets. Some are judgment calls. And some make you wonder how they made the shortlist. The Frisc has sampled recent nominees to show how the process can make sense, have us on the fence, or simply leave us scratching our heads.
Here’s a map of 15 sites that have either received recent landmark status or are heading there. Sites we’ve marked green have our approval. Yellow means we’re not sure. Red indicates a site we feel isn’t worthy of an official landmark. For explanations of our ratings, click on the sites on the map.
The landmarking frenzy is mainly the doing of Board of Supervisors President Rafael Mandelman. He made it clear last year that he wouldn’t vote for the zoning plan without historical protections in the affected neighborhoods.
There have been 75 sites nominated for landmarking so far. Neighborhoods including the Mission, Chinatown, and the Castro — which is part of Mandelman’s district — have already had dozens. Nearly half the city, including sprawling neighborhoods like the Bayview and Sunset, has not yet had a turn in the process.
Some preservation is critical. San Franciscans are still rightfully grateful for the “freeway revolt” that saved the Haight and rue the day that racist “urban renewal” schemes demolished neighborhoods like the Fillmore, Manilatown, and even Skid Row.
But preservation has also been wielded as a cudgel against much-needed new development, leaving the city to set standards broad enough to hinder wanton destruction but narrow enough to discourage abuse. This underlying conflict between the past and future is “intrinsic” to San Francisco, says architect Christopher Roach.
When Mandelman presented his tradeoff last year, city planners said taking dozens, even hundreds, of sites off the upzoning map would not crimp the overall goal: tens of thousands of new homes. The number of lots was small relative to the overall housing expansion, planners said, and many sites were unlikely to invite new development anyway.
“We’re off to a decent start, and I think there’s a lot more work to do,” Mandelman tells The Frisc. “I worry that there are a lot of buildings that are going to have historic merit that are not going to qualify” for protection.
The process is supposed to take up to 10 months as city planners assess all 11 districts for outstanding landmarks, but it could go even longer.
The city’s landmark law usually limits changes to a structure’s exterior. Internal changes — say, to turn a single-family home into four units — are technically allowed but often too expensive or infeasible because of the limitations.
Supervisors can also vote to landmark an interior, which they’ve done with the Tenderloin site of the former Compton’s cafeteria for its role in LGBTQ history.
At times the city has also demanded preservation of fragments that have no remaining function, as with the old Mining Exchange on Bush Street, built in 1923 and designed by Timothy Pflueger.
It eventually fell into ruins, but a developer with rights to the site had to incorporate the remnant into their glass-and-steel high rise. The negotiations took more than a decade.
“It’s a good thing I’m the patient type, because you could jump out a window waiting on these things,” says Joseph Heller of Heller Manus Architects, who helped design the final project.
Almost every new SF project once had to submit to an historical review, thanks to California’s environmental law known as CEQA. But recent state legislation exempts most new SF housing from CEQA, making it harder to use preservation to curb development.
The current landmarking blitz adds back a layer of protection for sites that planners and lawmakers deem worthy. It might even provide a layer of certainty for developers who know in advance a property isn’t worth messing with.
“People are experiencing a level of fear about the loss of CEQA as a tool and lever in the preservation of properties,” SF Planning Chief of Staff Dan Sider tells The Frisc.
The city (and so many other places these days) need more homes to meet housing goals. With the Family Zoning Plan and other changes, the mandate is to make building faster and easier. For example, state law says development opponents can no longer invoke the vague notion of “neighborhood character” to block or delay projects. (There’s even a push to make design standards more uniform and less mercurial.)
Of potentially hundreds of new protected sites, how many are deserving? In a sense, they’re all judgment calls: perhaps they’re the work of famous architects, or “well preserved” examples of famous architectural styles. Sometimes the aesthetics take a backseat to cultural significance, as with the Compton’s building.
“When we talk about preservation, it’s about things that happened there, but it’s also about the visual component and the neighborhood aesthetic,” says Stephen Torres, former Castro LGBTQ Cultural District chair, who once argued against demolition of an empty building, the former home of an all-night diner, to make way for new apartments.
In some places the wrecking ball should be held back. The question is where?
