Tagged: historic preservation

BARRY McGEE: ARTIST AND VANDAL

Last summer’s trip to Berlin, City of Graffiti, has us thinking about the lively yet criminal place of graffiti in the community.   The Berkeley Arts Museum visits the subject  in Barry McGee’s exhibit of constructions, sketches and graffiti art closing December 9th, 2012.  The museum building itself  is not to be missed, as it too is subject to closure as an art museum in 2015 as a result of ever-stiffening seismic requirements anxiously awaiting the arrival of the Big One.  Meanwhile, the building’s impending loss as a dramatic and now-unrepeatable gallery space is a tragic and crushing blow.

Designed by Northern Californian Mario Ciampi, who also gave us the elegant  overpass of I-280, the museum’s massive cantilevered concrete ramps captures all the visual noise and rough character of  the underside of a freeway on-ramp where McGee first made his mark in San Francisco.  The museums unabashed concrete drama   imparts a vitality and weightiness to the work that is lost in the prim presentation of the McGee collage construction on Floor 2 of that big white box SFMOMA.  Not surprisingly, McGee’s experience as urban tagger shares Ciampi’s keen understanding of the thrilling tension of urban spaces capitalizing on  juxtapositions of perspective/planar, light/dark, big/small, and discovery/risk in the arrangement of the art for maximum effect.

Typical, of the work formerly visible for free on the concrete supports upholding  San Francisco’s Central Freeway, are the caricatures of McGee’s world of the down and out, beaten-down, submissive, angry and plain drunk.  The incredible talent and dark humor behind the line work and rendering recalls centuries of admirable caricaturists including Daumier, George Grosz, and the war and post-war Sad Sack Cartoons of George Baker.

 

The exhibit extends to include bricolage installations of miniature drawings and street detritus,  to more recent color and type patterning, and on further to the artist’s street life with  graffiti paraphernalia and memorabilia including a fantastic spray-can laden overcoat.    Repeating a theme are wooden robots and artist robots whose arms jerk up and down in simulation of the vandal’s spray-painted artistic violations.  The artist as jerking robot metaphor is made blatant in a seedy “bodega” sited at the back of the exhibit whose greasy interior piled with old record albums, beatnik novels and dirty ashtrays resembles a reconstruction of the interior of the artist’s grabbag brain.

The general response of “that’s cool” sums up one’s overall response.  The exhibit is  a lot of fun, circus-like in scope, intimate in detail and tactility and graphically stunning.  As weird as it is cool is its linking of art and the creative act to an asocial bad-boy impulse–a  crime in most jurisdictions–in which the museum and art-goer get to play act at complicity.  The awkward place of graffiti on the streets and in the museums is discussed  by McGee himself in this linked SFMOMA video.

Out on the streets, the edgy confusion of graffiti crime, street art, community building and blight awaits further study.

 

LAST OUTPOSTS: LAST DAYS AT GETHSEMANE

“The last days are here.”  80-something,  Ray takes his morning constitutional down to the corner store, at Broderick and Fulton around 8 am, hangs out to catch his breath, smoke a cigarette, socialize and sometimes prophesize.  We talk about the recent foreclosure and sale of the Gethsemane Missionary Baptist a block away.  ”I’d been sayin’ it all along, it’s the last days, I do believe that.  The last days are here!”

The Gethsemane Missionary Baptist at Grove and Broderick is the latest of Western Addition’s church closures.  Neighbor Bill reports the church had been failing for  a while and was not shocked to hear the loan had been foreclosed and the property sold.  The realtor for sale reports the interior was in shambles.

I bump into Dharma, drinking lattes, a block east at Mojo.  He recalls, “I think maybe it was 2004.  I ‘member walkin’ by and those walls were like pumpin’.”  Here he makes a squeeze-box oompah gesture.  ”Yeah, it was this cool, loud gospel music.  We stuck our heads in, but it didn’t exactly feel right. So ….”

