Elizabeth C. Creely and Jay Martin happened to be walking in the Mission and discovered a project in the works that would transform a humble, ramshackle Florida home with a rich history into something else entirely. Below is their account of their discovery.
Sunday, after a late morning breakfast of hot cross buns and coffee at Joey & Pat’s, my husband and I slowly perambulated the Mission, doing errands in a desultory way. On Florida Street, between 20th and 21st, we encountered a scrum of people on the sidewalk.
Two men in their fifties or sixties were presenting a building plan to the neighborhood. Blueprints were on a folding table. You could take a copy. The men and the table were in front of an old, white house with a garage door right at the sidewalk. We stopped to see what was happening. Why were they sitting in front of the house with an attitude of resignation?
The “house” is, or was, a dwelling for someone, but when it was constructed (in 1908, as it turns out) it wasn’t built to house people. It was clearly a garage or a space for light industry.
Two women were looking at the plans. The table was in the shade of the building, a nice place to linger. Two children biked around the women. We walked over to the table.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“We’re presenting these plans to the neighborhood,” replied the sitting man. He was older, maybe in his late sixties. “We’re adding a vertical element.”
“Oh,” I said, looking at the plans. “Are you the owner?”
The man shifted in his chair. “We’re the designers,” he replied. “We’re going to add a couple floors.”
Sensing circumvention, I tried again. “Who owns this place?”
The heavyset man sighed and moved in his folding chair again, almost imperceptibly. Evasion hung thick in the air. Crosstalk prevented the moment from becoming too acute.
One of the women knew the building’s history. The Travertini family had made pottery there. A truck used to pull into the garage and load up, she remembered.
The woman moved to Florida Street in 1965, when she was eight years old, and has lived here ever since. “I’m first generation,” she said. Her parents were from Puerto Rico. The neighborhood was full of Italian families when her family moved to the Mission, she said. “We were the minority. Can you imagine that?”
I said immediately, as I always do when Mission history comes up, “My great-great-grandparents lived down the street!” The woman and I beamed at each other, pleased to find another ancestral Missionite.
The standing man said the building was originally a gymnasium.
Back to the question hanging in the air. “Are you the owners?” I asked again.
The sitting man sensed that I wasn’t going to let it go. “There’s a group of owners,” he said. “I’m the face of the owners.”
He wasn’t going to say who. He wasn’t going to name names. Eleven owners? Twelve? Three? We thanked the men and left.
At home I went online. The San Francisco Public Library has online city directories from 1850 to 1982. I searched the 1963 Polk’s City Directory and found Travertini & Co. Mfg., “plaster casting,” owned by Gino and Ulaldina Travertini at 824 Florida Street. No pictures emerged on Google of Mr. and Mrs. Travertini. The only picture of them with their plaster and lathe and delivery trucks is a memory held in the mind of the woman who moved to the Mission in 1965, the year I was born.
My husband went back to get a blueprint at 2 p.m., perhaps thirty minutes after we’d seen them, but the men were gone. Nothing was posted on the building or the telephone pole in front of the building. Apparently, the men had given notice to the neighborhood.
The men were nice, and spoke to us in a civil fashion about the change in the neighborhood, the alteration of the Travertini place. But a description posted last year on Zillow seemed offhandedly callous. It described the structure as a “Great one open space with bathroom, kitchen, lots light and huge backyard. . . . We will tear down place in 22 months.”
It’s bewildering, this speculative wilding in the Mission, where prices are so high that groups of investors need to pool their money to purchase property, where the blueprints detailing changes to the neighborhood are grudgingly unveiled for a few minutes on hot, sunny Saturday afternoons and then folded up and secreted away so that neighborhood re-visioning can start, and where the perfect moments of the Mission stay preserved in memory.
Editor’s Note: As it turns out, the building is owned by a LLC – a limited liability corporation – headed by John Schrader, a principle of the architecture and construction firm Nova Design + Build. The firm lists 824 Florida as an upcoming project for 2016 and public records indicate that its redesign will, “Add two stories and roof deck to existing one-story single-family residence. Add one dwelling unit. Add basement level to accommodate parking for two vehicles.”
P.S. I believe the term you are looking for is astroturfing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing
Infill? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Nice marketing ploy there Nova Design and Build.
Density and infill are concepts which are typically linked with affordability.
I think this is fantastic! Infill is what we need to do to save our planet. The plans are taking an underused piece of property and adding density. Density means less sprawl, less air pollution, more use of public transport or biking/walking, a safer neighborhood, more city tax revenue, and yes, higher property values (because that matters folks!)
Great use of the space! Congratulations
They have a right to do what they want with the building, of course, but the facade is adorable. I hope they can redevelop the lot but urge them to reconsider demolishing the front. There’s so much that can be done with adaptive reuse.
My favorite part of living here is feeling like we can step back in time and feel connected with the city’s past, just by walking around the neighborhood. We shouldn’t throw that away without having second thoughts.
Wow, Linda! My email is creely12@gmail.com. I live in the neighborhood. I am planning on re-posting this on my blog and I’d love to have a scan of the blueprints! Email me and lets set a date.
Lame.
My friends used to live there a few years back, this is a wonderful place, with a nice backyard.
Sounds like they want to make it into a larger residence to house more people than it was designed for.
Sounds like a bunch of unwanted construction on that little street, noise, and contractor vehicles taking up too much parking.
This idea will make the neighbors’ homes terrible.
How can I vote against this ?
sheesh, because that street needs a new condo.
lame.
I have a full set of blueprints which I will be happy to provide for anyone who wants to scan and disseminate to the neighborhood and the public in general. They do not include plans to save any feature of the facade except the wall itself. Please let me know where I can walk the plans over or mail them. I would also like to add that they displaced a small family who had only just recently just given birth when they acquired the property.