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Does it Spark Joy? How San Francisco Decides What to Keep
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, a dramatic undertaking which captured the imagination of the press.⁴
By the mid-70s, SF Heritage was focusing on vulnerable buildings downtown. This was often an uphill battle, but their advocacy for since-demolished notables like the Alaska Commercial Building and the City of Paris department store highlighted the role preservation legislation could play in shaping the City. In 1979, they completed a major survey of downtown, published as Splendid Survivors, complete with a forward by Herb Caen.⁵
This book introduced the evaluation system which is more-or-less still used today: Buildings are assigned letter grades from A to D (highest to minor-or-no importance).⁶ SF Heritage acknowledged that ranking systems were often disliked by historians, but stressed that “city planning officials, real-estate developers, and others in positions of influence over land use and development” required some form of quantification in order to take…
