Feature
Story & Photos by Robert Shurell
I was living in North Beach when they closed down the public housing complex on Bay Street. It was just a few blocks from where I lived. The buildings were concrete, built in the 1950s style of cold efficiency. They exuded a bleak sadness that seemed to seep into the neighboring properties. Their color was a dismal yellowish, making the buildings look like they were perpetually caught in a rainstorm. The façade was brutal; its random dark recesses hiding shadowed and locked gates. I remember how it hunched over the cable car stop like a monster in the night. Unconsciously at the time, and in retrospect a conscious decision, I used to cross the street when walking past it. The place felt like danger, and from the stories I’ve heard, my feelings were correct. Needles in the stairwells were commonplace, and in the shadows and recesses, drug dealers lurked. Rats and cockroaches dominated the environment—no wonder the place looked so sad.
I remember, too, when they emptied it out. The inhabitants were dispersed to any number of distant projects, with the promise that they would have the option to move back in when the new complex was ready. For some time, it sat empty. But it was almost scarier empty than full. The desolation was overpowering. The windows had been removed, and the empty holes stared at you with a soulless gaze. Like ivy climbs a brick wall, graffiti began its organic invasion of those concrete walls and moved quickly inside. For some time it remained that way, a sad end for failed social engineering.
One day, the buildings were gone. I recall walking to the bookstore one evening, and being stopped in my tracks by the emptiness of the site. That oppressive object was gone, gone, gone! In its place was an incredibly beautiful view of Russian Hill. I hadn’t realized until then the precise topography of my surroundings, and I spent some time soaking in the lights on the hillside. Russian Hill forms a protective bowl that cups around North Beach, and I thought, “What a treasure those horrible old buildings were hiding! But this is a fleeting treasure, so I’d better enjoy it while it’s here. A new building will be going up soon enough, and this view will be hidden for another 50 years, probably by something just as bad.”
I was right about a new building going up, hiding the view. Another fifty years? Maybe. It’s hard to judge these days how long a building will last, but they’re certainly no longer built for the ages. I was wrong, though, about it being something just as bad. The new complex’s lively façade, with a more sophomoric than sophisticated feeling, adds color and texture to the insufferably dull streetscape of Bay Street. The stucco walls are colored alternately rust, mustard and green. There are a variety of roof forms, from the corner towers that look as if they are wearing a flat-topped graduation hat to flat roofs with parapets to gabled standing-seam metal roofs. Bays pop out of the main wall plane at various locations, seemingly without any repetition of rhythm.
Street-level storefront windows along Bay Street have varying sizes, heights and forms; some have an arched top, others are flat. These windows are uniformly tinted dark gray, a tactic that succeeds in affording privacy to those inside. On the other primary facades, walk-up ground level housing units are accessible from Francisco, Mason and Powell streets. These units are a welcome departure from the other large apartment housing complexes on Bay Street, which rely on small lobbies and long corridors for unit access. The street-level units have small front porches with railings and one or two steps. The porch is typically flanked by a pre-cast concrete planter (many, I noticed, leaking water onto the stucco below, which means water damage and mold in the coming years if not attended to immediately). The units on the second and third stories, accessible as walk-ups from the interior courtyard, have well-placed awnings at some windows. Functionally, many more windows should have awnings.
The interior courtyards are accessed through main gateways designed to
minimize the feeling of institutional lockdown that the old gates imparted. Rather than floor-to-ceiling bars, with a severe metal gate, there are low bars of a residential scale, with a stucco portal that feels more like a front door. Once inside the gate, the visitor has the option to ascend a grand stair or ride the adjacent elevator to the podium level. The courtyard may be considered a green roof. A green roof is one of the smartest ideas in urban construction, as it lowers the heat island effect created by typical roofs, uses naturally occurring rainwater for useful purposes, rather than channeling it into an already overburdened storm sewer system, and provides residents with pleasant outdoor garden space within the dense urban fabric. The green roof was realized by depressing the podium slab so that planters could be built up to the height of the walks, rather than have raised planters that would have felt confining. Also, this allowed the designers to give the curving walks a gentle undulation, perhaps to remind residents that even in a fabricated environment, the hills dominate in San Francisco.
The courtyard, further, doesn’t have the cavernous feel that it might if its bounding walls were the full four-story height of the exterior. The podium above the street-level units allows the courtyard walls to be only three-stories high, thereby letting the neighborhood context be felt from the interior of the complex. Several playgrounds exist at various places around the courtyard, but they contain odd, cumbersome play equipment that appear dangerous and not conducive to children’s play.
Downstairs, at street level, a community room looks out at Bay Street from behind tinted windows. This room, with shiny, waxed floors and clean, smooth furniture, appeared little used. I had that feeling also at the podium level, where perhaps the most noticeable feature was that the courtyard was completely empty on a Saturday afternoon. Where was everybody? I would hope that they were in the 3,000 square feet of office space dedicated for tenants who want to develop start-up companies. But, alas, I doubt it.
One part of the complex that is always busy is the Trader Joe’s supermarket in the northeast corner. The store is in direct competition with the Safeway across the street, and seems a perfect fit for the neighborhood. Also, although a small café initially failed to put down roots at the foot of the cable car stop at Powell Street, Starbucks has swooped in and settled in the building. There is a cable car ticket office, and a tourist gift shop adjacent to the cable car turnaround as well, along with still-vacant retail frontage on Bay Street. Integrating retail into the ground-floor use of this complex was a great idea, as it gives people a reason to be on the street, reversing the imposing feel that the old complex had.
There has been a complete change of ideology from old to new: the old complex was so introverted it became dangerous, as if it was designed with a chip on its shoulder. The new complex, thanks to the hard work of nonprofit Bridge Housing along with its partners and financiers, is extroverted, inviting and brings a variety of uses to a stretch of road that needed a higher calling. The amount of affordable housing units has been increased from 229 to 341, and the ground-floor retail spots connect the Barnes and Noble/Cost Plus retail center to the North Point shopping center a block and a half away, effectively activating both sides of Bay Street.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Shurell is a licensed architect and designer with Architectural Resources Group, a firm specializing in historic preservation throughout the western United States. Feel free to contact him with questions or comments at robert@argsf.com. Copyright © 2007 by the SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.