Uncle Walter’s Mystery House: Mission Local’s exclusive tour

Nobody knew about the secret passage. That is, after all, the nature of a secret. 

But there it was: In the far corner of the longtime penthouse office of ousted permit-expediting king and erstwhile mayoral best buddy Walter Wong, tucked behind an innocuous hidden door resembling a cabinet. 

With a push, the hidden door gives way, revealing a series of secret shelves on rollers. They’re empty now — unlike Wong’s nearby former private bathroom that, embarrassingly, turned out to be occupied by a painter. 

What was once stored on these hidden shelves? Wouldn’t you like to know. 

The passageway is narrow; you aren’t getting through here with your backpack on, let me tell you. It’s only a few feet long and leads directly to the fire stairs. Wong — or a politician or a companion — could easily race through and down to the street undetected by anyone knocking on the opaque glass wall of Wong’s penthouse office. That’d be the cops, the feds, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anyone. 

“Walter was always thinking ahead,” said a longtime associate with a laugh. “He probably didn’t have a building permit for that.” 

You think? Retracing the permitting history of this building vs. the actual construction is a task befitting all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. For decades, Wong was the ultimate fixer for those in search of no-questions-asked building permits. The Department of Building Inspection was a magical place and Wong was its dark wizard. 

As we’ve written before (more than once), it is nigh-impossible to overstate the influence Wong held over the DBI, particularly its plan-check and central permitting divisions. He stocked it with his people, who handled his business. And, here, in the shadow of Highway 101 at 1717 Mission St. (and other addresses), was Wong’s tower — his Orthanc to the Department of Building Inspection’s Minas Morgul.

Wong didn’t just work magic with construction and permitting. He also landed dodgy contracts and sold dodgy things to the city and squired San Francisco officials around China, where they were fêtéd with booze and “some stone” (jewelry, presumably). You’ll not be surprised that the rich dudes offering up the booze and stone got their permits. Wong, of course, handled that. For many years, he operated by his own set of rules, flouting the law for all to see.   

Until he didn’t: One day after the FBI arrested former Public Works boss Mohammed Nuru in January 2020, Wong’s citadel was raided. He would soon plead guilty to fraud and money-laundering charges and help the feds to nail his old pals.

In July, Wong sold his 95,000-square-foot “self-sufficient kingdom” to Kink.com, the adult film company. Earlier this month, they kindly led your humble narrator and photographer Zoe Malen on a tour through their vast new home base. 

As you’d suppose, the building’s new owners are not squeamish types. They’re not alarmed by much. 

But when they found what was waiting for them in here, they called the FBI. 

Wong rented his sprawling offices to political campaigns, including Willie Brown’s re-election drive in 1999 and Matt Gonzalez’s upstart campaign just four years later. Young political volunteers and workers referred to the polite older man who would often fix or build stuff himself as “Uncle Walter.” 

The Kink.com people would like you to know that, no, there will not be an “Uncle Walter” line of adult films. But will Uncle Walter’s secret passageway find its way into a porno shoot? This, we are told, is “way too tempting to not use.” 

There are other secrets in this building, however, that are a bit less stimulating. And while a secret passageway is tantalizing, the building’s new owners were less enthused by the secret floor. 

Yes, a secret floor. Well, more of a half-floor. Like in “Being John Malkovich.”

There’s no elevator to jam open with a crowbar, though. There’s simply a ladder that takes you to a panel removed from the second-floor ceiling. In their apparent haste to decamp from this place, Wong’s people left the panel exposed and the ladder placed enticingly beneath it. 

If you were to ascend this ladder and precariously clamber into the area above, you’d find a series of rooms shoehorned into the space between floors two and three. The ceilings are low — perhaps five and a half feet high (that’s me in the photo and I’m 6-feet-tall). There are doors that lock. A trapdoor could allow you to, literally, drop in on the men’s room — where, blessedly, there is no painter to terrify. 

And while this hidden floor is not on the building’s plans, it was equipped with a full sprinkler system. Whatever was yanked off these shelves was valuable enough that nobody wanted it to burn. 

What was once stored here? Wouldn’t you like to know. 

All that’s left are labels, perhaps hundreds of them, listing the many addresses of the projects Wong was connected to. In the corner, a yard or so from a Chinese postal service envelope, a large set of plans rests on the floor. A cursory analysis indicates they were from the Metreon — where you could’ve seen “Being John Malkovich.”