Friday the 13th, April 2012, was the day the music died at  Gethsemane Missionary Baptist–the day the foreclosed property was listed for sale.

As described on the realtor’s website redfin.com: “601 Broderick is a charming old church … in the heart of NOPA.  Not for the faint of heart or faithless, this property needs a revival. … make them believers. Heaven only knows what the possibilities could be!”  Receiving multiple offers on first showing, the sale closed before the For Sale sign was hammered in the ground.  Highland Ferndale Partners,  a luxury home developer purchased the church for restoration and resale.  David Papale, partner and realtor,  prefers not to disclose the sale price, but  redfin.com notes the price clearly at $1,401,000, 40% over asking, a sizeable investment in the future of the community. One might speculate, since this is real estate, that the sale price is more than adequate to cover the losses the bank faced in foreclosure on their faulty loan, a profit unrealized by the church.   Mr. Papale claims, while the possibilities for the property include six  units, it will be restored as a single family  home and to its original Victorian appearance without “that horrible addition.”  

Emphatically squat and unadorned, aluminum windowed and with in-your-face exterior spots, the addition could easily be seen as the Anti-Victorian to an ardent preservationist.  The photo from the Planning Department’s  1976 Architectural Field Form  shows the original entry porch, intact up to 1976.

“DESTROYED EN FACADE BY ABOMINABLE ENTRY ADDITION.”  Overcome with emotion the Planning Department’s  Field Notes for 601 Broderick rave with a zealot’s outrage about the 1977 entry addition for the Gethsemane Missionary Baptist.  The Field Notes represent the personal indignation and righteousness that mark the beginnings of historical preservation enforcement in San Francisco’s Planning Department.

In 1962 the women’s Junior League of San Francisco, the self-proclaimed incubator for “many of San Francisco’s most successful fundraisers and philanthropists (Opera, Ballet, Symphony, etc.),” initiated a drive-by survey of important historical structures and recorded them in the book Here Today (c 1968).    Responding to Western Addition’s decay, Urban Renewal‘s demolition (including 2,500 Victorians) and the post-war craze for asbestos shingle and stucco facade upgrades, the survey focused heavily on homes with Victorian ornamentation.  With the advent of Redevelopment Phase 2, their record serves in memoriam the further Victorian disappearances and relocations of the coming decades.  Pictured here are Here Today’s authors: Junior League’s Mrs. Alden Crow, the writers Watkins and Olmsted, and the masterful California landscape and architectural photographer Morley Baer.

The volunteer efforts of the Junior League are notable and praiseworthy.  Based on their  groundbreaking work, the Planning Department extended the list with the 1976 Architectural Survey of rated buildings–10,000 buildings in 60 unpublished volumes, accessible in the department’s database but less available to the general public.  For decades this  historical listing became the Planning Department’s chief basis for more severe scrutiny of facade alterations comparable to airport security’s no-fly list.   With this years online publishing of the survey field forms, the information for all listed properties is at last accessible and its inherent subjectivity evident.

It must be admitted, looking back in time, the historical porch is elegant and charming in the old black-and-white Field Form photograph.  And with the loss of the congregation the carefree chutzpah of the 1977 entry addition becomes less supportable to the values and beliefs of a new community.  Likewise, its inevitable demolition and architectural loss become trivial compared to the loss of   affordable options for a broader community.

The goal of historic preservation remains laudable, but one some can ill afford.  In the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s when redlining made home loans unavailable to residents in the Western Addition, maintenance, repair and improvement were not even an option.  Today, chipping paint, warped flooring, aluminum windows and asbestos shingles can look as attractively affordable to a budget minded renter or a TIC purchaser, as they can to well-funded developers like the Highland Ferndale Partners.

At Gethsemane, one should expect that under the watchful eye and wagging finger of the City’s Historical Review Process a new historical look will be recreated including entry and garage for the freshly painted luxury home at 601 Broderick.  And one can reckon that the so-called horrible abomination of an entry that served a rocking congregation for 36 years will be bull-dozed and our post will serve in remembrance.

