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A City Torn Between Past and Present

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Desperate men battled the cataclysmic fire of 1906 to a halt almost at the doorstep of the three-story Victorian. But after an elevated freeway went up beside it in the 1950s, the once-grand survivor slowly succumbed to the ravages of time.

In the 1980s, it was a communal home for gay artists. By the 1990s, a flophouse for derelicts. No one paid much attention when vandals spray-painted the walls with graffiti, filled the stately rooms with garbage and stripped them of their marble fireplace mantles.

Then the board of directors for the planned Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Bisexual Community Center decided to tear down what everyone calls the Fallon Building and replace it with a four-story, steel-frame structure.

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And all hell broke loose.

Another one of San Francisco’s bruising preservation battles--the sort of bare-knuckled fight that makes builders and architects curse the city and stiffens the spine of preservationists everywhere--was underway.

San Franciscans will tell you their passion for defending historic buildings, particularly the ornate Victorians sometimes called Painted Ladies, is one of the most important differences between their city and Los Angeles. The civic ethos sets San Francisco apart, not the preservation laws--which are not all that different from Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles has always been a city of buildings that aren’t here forever,” said Aldolfo V. Nodal, general manager of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs. “San Francisco is a city of the past.”

That affinity for the past and its aesthetics has made San Francisco one of the world’s premier tourist destinations. But critics say it has also sapped the city’s creative juices and turned it into a museum of late 19th and early 20th century buildings, where great modern buildings are hard to find and mediocre old ones almost impossible to tear down.

“There is a culture in this city that is a bizarre combination of commitment to bohemianism and neurotic fear and concern of anything new,” said Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture, design and digital design for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “Sometimes,” he said, “holding on to every part of the past is as much of a disease as tearing down the past wholesale.”

Never on Any Historic Register

The Fallon Building--named for the woman who built it, Carmel Fallon, a descendant of the man for whom Castro Street is named--was never on any local, state or national historic register. Still, once it was threatened by the wrecking ball, the gay community split bitterly between those who believed that the peeling mansion had to go and those who believed that its destruction would betray their role in San Francisco’s Victorian restoration movement.

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“Most people would look at [the Fallon Building] and go: Who would want to save it?” conceded Jim Siegel, a gay businessman who has been restoring Victorians here for more than two decades. “It’s a mess. But it represents old San Francisco to me.”

Siegel and others formed Friends of 1800 Market Street, named for the building’s address. For two years, the group picketed fund-raising events for the community center. Members launched petition drives, disrupted public hearings and held a press conference to urge donors not to give.

Last summer, faced with bad publicity and a sharp drop in donations, the center’s board reversed its decision.

“The concern was that corporate and individual donors would be consumed by the controversy,” said Scott Walton, the center’s project manager.

The board decided to shrink the new building’s design so that it will fit beside the Victorian, restore the old home and link the two. As a result, project costs soared more than $1 million, to $10.7 million, and the new building’s floor space had to be slashed from 48,000 square feet to 40,000 square feet, Walton said.

Both sides now say they are happy with the compromise. More often in these San Francisco battles, one side or the other--or both--emerge feeling like they’ve been run over by a truck.

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“We’re a city of 46.7 square miles and nothing escapes the attention of someone in San Francisco,” said San Francisco Supervisor Michael Yaki. “That is both good and bad. . . . Sometimes it becomes a fight to the death, and that is not to the benefit of everyone.”

That is the case in the current battle over the city’s Asian Art Museum. Squeezed into a wing of the city’s M.H. de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, forced to store much of its world-class collection, the Asian leaped when the city offered it the chance to take over the old Main Library in the Civic Center.

The 1917 Beaux Arts library building, which is on the national historic register, was badly damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. It has stood empty since 1996, when the city opened a new library nearby.

The Asian museum wants to convert the library, with its grand central staircase, monumental loggia and massive reading rooms, into a light-filled space for displaying ancient art.

Preservationists say the plan will destroy grand interior features. Art historians decry the museum’s plan to remove 14 huge murals, painted by Californian artist Gottardo Piazzoni, that decorate the loggia.

The debate has raged for six years.

Museum Director Emily Sano has been accused of everything from arrogance to cultural vandalism. She said she is flabbergasted by the intensity of the attacks.

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“There is this knee-jerk reaction that any change is destruction,” Sano said. “Even perfectly nice people who are friendly with me think that I am destroying the old Main Library.”

Sano insists that the museum’s plans will preserve the building’s most important features. The paintings must go, she said, but the museum is willing to spend $225,000 to remove and restore them. It has promised to find a home for them in another of the city’s public buildings.

The Planning Commission finally approved the museum’s plans in December. But the San Francisco Architectural Heritage Foundation, a powerful nonprofit preservationist organization, plans to file suit this week in Superior Court, alleging that the city and county violated local and state laws in approving the plan. The lawsuit, the museum says, will delay construction and increase costs by millions of dollars.

Joe O’Donaghue, president of the city’s Residential Builders Assn., said the level of vitriol in the battle over the Asian is typical of San Francisco.

“For years, the polarization was so extreme, it was like a war,” O’Donaghue said, but added that Mayor Willie Brown’s administration is more sympathetic to development.

