potrero view

This Polaroid photograph of the building at Third and 19th streets ran above the fold on page one of the View’s first issue. The candy factory was long gone, and the building was being proposed as the site of a new clinic to serve the Hill, a plan that never came to pass. However in 1976 the Caleb G. Clark Potrero Hill Health Center opened at 1050 Wisconsin Street on the Hill’s southern slope.

August 2010

August 1970 View Covers Assaults, Drugs & Religion

By Judy Baston

“Mobile Drug Clinic for Hill Rejected,” “Assault Wave Hits Elders,” “Community Tree Planting Program Gets Underway,” “St. Teresa Welcomes New Pastor,” and “Drug Figures Meaningless.”  With these stories The Potrero View’s first issue was born 40 years ago this month.  In 1970, there was barely a glimmer of the building boom that would affect the neighborhood in ensuing years.  A request in the View’s January 1972  classified advertisement column speaks to the area’s past affordability: “I want to live on the Hill. One bedroom to $100.”  A May 1978 ad – “2 BR Victorian Flat, $385 per month” – would today belong in the “Read it and Weep” column.

In its early years the View reflected the sense that Potrero Hill was a sleepy village on San Francisco’s east side.  The Hill was, and still is, surrounded by freeways and belts of light industry, but, more to the point, the community was on the “other side of the tracks.” In the 1970s, Hillers pointed to the big Pacific Gas and Electric Company gas tank – since removed – or the water tower as notable neighborhood landmarks.  The De Haro Street house in which Karl Malden’s Streets of San Francisco character Mike Stone lived was a point of pride.

Ironically, the elements that for many years kept the neighborhood a sleepy backwater – reasonable rents, empty lots, light industry, freeways – became major factors in making the Hill ground zero for massive changes, bringing development, congestion and spiraling home prices and rents.  The View reflected this evolution, but also expressed an almost eerie sense of continuity.  

During the View’s years of cut-and-paste production, the volunteer staff would often be forced to turn to a box of previously used headlines because of frequent headliner machine breakdowns. The headline “New Threat to Open Space Meets Opposition” might have been used for a controversy 20 years ago about the construction of live-work spaces at 18th and Arkansas streets, but was originally deployed in 1985 in a story about Starr King Openspace on the Hill’s southern slope, near Parkview Heights.  “No New Stadium, View Readers Say” could have been used for the 1987 effort against the Seventh and Townsend Ballpark proposal, or for a poll the paper had conducted five years before that.

The stories in the View’s early decades frequently reflected the active role Potrero Hill residents and their organizations played in civic affairs.  Because the Hill has been a persistent, determined, and even ornery community, the View was able to end many of its articles with “-30-“; newspaper jargon for “the end.”  These stories included the successful campaign against Mirant Corporation’s expansion of the Potrero Power Plant; The Good Life Grocery’s survival after being evicted from 18th Street; and the defeat of then-supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s proposal to create a “porno zone” near the Hill.

Often a View story helped spark decisive action to address a problem.  The paper disclosed that toxic substances existed under the former Synanon site on 23rd and Kansas streets, delaying the project so that the toxins could be removed.   And that a local physician was distributing prescriptions as if they were candy.   While not prosecuted legally, the doctor quit his local practice and left the area.

The View’s first 30 years covered aspects of the Hill that are gone forever.  Father Peter Sammon, whose arrival at St. Teresa’s Church was heralded in the View’s first issue, led the church for 32 years, until his death in 2002.  When Atchison’s Pharmacy on 20th Street closed in December 1995, it reflected a national trend in which independent pharmacies shuttered their doors, unable to compete with drugstore chains.  With Atchison’s went the contract Post Office at the back of the store. The physician’s office that was located next to the pharmacy moved closer to the hospitals in which the doctors practiced, and a few years ago disbanded.

Back issues of the View contain the names of quite a few people who were part of the paper’s family but are now gone.  Among those who have passed are Arden Arnautoff, Vas Arnautoff, Nina Gershater, Bernie Gershater, Bob Hayes, Marylouise Lovett, Winifred Mann, Peggy Ohta, Joe Passen and Molly Wood.  They are missed.  As the View celebrates its 40-year history, their contribution to the City’s oldest surviving neighborhood newspaper is remembered.

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