SCRAP, the 50-year-old Bayview arts-and-everything store, is losing its lease

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Along a gritty, industrialized path in Bayview, hidden among numerous auto-body shops, construction companies and shipping facilities, lies a seemingly nondescript warehouse. If you take a closer look, it’s lined with plastic pink flamingos and painted in bright rainbow colors. Inside, it’s a time capsule. 

SCRAP, a nonprofit and legacy business, has been selling everything from miscellaneous family photos from the 1990s to a large selection of paper maps from around the world. Next year, it will celebrate its 50th anniversary.

But its party will have to be held elsewhere.

SCRAP will likely lose its $1,000 monthly lease on 2150 Newcomb Ave. next June. After that, the warehouse is scheduled to be rebuilt by its landlord, the San Francisco Unified School District, to house a new central kitchen for the entire district. 

SCRAP is now searching to buy its “forever home” — at market rates in San Francisco.

“A thousand dollars is hardly anything in San Francisco,” said Steve Lambright, a SCRAP board member. “It’s going to be hard to let that go.”

Since 1999, SCRAP has occupied just 7,000 square feet, including its outdoor space, in a hulking 132,000-square-foot warehouse owned by the district. The remaining 125,000 square feet is devoted to SFUSD’s maintenance facility. 

In SCRAP’s corner you’ll find everything city residents have chosen to donate for creative reuse over the years; stuff like buckets of miscellaneous buttons, reams of fabric, and thousands of loose beads, much of which would have otherwise wound up in a landfill. 

Ahead of its departure, the nonprofit is pulling out all the stops: It’s launching a capital campaign and reminding customers that it is, in fact, a nonprofit and could use the help. A page on its website asks customers if they have any leads on a potential property — SCRAP wants a space with 3,000 more square feet than it has now — and if they would be willing to donate funds.

“For us to find our forever home will take the support of the entire community,” said Terry Kochanski, SCRAP’s executive director, who wants to stay in the Bayview and expand SCRAP into a larger space with more offerings. “We need room to provide workshops, sales events, for our volunteers to work. We also want to build a formal artists-in-residency program.” 

SCRAP’s lease was originally up in June, but SFUSD spokesperson Laura Dudnick said on Monday that “SFUSD is working with SCRAP to extend the current agreement through June 2026,” pending school-board approval on May 13. Dudnick added that, depending on the construction timeline, there may be a chance to further extend the lease past next June.

SCRAP, the “Scroungers’ Center for Reusable Art Parts,” was founded in 1976 by Anne Marie Theilen and artist Ruth Asawa (whose show, “Retrospective,” is at SFMoMA until September). Theilen was overseeing a group of artists placed in public schools who had been hired with a city grant but given no funds for supplies, so she started a nonprofit and began reclaiming paper, fabric and other materials destined for the dump.

Catering to schools is still core to SCRAP’s mission: At the entrance to its warehouse, notebooks, paper, and folders are labeled “FREE” in big, painted letters. Twice a year, SCRAP hosts teacher giveaways, where art supplies and anything else a teacher might want for their classrooms are offered free of charge. The nonprofit regularly holds arts workshops geared toward teachers. 

But its mission has grown into making art accessible to everyone, and all manner of customers now pass through its doors: Serious artists doing bargain-hunting, twenty-somethings outfitting their homes, and homeless folks looking for basic necessities.

“It’s like Aladdin’s maze in here,” remarked Kochanski, as she weaved through barrels of dozens of identical pink umbrellas, one filled to the brim with tennis balls, another with bra pads. “But you can find anything here and make art from it.” 

Kochanski is not an artist herself, unlike most of the employees at SCRAP, but thinks of herself as a “creative thinker.” She says sifting through the items in the packed warehouse, including old film slides, other people’s donated art, hundreds upon hundreds of National Geographic magazines and a collection of exercise tapes of a bygone era, inspires her. “It’s actually kind of zen.”

Most of the curated items can be found near the front entrance. As you make your way toward the back of the warehouse, greeted by a human-sized statue of the Pillsbury Doughboy, you have to start to dig for treasure. But Kocahnski says that’s part of the fun. 

Workers at SCRAP sift through donated items; there’s a small list of items they won’t take, but many have managed to find their way onto a shelf anyway. 

“We don’t usually accept glassware,” said Kochanski, gesturing towards a bookshelf filled with mugs and glasses, “Or a piano,” pointing at an antique piano in the corner, on top of which sat glass vases filled with fake money. “But sometimes, we just take it anyways.” 

When asked what the strangest items are that they’ve received, some workers remembered a giant shipment of dental molds, another a mummified animal. There is even a rumor of a book bound with human flesh. 

SCRAP has had more than 36,000 transactions in the past year, and has managed to divert about 250 tons from the landfill. Space is running short; special sales, artist-led workshops, and volunteers processing new items all work out of the same room. Since the pandemic, visitorship has increased. 

Extra merchandise that cannot fit inside the warehouse is stored outside, next to shipping containers converted into makeshift offices. A giant pile of biodegradable sponges are still sealed in their containers.  

Employees joke that a “SCRAP dollar” is worth much more than what a dollar would get you in a regular arts supplies store. The nonprofit’s pricier items — like jewelry, fancy China, personal art collections, and other items left over from an estate — often wind up on SCRAP’s eBay store or are sold at auction, which SCRAP hopes will help fund their next venture.

SCRAP is also turning to grants from the California Arts Commission and increasing its workshop offerings, which has included everything from an Ikebana tutorial to how to upcycle your T-shirts into underwear. It wants to put on more sales events; some recent ones include “Sheep Skin Sunday” for $1-2 a pop or $15 for a bag full, and “Vintage Wools on Parade.” SCRAP would also like to partner with other nonprofits.

But for now, the future remains uncertain. 

“This is such a hard city to live in if you’re an artist,” said Lambright, a former artist himself. Pausing a minute, he remembered an old art professor who used to instruct his students to go to SCRAP for their materials, with just $10 in their pocket. His motto was, “Just give them 10 bucks and send them to SCRAP,” he recalled, laughing. 

Lambright says that nothing much has changed at SCRAP since the 1970s. “There are still plenty of art schools and students in San Francisco, and underground artists, that come through these doors,” he said, despite the tech boom. 

Kochanski nodded, adding, “We want to continue to have a place for them to go.”