Even under Brown, observers say the impulse to protect San Francisco’s legacy has kept it one of the most picturesque cities in the world.

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But a city can be too pretty for its own good, said Kevin Starr, the state librarian and a historian.

“San Francisco today is essentially a museum city,” said the fifth-generation San Franciscan. “At its deepest level, its deepest identity is as a museum of urbanism, a theme park in real time.”

Somewhere along the line, preservation became a substitute for the cultural, economic and intellectual dynamism that long ago flowed south to bigger, brassier Los Angeles, Starr contends. The city became “a platonic image of itself,” he said, a tourist town steadily losing blue-collar jobs and major corporate headquarters as real estate costs soar.

“If San Francisco lost its prettiness, what would it have?” he asked. “It would be a much more important American city if it was a little less pretty.”

Rooted in Pain of 1906 Quake

The reverence for the past has made it hard to design great new buildings, architects and architectural historians complain.

“When I have architect friends visiting from other parts of the world, I try to draw up lists of buildings to see, and it is tough,” said James Goring, a respected Bay Area architect. He loves “the whole fabric of San Francisco,” Goring said, its topography, views and the way its neighborhoods are architecturally coherent. “But most of the great buildings are in Los Angeles.”

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At the core of the preservationist mission lies the city’s painful collective memory of the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of Gold Rush San Francisco.

Left behind was the nation’s largest collection of Victorians, 14,000 of them. Built of old-growth redwood from plans carried by East Coast settlers, they have survived changing tastes and urban renewal to become San Francisco’s most recognizable feature.

And Victorians are not the only beautiful buildings in San Francisco. There is the Beaux Arts Civic Center and dozens of early 20th century brick office buildings and warehouses. In the neighborhoods, there are fine examples of Craftsman bungalows and four-square Edwardians.

All told, the city has 130 structures on the National Register of Historic Places. Los Angeles County has more, with 344, but their impact is lessened by the fact that they are spread across a far larger area than this tightly packed city.

San Francisco also has declared 223 of its buildings landmarks and 10 districts historic. Under those designations, there is a yearlong review by the Landmarks Commission and the Planning Commission before a building can be demolished.

In Los Angeles, such designation often means that demolition eventually proceeds. Here, it normally means that developers negotiate with preservationists and wind up reworking designs to save at least the facade of older buildings.

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The city’s most far-reaching and unusual planning ordinance, adopted in 1985, was its Downtown Plan. The plan drastically limited high-rise construction and preserved more than 251 historic buildings.

“Nothing on such a scale has ever even been considered in Los Angeles,” said Linda Dishman, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservancy, a nonprofit preservationist organization.

Builders complain that the restrictions on demolitions here are so onerous that many prefer to work elsewhere. But preservationists say the city’s ordinances don’t go far enough.

The San Francisco Architectural Heritage Foundation reviews every application for demolition filed at the planning department, then tours each site to decide whether it is worth fighting for.

Some Architects Love the Challenge

Some San Francisco architects say they love the challenge of designing in a city with such a clearly defined sense of itself. Architect Jane Cee, who with her partner, Peter Pfau, designed the San Francisco gay community center, said she enjoyed figuring out how to incorporate the Victorian with the modern center. But she noticed a phenomenon among her Bay Area architect friends several years ago.

“A lot moved to Los Angeles. They preferred to live in San Francisco, but they found that the architectural attitudes just didn’t jibe with their desire to experiment. Here, a building is not judged to be successful it if tries to be experimental.”

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To the city’s preservationists, such a criticism is really no criticism at all. They mourn what has been lost, rejoice in what they have salvaged, and fret that the Brown administration is less sympathetic with preservation than previous ones.

Siegel, who helped save the Fallon Building, said he fell in love with Victorians while watching the “Addams Family” sitcom as a teenager.

“Gomez Addams was my hero,” he said. He dreamed of living in a rundown Victorian stuffed with taxidermy, just like the eccentric clan’s home. He was horrified when the city leveled thousands of Victorians in the Western Addition area to make room for high-rise housing projects and Japantown.

“My friends and I used to take windows and marble fireplaces and ornaments from the houses they were tearing down, because they tore them down with all this stuff still in it,” he recalled. He stored the remnants in his garage.

In 1976, when he was 19, Siegel bought his first Victorian. He paid $17,000 for a two-unit building that had become a heroin shooting gallery in the dangerous Dogpatch neighborhood. Siegel restored the house himself and sold it in the 1980s for $312,000 to buy his dream house--a 28-room, 10,000-square-foot mansion on Alamo Square, a historic district.

Siegel has spent $400,000 restoring the Victorian decor of his home, down to the florid wallpaper and the velvet-covered carved-wood furniture.

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“I’m a millionaire, but I drive around in a battered pickup truck and I am completely broke most of the time,” said Siegel, who continues to buy and restore San Francisco Victorians. “Every spare cent of my money goes into fixing up these buildings.”

Does he regret driving up the gay community center’s costs and scaling back its design to save the Fallon Building?

No, Siegel said cheerfully. “My friends and I are now helping them raise the money.”

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