LAST OUTPOSTS: VICTORIANS AND PENTECOSTALS OF THE WESTERN ADDITION

The First Apostolic Faith Church displays a Pentecostal purity of form in stark contrast to the ornament laden Victorians that populate the neighborhood.

Cleansed of its Victorian ornament to a powerful austerity and a puritanical severity, the First Apostolic Faith Church at Pierce and Bush, top,  provides an affordable and architectural alternative to the prevailing upper middle class styling common in Lower Pacific Heights in Western Addition’s upper end.  It represents one of many small and endangered churches still active as its supporting congregation is pushed out of the neighborhood to make way for a less evangelical population.

A Bible belt of small churches, Pentecostals and Baptists, cradles the former Redevelopment Area of  the Western Addition.  During the reconstruction period of the 1960′s and 70′s  the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency replaced demolished Victorian row-houses with large-scale housing blocks.  The new plans eliminated small churches, mom and pop corner stores, bars, clubs, even front stoops –all spots for neighborhood socializing.  The churches migrated west into the adjacent hospitable Victorian era neighborhoods of Hayes Valley, including the Lower Haight and North of the Panhandle.  Shown above, ”The indiscriminate mixture of commercial, industrial and residential structures … is the disease of blighted areas.” proclaims the San Francisco Planning Commission in their anti-urban propaganda “New City” of 1947.

Considered Urban Blight by the Redevelopment Agency and now called Painted Ladies, the Victorians of the Western Addition form an astounding collection of which the tour-bus beloved  Six Painted Ladies of Alamo Square are but a tiny piece.  These other Ladies of a certain age like the one below just happen to be on a different maintenance schedule.

Among the earliest, these classic italianate row houses at Grove and Scott, shown above, represent 10 of more than 1,000 identical homes built throughout Victorian San Francisco by William Hollis’ The Real Estate Associates (TREA), building developer of the early 1870′s with a very successful homeowner package.   Between 1870 to 1877, TREA building production averaged 2 to 3 homes a day, a scale of construction, mass production and landscape re-invention comparable to that undertaken by the Redevelopment Agency itself.

Presenting a Before and After view,  the Mount Hermon Baptist displays its original Victorian ornament(the Before) on its annex, above left.  In contrast, its sanctuary(the After), above right, strips down to a purity of form animated only by subtle use of color, iconography and window placement.  Both are Victorian era structures.  Both are stunning.  The modern sanctuary is also surprising.

In conflict with San Francisco’s legislated  Residential Design Guidelines, the Pentecostal Temple at Grove and Lyon and the Second Union Baptist on Page interrupt residential street pattern with positive mid-block socializing and the safety of the bright neon glow–that is as long as the light stays on.

The Solid Rock Church of God re-thinks what Victorian ornamentation can mean.  Below the elegant cornice, Victorian trims are removed and replaced with a stone  veneer and a tomb like entry.  Above the roof peak floats a heavenly cross.   Unfortunately, the church’s footing North of the Panhandle seems less than rock solid along with many of the remaining congregations.

The neighborhood churches provide a unique counterpoint in an otherwise well preserved, if less painted, Victorian neighborhood.  They up-end our expectations of appropriateness and call to question the restrictive goals of preservation and zoning which encourage greater neighborhood consistency and discourage architectual diversity and affordability at a parcel by parcel scale.  If less ornamented than the Victorians,  what the small church structures offer the community is variety and character–aesthetic, economic, cultural and  certainly spiritual.

Real estate profits, radically improved commercial activity and city infrastructure support the revitalization of the neighborhood but do less to support the fragile economic integration of its community.   Historically, the neighborhood was Victorian.  Historically, the neighborhood encouraged a middle range of incomes and a diverse community.

