Today's San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission meeting was particularly interesting. During public comment someone expressed concern about the Park Branch Library which is a beautiful building and it is alarming to think that it might be in jeopardy. During matters of the board the Lombard Street cottage (see also blog posting HPC Meeting - May 20) was again discussed and I presented the following comments to the Commission.
"I think the the underlying problem with the emergency demolition process is that we aren't asking the right people the right questions. Times have changed. We don't need to ask an engineer, "Can we save this building?" We are at a point in which pretty much anything can be done. The question is what do we need to do to save the building and how much is it going to cost? Engineers are problem solvers. They don't want to write Feasibility Studies they want to be designing crazy, steel stabilizing structures with cranes and lasers and computers and things... The only limiting factor these days is money. So perhaps I am biased, but I think the question of whether or not to save a building lies with the Planning Department to assign its cultural value. If City Hall was falling down we would, and have in the past, pulled out all the stops to save it. Should we have made the property owner of the Lombard Street cottage pay whatever it takes to stabilize the building? Say it would have cost $500,000 dollars. Would it have been worth it? I think that is the question that should be discussed in the future."
This was followed by an approval of the consent calendar, which included three projects replacing their windows, and then an informational presentation about the status of the Notre Dame School (Landmark 137). The next item was a fantastic presentation by Mark Kessler, a professor at the University of California, Davis. He shared his views on the San Francisco "Auto-Row" typology. The presentation can hardly be justifiably paraphrased but basically he noted that "Auto-Row" buildings have "historicist" facades with industrial structures. He linked this approach to what was also commonplace in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Exposition buildings. A particular appealing analogy that he used was that destroying a building that contributes to a district was like pulling out a thread in the fabric of the built environment; leaving the other threads hanging. He sited the Patagonia Store as a good reuse project for an "Auto-Row" building.
The next item was an amendment to San Francisco Building Code Section 103A creating a vacant-abandoned building registry and additional maintenance requirements. This is a Supervisor Sponsored amendment and is directly in response to the Lombard Street cottage debacle. There were a lot of good ideas tossed around including outreach and hardship clauses. I think that to avoid some really bad press the City better take a good look at how many buildings they own that are vacant and make sure that they can pay for the new requirements before they ask the public to!! After this item I left the meeting and do not at this time know the outcome of the additional items on the agenda.