The new owners tell us they called the FBI. But not just about this hidden floor. 

They claim that one of the nonprofits renting space in the building reported to them that unknown items had been stored by Wong in locked rooms in the suite the nonprofit rented. These rooms, it seems, were not searched when the feds raided this building. 

Whatever was kept in those rooms was apparently extracted en masse as Wong’s people left the building, and purportedly shipped to parts unknown. This is something the Kink people say they made a point of telling the feds.  

Wandering through the more remote annexes of Uncle Walter’s Mystery House, one can feel stuck in a Hollywood prop room or trapped within the world’s largest junk shop. This labyrinth lacks only a minotaur.  

Turn a corner and you’ll find five hulking outdoor streetlamps lying on the floor. Each is about five yards high and resembles nothing so much as the death ray affixed atop a Martian UFO.

Wong ran numerous companies from under this roof, and many of them had contracts with San Francisco government. He threw off anyone who’d be suspicious, however, by unilaterally devising new addresses for his building and assigning different ones to different companies. Problem solved! 

Only stumbling distance from the quintet of death-ray lights are boxes and boxes of even more giant lights topped, incongruously, by a Black and Decker toaster oven. One box reads “RFP 79002-A sample. 3/2/2015 11:38 a.m. Kingsun.” 

This streetlight Request for Proposal, it turns out, is the very one former Public Utilities Commission general manager Harlan Kelly allegedly attempted to rig for Wong. No idea about the toaster oven, though. Or the boxes of kitchen gloves in the next room. Or the many cartons of battery packs for flip phones. 

A 2018 Yelp review for the third-floor Chinese restaurant once housed on this site, the Center Cafe, offers mixed praise. 

“I would have given it 5 stars,” it reads, “but the combination of the 82 health score and my frequent visits to the bathroom after this meal (and eating leftovers) worries me about what’s going on behind the scenes.”

Well, you can’t get much more on-the-nose than that. These days, the defunct Center Cafe resembles a restaurant evacuated mid-shift. A laminated menu still sits atop a table; the House Special Fried Rice is eternally $8.95. 

The building’s new owners would like to bring back an eatery or pop-up someday. But it’s not a top priority. They’d like this place to be, naturally, an office and studio for their adult film company. They’d like Walter’s former penthouse to serve as an event space, even for not-kinky events. (You can book it here, by the way). They’d like to be on good terms with the neighbors and the nonprofit tenants renting space here. And they’d like to move Kink’s retail space, metalshop and woodshop here. 

You could argue that this would be the first legitimate Production, Distribution and Repair (PDR) taking place on-site since this building served as the Spreckels/Russell Dairy Company during the Johnson Administration. 

Except, instead of big dairy machines, now they’d be crafting the latest thing in sex toys. 

“It was 7 a.m. and it was pouring rain,” says the voice on the other end of the phone. It belonged to a man who worked for many years in Wong’s former building. 

“I look out the window and I see a guy on a horse wearing a duster. And he’s leading a burro. And they’re going up the onramp and onto Highway 101. So, I call the Highway Patrol and I say, ‘I’m not drunk and I’m not high but this is what I’m looking at.’ I gotta give them credit, they jumped right on it. The animals were not hurt.” 

He exhales. “One of the weirdest things I saw in my life, actually.” 

Working in this building, that’s saying something. 

Then, almost as an afterthought: “Hey, did you find the safe?” 

Say what? 

This conversation took place a couple of days after Mission Local’s visit to the building, and, no, we hadn’t seen it on our tour. But that’s because we didn’t know where to look. 

On the second floor, in an apartment that a building caretaker once lived in — beneath the stairway to a balcony and behind an innocuous panel — there was once a big safe, four or five feet tall. In it, we’re told, were things Wong “didn’t want anybody to know about.” 

So, your humble narrator texted the new owners. “My guess is we would have spotted a safe by now,” was the response. “But I’ll search.” 

A few hours later, the phone vibrated with an incoming message. 

“OMG, it’s there.” 

And then an emoji of a mushroom cloud rising from the head of a bewildered face. 

And then they called the FBI. Again.  

What’s in the safe? Wouldn’t you like to know.