Cothran

Peskin and the Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association have a limited goal: They want the city Planning Department to refer to the Bloomfield study when considering requests from developers to alter or tear down buildings. If a building is listed in the study as historically or architecturally significant -- there are different levels of significance, which I won't bore you with -- the activists would like city planners to take that significance into consideration. If the benefits of development outweigh the social good of maintaining a facade, a cornice, a balcony, or a whole building ... well then, so be it. The trade-off would have been considered, and sometimes the trade-off tilts in the direction of development.

Of course, if the association doesn't concur with the outcome of the Planning Department's balancing act, the group could press the point further. With the study adopted as a city policy document, activists could ask that city planners require, as a condition of permit approval, a developer to adhere to federal government historic preservation standards when a building is altered.

In the case of more severe development plans that would eliminate or seriously alter buildings, an "official" Bloomfield study could call into play the California Environmental Quality Act, known by its acronym CEQA (and usually pronounced SEE-kwuh). In such a case, the city would be required to prepare an environmental impact report, which in turn would have to acknowledge a building's historic significance, and, more important, discuss possible development alternatives to demolition. The EIR would also trigger public hearings at the Planning Commission and the city Landmarks Board; these hearings could, of course, provide political openings for Peskin and other preservationists.

As always, though, the planners would still have the final say-so. Their discretion would be left intact.

What the North Beach activists are doing -- raising money to complete a study of their neighborhood's architectural and historical significance, and presenting it for the city government to use -- is rightly, properly, and, legally speaking, the official job of the Department of City Planning. That's right. The only reason Peskin and his allies are involved in this mundane issue is the Planning Department's willful abandonment of a critical part of its duties.

Under state law, municipal governments can be certified by the state Office of Historic Preservation to receive state funds to conduct surveys and studies on the architectural and historical significance of buildings within their jurisdictions. These studies are then supposed to be used as part of the arsenal of city planning. Modest preservation of the kind Peskin and his allies are pushing is meant to be a government function, not the sole purview of outside activism.

Oakland, for example, routinely applies for and receives state money to conduct such surveys. Forty-two other cities in the state get grants to do surveys as well. Somewhere along the way San Francisco lost its certification, but, ironically, became certified again on the eve of the election of Willie Brown.

Fat lot of good it did.
So far, Willie Brown has seemed more interested in dismantling the landmarks and preservation arm of government than building it up with state funds. In 1996, he fired the entire Landmarks Board and filled nearly all the vacancies with pro-development shills such as Nancy Ho Belli (whose distinguishing feature as a historic buildings expert is that she once tore one down). The next year Mayor Brown fired the only two outspoken preservationists on the panel at the same time he moved the board's longtime secretary (read: institutional brain) and preservation coordinator for the Planning Department, Vincent Marsh, into a backwater planning post, and had him replaced with a man of little preservation experience, Neil Hart.

Development projects that impinged on or eradicated historic buildings have been approved without complaint. Shriners Hospital went down. And in North Beach, the Pagoda Theater, an art deco wonder, was slated to become a Rite Aid drug store until neighborhood activism forestalled the chain. Still, the Planning Department approved a complete gutting of the interior of the theater to facilitate the Rite Aid store. Many of the architecturally significant art deco flourishes were lost.

Peskin complains that it would have been possible to both maintain the art deco design of the interior and allow the owner to do what he wanted. But, at least in theory, the Planning Department possessed no document that would have instructed planners about the significance of the structure. (At least in theory; the Bloomfield study was well known. It just wasn't official.)

The Telegraph Hill Dwellers learned of the Bloomfield study around the time the Pagoda was being mutilated. At the same time, Willie Brown named Ferlinghetti poet laureate, and among his first words were his wish to have North Beach named a historic district. Inspired by Ferlinghetti and depressed over the loss of the Pagoda's interior, Peskin and his association members started raising money for the update of the 1982 North Beach survey until Bloomfield's illness intervened.