Life South of Market Street : Art Institutions Flock to San Francisco’s Revitalized Downtown

Casual observers who check out the high-tech aluminum sign over Capp Street Project’s door and peer through windows at a floor-to-ceiling display of three-inch-square paintings by Korean artist Ik-Joong Kang may think the intriguing new show space is nothing more than the latest addition to a burgeoning business district known as Multimedia Gulch.

San Francisco’s art crowd knows better. By moving to a renovated warehouse at 525 2nd St., Capp Street Project has not only gained proximity to the Gulch’s proliferation of designers, architects, video artists and computer visionaries. The 10-year-old nonprofit organization--which sponsors an artist-friendly exhibition and residency program--has joined a parade of cultural institutions that are opening or moving downtown.

The location of choice is Yerba Buena Gardens, a 12-block redevelopment project, and its environs south of Market Street. Indeed, the formerly blighted neighborhood--where tourists once feared to tread--is rapidly becoming an attraction that no culturally attuned visitor can miss.

Before the arrival of Capp Street Project, the neighborhood was already home to two arts institutions: the Center for the Arts, a city-owned visual and performing arts complex that was inaugurated last fall, and the Ansel Adams Center, a privately funded museum that has presented about 15 photography exhibitions a year since it opened in 1989.

Two other distinguished organizations are scheduled to take up residency at Yerba Buena in January. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is moving from its longtime home at the War Memorial Veterans Building in the Civic Center to a new building at 151 3rd St., and the California Historical Society will leave Pacific Heights for the old Hundley Hardware Store building at 678 Mission St.

In addition, the Mexican Museum, currently lodged in an 8,800-square-foot space at Ft. Mason, plans to erect a 70,000-square-foot building on Mission Street on land donated by the city. San Francisco’s Jewish Museum is also seeking a new home in or near Yerba Buena Gardens.

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As a gentrified Skid Row area with a pleasant green space that is all too obviously man-made, the Yerba Buena neighborhood can’t touch the sheer physical beauty of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and Lincoln Park, where the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco reside. Those institutions will continue to exert their considerable charms, but the concentration of cultural facilities downtown--adjacent to the Moscone Convention Center and close to Union Square, the Financial District, hotels and restaurants--promises to be a vibrant community, offering extraordinary convenience for visitors and residents alike.

Consider the Center for the Arts, a $44-million complex consisting of a 55,000-square-foot visual arts building designed by Fumihiko Maki and a 46,800-square-foot performing arts facility created by James Stewart Polshak. Located above a subterranean portion of the Moscone Convention Center, the arts center’s buildings, park grounds, fountains and outdoor sculpture serve as a hub for the entire neighborhood and make the point that the arts are central to a development that also has residential, business and retail components. On a typical weekday when the weather is fine, tourists stroll through the grounds and galleries, while refugees from nearby offices eat lunch on park benches and in restaurants overlooking the park.

Inside, the center bustles with activity as exhibitions are planned and the theater is prepared for upcoming productions. Established in an era of multicultural consciousness, the center has a mission to “present arts and entertainment reflecting the region’s diverse cultural populations to the widest possible audience in attractive world-class venues.” Programs emphasize local and regional talent but also encompass works from around the world that reflect San Francisco’s cultural diversity, press officer David Perry said.

Programs and exhibitions at the Center for the Arts, the Ansel Adams Center for Photography and Capp Street Project already have injected considerable energy into the downtown art scene. But the most eagerly awaited event is the January, 1995, opening of the Museum of Modern Art.

The modern museum’s new building, designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, already looms large and impressive. From all appearances, the gray stone and red brick structure seems certain to be a new landmark for San Francisco. Its defining architectural feature is a central, five-story, cylindrical atrium, capped by a diagonal skylight that resembles an eye on the city when seen from afar. Inside the building--where carpenters and electricians are hard at work--the atrium soars to the sky, offering visitors a view of the clouds and a walk on a bridge that spans the opening on the fifth floor.

Botta’s 225,000-square-foot building will double the museum’s current exhibition and program space. The first floor will accommodate a public-event space, a 299-seat auditorium, a bookstore and a cafe. Second-floor galleries will display paintings and sculpture from 1900 to 1970, California art and exhibits of architecture and design--all from the museum’s permanent collection. Galleries on the third floor will be devoted to SFMOMA’s photographs and works on paper. Special exhibitions will occupy the fourth level, while new acquisitions will be seen on the fifth floor. A five-story tower in the back of the building will house offices, storage and conservation facilities.

At a time when many museum building projects have been cut back or scrapped, the Museum of Modern Art is an astonishing success story. Director John R. Lane is fond of pointing out that the $60-million building is on time and on budget, while conceding the good fortune of having raised initial funds before the economy plummeted. Even so, the museum offers the enviable example of having received $82 million in pledges and gifts to date--just $3 million short of its $85-million goal for the building and an endowment.

The saga of the still-unfinished Yerba Buena Gardens development is an entirely different story. About 30 years in the talking and 20 years in the making, the project has been repeatedly conceptualized, challenged by activists and redesigned through the reigns of five mayors. The project still has detractors (including residents who were displaced many years ago) but press reports are generally favorable--if not ecstatic--and San Franciscans seem quite pleased with the way the development is shaping up.

For arts administrators, the development and its environs offer community strength without a loss of independence. “I feel that it is important to be near all the arts organizations and to be a part of that energy, but at enough distance so that we are not in the shadow of the Museum of Modern Art,” said Linda Blumberg, executive director of Capp Street Project. A former vice commissioner of New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and a co-founder of PS1, a nonprofit arts organization in New York, Blumberg has overseen Capp Street Project’s recent move.

Named for and originally located at a house at 65 Capp Street that was designed by artist David Ireland, the organization later moved to industrial quarters on 14th Street. Although the cavernous space was immensely popular with artists, the neighborhood became increasingly dangerous and forbidding to visitors, Blumberg said.

Ann Hatch, the founder of Capp Street Project, bought the building at 525 2nd St. with a partnership. The team paid for renovations and gave the nonprofit organization a 10-year lease on the two lower floors. Apartments will be developed on the third floor and penthouse.

If there were any doubts about local response to Capp Street Project’s move, last week’s opening festivities laid them to rest. At 7 p.m. on Jan. 25, artists and patrons gathered at the nearby Ecco Restaurant, picked up souvenir flashlights and marched to the darkened building.

One by one, Capp Street Project’s windows were illuminated and the guests filed in to see three special exhibitions: Kang’s poignant paintings, drawings and wood blocks, relating the Korean immigrant’s experiences in the United States; Mildred Howard’s evocative ode to black people’s migration to California, and Donald Lipski’s breathtaking installation of thousands of razor blades, stuck into walls of a large gallery where they look rather like swarms of butterflies.

Within half an hour, the small crowd turned into a throng.