Thanks to Eric Fischer for his monumental postings of San Francisco City Planning maps and documents including “Reclaimed from Blight.”  Below the crosses of the recently sold Gethsemane Missionary Baptist at Grove and Broderick and the dark cypress at the door of the Emmanuel Church of God in Christ.

 

LAST OUTPOSTS: BAPTISTS AND A.M.E.S OF THE WESTERN ADDITION

On Thursday evenings and Sundays mornings, the largely white neighborhoods of the Western Addition are transfigured by  voices singing the gospel and shouting Amen from within the local African Americans churches of what were predominantly black neighborhoods.   Once occupying the entire Western Addition as “the Harlem of the West“, the now scattered black community reassembles in the church choirs and congregations with former neighbors driving in from more affordable neighborhoods across the city, and across the bay for worship and community.

Connecting the dots on a googlemap of “baptist churches”, one can chart the size of the mighty community that filled San Francisco’s Western Addition including the neighborhoods of the Fillmore, both Upper and Lower, Haight Ashbury and the Lower Haight, Hayes Valley, Alamo Square, NoPa and Divisadero Street, the Lower Pacific Heights, Japantown, and Cathedral Hill.  Along with the Baptists we’ve added to the map the names of black A.M.E.s (Black American Episcopal), C.O.G.I.C.s (Church of God in Christ)  and Pentecostals.

The churches range across the heart of the city from the imposing Macedonia Missionary Baptist in Lower Pacific Heights  to the gothic Mount Zion Baptist across from Golden Gate Park in the Haight Ashbury, pictured above, and from the rosy Love Chapel Church of God bordering Presidio Heights to the modest Mount Trinity Baptist along the new Octavia Blvd. near Market Street, both shown below.

Over a 69 year history these church communities have fought a continuing battle for permanence and relevance.

Typical of many, the founder’s plaque at the Macedonia Missionary Baptist dates the Sanctuary’s beginnings to 1943, during the heyday of wartime ship building and at the height of black migration from the deep south.  The plaque goes on to proudly honor “Mortgage burned, July 6, 1958,” while one block down, San Francisco Urban Renewal begins its buy-out and wholesale demolition of the district, replacing Geary Street with Geary Boulevard, effectively cleaving Pacific Heights and the Macedonia Missionary from the heavily  concentrated black neighborhoods south of Geary with a six  lane expressway beginning and ending precisely at the Western Addition borders, serving all but the locals.

Beginning in wartime 1943 like the Macedonia Missionary, the more nomadic congregation of the Greater Gethsemane C.O.G.I.C.  suffers both forced and voluntary relocations before settling down.   Starting on Eddy Street, ground zero for Urban Renewal Project Area A-1, the congregation relocates to Buchanan Street, soon to become Project Area A-2, where the church is claimed by San Francisco Redevelopment and demolished.   Re-established in a former theater in the Lower Haight, they sell to the developer of The Theater Lofts Condominiums.  In 1999 Lord Pastor Dad Grant leads  his congregation 5 blocks home to the stately 240 Page Street, the former St. Paul’s German Methodist built in 1909, shown below.

Nearby up Page Street, the neon cross at the 2nd Union Baptist still glows nightly after 50 years.


Among the  more prominent congregations, the Third Baptist near Alamo Square claims to be the oldest, founded in 1852.  Both believers and activists , the church  maintains long-standing connections with the N.A.A.C.P.   Below W.E.B. Du Bois  speaks in the sanctuary to the NAACP in 1958.   It has been pastored by the outspoken  Dr. Amos C. Brown since 1976, current President of the local branch.

Out at the fringes of the district, two different strategies address the issue of dwindling attendance.

The steeple of the First A.M.E. Zion, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal, congregation west of the Mississippi (1852), stands opposite the private San Francisco Day School at Golden Gate and Masonic, below, one representing the older and one the newer demographic.   In 2009, the 26 year old, Rev. Malcolm J. Byrd was called from Brooklyn to re-vitalize the aging congregation.  Check out the video of his arrival,  “A New Beginning”,  for an inside view.

