[BTinSF]

Tenderloin's heritage wins national notice
John King
Tuesday, March 17, 2009

San Francisco's newest historic district includes gargoyles and chariots, overblown balconies - and street crime and blight.

Those latter traits are no surprise in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood west of Union Square that most of us pass through hurriedly, if at all. But the architectural richness is real, and it deserves celebration as a reminder of how complex a city can be.

That complexity is one reason it took so long for the 33 blocks and 409 "contributing" buildings of the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District to finally be added last month to the National Register of Historic Places.

The saga began in 1982, when architectural historian Anne Bloomfield surveyed a troubled neighborhood being chewed on the east by convention hotels and on the south by institutional expansion.

History buffs wanted to protect the sturdy masonry apartment buildings that filled the district in the decades after the 1906 earthquake. But the push for landmark status was opposed - not only by property owners fearful of new regulations but by activists who saw the specter of gentrification lurking behind the robes of preservation.

Fast-forward 25 years.

During that time the Tenderloin's zoning was tightened and height limits were lowered, so hotel towers no longer are a threat. Low-rent residential hotels are barred from conversion into tourist inns. The main real estate action these days is from nonprofit developers seeking to build safe housing on the underutilized sites that remain.

In this climate, the architectural heritage becomes a badge of pride: "There's a real quality here," says Randy Shaw, executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Committee since 1980 and a force behind the new district.

Bloomfield's survey was updated and expanded by architectural historian Michael Corbett with the help of a city grant. The revised version emphasizes social change along with architectural details, forthrightly describing the Tenderloin as "a distinctive residential area ... also associated with commercial activity, entertainment and vice."

As for property owners, the controls they face are no tighter than before. But if they restore their buildings in historically accurate ways, they're now eligible for tax credits of up to 40 percent.

Becoming one of San Francisco's 24 recognized historic districts doesn't change reality. Drug trade is persistent on some blocks. Social services targeted to the down-and-out also attract grifters looking for trouble.

But the district absolutely deserves the honor. To see what I mean, take a walk up Hyde Street from Market.

The first two blocks are grim, blank walls erected by institutions eager to turn their back on the neighbors. North of Golden Gate Avenue, though, the pace picks up.

The street is walled by a dense march of buildings roughly the same size, age and vaguely classic style. A close look reveals accents and flair - 138 Hyde from 1915, for instance, where the entrance behind the (recent) security gate has etched glass framing the door.

The 200 block includes low structures erected in the 1930s by film studios needing space to store movies destined for the cinemas of Market Street. Now they're occupied mostly by nonprofits, but at 255 Hyde there's fresh paint on the ornamental lions and theatrical masks that marked the presence of tenant Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


The Ben Hur apartments at Hyde and Ellis streets, built in 1926, feature a baby-blue chariot beneath each window.

The next block includes the round neon sign for Lafayette Coffee Shop Prime Rib where, indeed, a prime rib dinner is on the menu for $11.75 (no, I didn't see Alice Waters at a table inside). Another block brings the Ben Hur, six stories of apartments from 1926 with a baby-blue chariot beneath each bay window.

The show continues when you turn onto O'Farrell Street and head east, toward the familiar terrain of Powell Street. If nothing else, slow down for the Abbey Garage at 550 O'Farrell - where this most mundane of building types was erected in 1924 with a theatrical balcony above the entrance and a row of gargoyles beneath the roofline.


Gargoyles look down on the entrance to the 1924 Abbey Garage, at 550 O'Farrell St.

Creation of the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District does more than bring outside attention to a surprisingly evocative landscape of early 20th century urbanism. It sends a message of validation to Tenderloin residents who struggle to make their home a better place.

"The listing is an opportunity for people in the neighborhood to recognize that when you look up, there's a lot to appreciate," says Jack Gold, executive director of San Francisco Architectural Heritage.

The Tenderloin's determinedly dignified buildings went up long before today's drug dealers arrived. With luck, they'll endure long after the current troubles depart.


Now an apartment building aimed at low income in residents, the six story building at 240 Jones St. debuted in 1925 as the Roosevelt Hotel

For more on the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, go to www.uptowntl.org.

For more information on the National Register of Historic Places, go to: www.nps.gov/nr.

Place appears on Tuesdays. E-mail John King at jking@sfchronicle.com.

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