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Does it Spark Joy? How San Francisco Decides What to Keep

Devin Smith
18 min readOct 5, 2022

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Moving a Victorian in the Fillmore. Still from SF Heritage’s 50th Anniversary Documentary.

This article originally appeared in the September 2022 issue of the SF Apartment Association Magazine.

Movements

As with so much in the history of US cities, preservation movements began largely in response to the heavy-handed excesses of midcentury redevelopment.¹ The National Historic Preservation Act was passed in 1966, with most state and local measures coming around the same time. San Francisco introduced Article 10 into the Planning Code in 1967, which created the Landmarks Advisory Board and a list of Designated Landmarks.²

But preservation is often a ground-up effort. Our most influential private organization is SF Heritage, founded by architects Charles Hall Paige and Harry Miller. Formally incorporated in 1971, they’d already been active for several years: In 1963, they helped organize an architectural survey with the Junior League of SF, published in 1968 as Here Today. Their overarching purpose was to advocate for the “historic look of San Francisco, the historic urban design patterns, the historic buildings” — but their immediate concern was saving Victorians slated for demolition in the Western Addition.³ After three years of negotiation and planning with the Redevelopment Agency, SF Heritage made its mark with the relocation of twelve Victorians over a single month in 1974…

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Devin Smith
Devin Smith

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