At Turk and Lyon, the congregation of the multi-colored St. Cyprian’s Episcopal, below, adapts to survive, transforming from a 34 member declining black congregation to an integrated  neighborhood  church, reflecting the evolving neighborhood  with significant community outreach programs and its own voice in issues affecting new community interests.

Like the recently publicized foreclosures in Bayview, the steady loss of the churches of the Western Addition through foreclosure, eviction  and attrition echoes  the economic expulsion and flight of San Francisco’s black population, representing 17% in the 60′s before Urban Renewal and the loss of blue collar work, and now representing 6%.  The churches stand as testament of their binding strength as a spiritual homeland for a community dispossessed of its physical, geographical neighborhood.

Above NoPa’s Pentecostal Temple and nearby the recently foreclosed Gethsemane Missionary Baptist.

The next few blog posts present an incomplete catalog of the endangered Western Addition churches, representing both a spirited culture and free-spirited architectural approach.  Our interests are:

1.  to chronicle the remnants of a disappeared community and an endangered multi-culturalism.

2.  to recognize in the simple, evocative  forms and iconography of the smaller churches an historical architectural resource that provides a powerful counterpoint to the bric-a-brac laden Victorians in the neighborhoods they renovate.

3.  to critique San Francisco’s historical review process that deifies the middle class Victorians, promoting  neighborhood consistency while casting out neighborhood diversity and creative affordability.

Below, sidewalk topiary at the Love Chapel Church of God in Christ glows in the light of a setting sun.

Thanks to the recently defunct San Francisco Urban Redevelopment Agency for Geary Street Demolition photo and the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society for DuBois at 3rd Baptist and Joe Philipson for Rev. Amos Brown.  And thanks to Mrs. Dominique Jackson Byrd and the First A.M.E. Zion Church for the image of Rev. Malcolm J. Byrd and the video “A New Beginning.”

 

BETTER WURSTER?

Along with San Francisco’s  Bank of America Building and Ghiradelli Square, the Clark Beach House in elevation above and immortalized on PG&E’s heliodon machine left, counts among the most published and recognized of the work from the office of the architect William Wilson Wurster, one time west coast darling, and educational innovator as  Dean at MIT and UC Berkeley’s re-envisioned Environmental Design Department.  Known for his serious understatement and disdain for luxury and over-designing, his work remains largely disregarded today seemingly as a result.  With the One Percent currently under attack, the possibility for a resurgence of  modesty in home design seems better than any time since the Reign of Terror.

Just in time, Dick Peters and Caitlin Lempres Bostrom, have published a portion of the architectural trove of Wurster documents given Peters in 1973.  The Houses of William Wurster: Frames for Living with clear elucidating text, simple architectural plans (yes!) and images–new color and beautiful old black & white–identifies a clear and attractive California point of view embracing outdoor and casual living.  The majority of work done through the depression  from 1924 to 1939 represents vacation style homes with exterior bedroom access and protected courtyards reminiscent of early California adobes and camp layouts.  They show a great love and understanding of sun, fresh air and views, but exclude modern luxuries–like insulation and interior bedroom halls.  The book stretches the slender thread of two other excellent monographs:  R. Thomas Hille’s Inside the Large Small House (1994) and Marc Treib’s An Everyday Modernism (published in conjunction with a SFMOMA exhibit in 1995).

As vulnerable to the elements as to the vicissitudes of personal taste and modern convenience, the most famous and stunning of the residential projects have suffered greatly with time.  The Clark Beach House in Aptos, The Coleman House in Pacific Heights, and the Saxton Pope House in Lafayette are presented here with their more recent re-workings.  Better or worse?  You be the judge.

