The Center Won’t Hold
By well before Thanksgiving, Mission Bay Development, with support from the California Department of Transportation, plans to rip-out the driveway in front of Center Hardware & Supply Co., Inc., eliminating access to the front parking lot, to install a new sidewalk. Center already faces rumors that it’s going to close permanently. Sidewalk construction will impact parking for the company’s 60 feet tall delivery semi-truck; block traffic; and further erode customer confidence, increasing the financial damage prompted by Center’s forced move. Center averages about five hundred transactions daily. The business is contemplating a new site; if all goes well, it hopes to move by next spring. In the meantime, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has awarded the business a green zone on the eastern side of Pennsylvania, extending south for the front parking.
No Dogs, or Police
According to an Onondaga Street resident and dog owner, anonymous complaints led Aperto, on 18th Street, to remove its outside dining tables. “Will they be forced to remove the doggy water bowl too?” asked “Dog-Gone-Mad” in a letter to the View…In late-August, at around midnight, a Potrero Avenue resident spotted a car “spinning like crazy on 24th and Potrero…After it ended, it went down…24th Street to San Bruno or so. Behind that car, there were about 25 cars or more speeding and running red lights; they came from the Mission district. They came back on Potrero…Again speeding and running red lights…I called the police station and heard no one come from the police. No sirens, no police cars. Where was the police? Not in our neighborhood to keep the residents safe.”
Little Boxes
Dogpatch denizens looking to pick-up a copy of their favorite, or only, neighborhood newspaper from the box located at 20th and Third streets are out of luck. The San Francisco Department of Public Works seized the rack after the View failed to remove graffiti to their satisfaction last month. Coincidentally(?), DPW is looking to install its own print publication dispensaries in the area, despite the fact that demand for them has fallen so dramatically that City-sponsored containers are being removed in other neighborhoods. Although DPW maintains a citizen committee to oversee its newsrack program, members are chosen by DPW honcho Mohammed Nuru, whose original appointment City Attorney and Dogpatch resident Dennis Herrera protested due to Nuru’s history of ethical lapses. Nuru recently declined to add View publisher Steven Moss to the committee…It’s hard not to see seizure of this paper’s boxes as anti-small business, anti-community, and anti-free press. After all, catty-corner from the former rack is that long-vacant nuisance, derelict, San Francisco Police Department station. A tiny, admittedly ragged, box is taken, depriving readers of one of the only consistent sources of neighborhood news, while a much larger box continues to attract vagrants and drug users…The View is generally available at Jolt n’ Bolt, inside the American Industrial Center.