The original Clark Beach House in Aptos (1937, renovated sometime before 2000)  brings a funky Palladian symmetry and hierarchy to the beach shack.  Barely an enclosure, the shelter embraces the inhabitants while its open wings and lowered ramp welcome the passing of sun and clouds and the shifting of sand and tides.  What’s lost now: unpainted vertical redwood siding, two open sun porches, deck area, 4-square floor plan, exterior stair access to upstairs bedrooms, the characteristic wispy eave line, enormous glazed rolling  doors, a draw bridge to access the sand.  What’s gained:  more enclosed space, privacy, private upper level view decks and a tidal breakwater.

Wurster’s own beach house in Stinson Beach (1962–Wurster, Bernardi, Emmons) is shown here in black and white.   When it burned,  a clone of the Aptos Clark house rose phoenix like but in a corrected form by Turnbull Griffin Haesloop Architects in 2006.  Compare below side views and anthromorphic qualities of the original 4-square Aptos beach house and its elegant Stinson Beach homage.

In our comments Daniel Gregory has offered a correction to the popular reporting of the time.  Regarding the lamentable demise of the Wursters along Stinson Beach, the Wurster designed home destroyed by fire had been preceded by the destruction of Wurster’s own home remodeled beyond recognition.

In 1995 with the assistance of Ryan Associates, General Contractors and demolition crew, the talented craftsman/architect Olle Lundberg helped Larry Ellison achieve one of five dream homes counting others in Woodside, Malibu, Newport, RI, and Rancho Mirage.  The former Coleman House in Pacific Heights, San Francisco (1956) contained  an original courtyard garden by Lawrence Halperin (pictured in black and white) and redesigned by Ron Herman.

According to the architect’s and newspaper descriptions: “To make the spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay even more panoramic the house’s factory-like grid of opaque glass facing the courtyard was turned into a sweeping wall of glass…” while “…the monotony of plate-glass windows has been relieved in the living room with a distinctly syncopated rhythm … and, most particularly, a large trapezoidal panel.”


Arianna Huffington and Gavin Newsom party before the renovated stair at Larry Ellison’s.

William Wurster: “Architecture is not a goal. Architecture is for life and pleasure and work and for people. The picture frame and not the picture.”   When one makes the unfair comparison between Wurster’s work and the expressive functionalism of his close friend, the universally beloved Finn Alvar Aalto,  the restrictions Wurster put on self expression sound severe.  An exception, thanks to the helpful push of his client, might be the unique Saxton Pope House in Lafayette (1940) with its private entry court, an outdoor living space with circular roof opening and fireplace, all enclosed within a corrugated metal surround.

Nestled in suburban Lafayette, it was demolished for the Acalanes Road cloverleaf in 1963.

Thanks and credits to Roger Sturtevant for his exquisite black and white photos, Lundberg Designs, and Turnbull Griffin Haesloop.  Below Wurster’s Aptos plan and Turnbull Griffin Haesloop’s Stinson Beach plans.

DRAYTON HALL PLANTATION

Preservation today offers provocative questions about the value of creating monuments to wealth, power and fashion. Instead alternatives present time as a continuum and not simply a period, and consider history as something that is not owned but shared by all.
At Drayton Hall Plantation outside Charleston centuries of paint and furnishings are stripped away. The empty rooms become more memorial than museum. Without the distractions of furnishings and personal memorabilia, the mind wanders through history to a time when fields of slaves and tobacco supported a family home.  The home becomes haunted by one’s own reflections on time’s passage and the ghosts of southern history.

FORT ROSS, SONOMA

Light on two sides is the rule for a well lit, warm and glare-free room. The Fort Ross Chapel of 1850 takes a different approach with a different effect. Lit from one side, the hot spots, glare and gloominess are highly emotive with a dark presence hanging over the pulpit.
The tight grain and rich darkness of the the old growth lumber panelling is unavailable today. The diameter of the ceiling drum would be similar to that of the tree fell to supply the fort’s lumber.