Shooting
San Francisco police are investigating the fatal shooting of a 33-year-old man in the Potrero Annex-Terrace housing complex. Prince Johnson, a City resident, was found suffering from a gunshot wound to the shoulder in late-June on the 1000 block of Connecticut Street, near 25th Street, said police spokeswoman Grace Gatpandan. He was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died. No arrests have been made. In March, three people were shot near 25th and Wisconsin streets. Two suffered non-life-threatening gunshot wounds and a third had cuts from broken glass after a man fired into his car.
Moving
After 15 years on the corner of 18th and Missouri streets, The Voice Studio is being evicted to make room for a new, unknown, tenant. The studio is looking for one to two rooms where it can bring a keyboard and teach singing, in many cases to Hill residents…The opening of San Francisco General Hospital’s new nine-story, 283-bed facility, scheduled for December, has been pushed to the spring to allow more time to test new technologies and train staff. Construction will be completed and a ribbon cutting ceremony held on December 5, but patients won’t be able to use the new facility until May, give or take a month. When SFGH does open it would seem that the Southside neighborhoods will have more hospital than hotel beds, excluding ArBnB, of course. Given the amenities now available at Benioff-Zukerberg-funded health care facilities – fine food; art – perhaps tourists should consider checking into one of them as part of their stay…
Coming
Last month Twirl and Dip opened in the Onyx building on 17th and De Haro streets, offering handcrafted organic soft serve ice cream in sugar and cake cones and compostable cups, plus lots of tasty toppings. What is it with ice cream, anyways? Few other desserts – not brownies nor rice pudding – merit their own outlets. It’s all about cookies, cupcakes, and cream…Kilroy Realty Corporation, which is building headquarters for Salesforce and Dropbox, has acquired the 100 Hooper Street project from UrbanGreen Devco LLC. The 3.5 acre self-storage facility will be developed into a 400,000-plus square-foot two-building campus that’ll include 320,000 square feet of technology-oriented office space and 100,000 square feet of production, distribution, and repair space. Kilroy will donate a portion of the land to the nonprofit PlaceMade, an affiliate of SFMade, to provide affordable space for manufacturers. Handcrafted blue collar jobs and affordable housing are the must-have itms du jour for today’s developers…
Encroachment
Twenty-fifth Street resident Robert Hines is irritated that he has to pay a $120 annual “sidewalk encroachment” fee to San Francisco Public Works. But he’s downright angry that his letters protesting the recently rendered assessment – to DPW, District 10 Supervisor Malia Cohen, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the Assessment Appeal Board – have gone unanswered. According to Hines, when he bought his property in 1978 there was no mention of a municipal right-of-way. It took 36 years for the City to discover their ability to levy an access fee as part of a permit approval process. “To suddenly discover this and be penalized for it was a shock and, treated thusly, an insult,” Hines wrote in a letter to the View. Can we get some decent customer service over here?
Development
Plans to move the mobile California Mini-Storage office at 790 Pennsylvania Avenue and build 48,000 square feet of production, distribution and repair PDR space there, as well as 251 apartments, and 225 parking spaces, on the slope behind it, have been granted a key Eastern Neighborhoods Plan-based exemption from having to complete a detailed environmental impact report. The new residential complex would front 22nd Street, and consist of two buildings constructed over a shared podium, one four stories tall – with roughly 58,620 gross square feet of space – and one eight stories, with about 187,684 gross square feet of space. Both structures would be 40 feet in height; the eight-story edifice would step up along the site’s sloped portion, extending above the four-story building. The three stories tall PDR building would front Pennsylvania Avenue. The project would include a basement and ground-floor garage spanning both lots, with ingress and egress provided via Texas Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Open space would include an interior courtyard, a rooftop terrace and private balconies and decks. Six thousand three hundred square feet of outdoor space along the site’s north side would be developed into a new public stairway from 22nd Street to Missouri/Texas Street, connecting Dogpatch and the Hill.
Space
The Central Waterfront – Dogpatch Public Realm Plan is being developed to identify, prioritize, design, and estimate the costs of possible public space projects in Dogpatch, including street and sidewalk improvements, lighting installations, and more or better parks and playgrounds. The San Francisco Planning Department is conducting an online poll to gather and prioritize ideas for residents; vote and provide comments at sf-planning.org/CentralWaterfrontPRP. For more information, contact Robin Abad, project manager, at Robin.Abad@sfgov.org.
Correction
The lovely photograph of Susan Eslick which appeared on the front page of last month’s paper was taken by Dogpatch-based Scott R. Kline Photography.
Masthead
This month’s masthead ran in the View’s July/August 1974 issue, in reaction to community opposition to development of Victoria Mews. An article accompanying it, by Vincent Sammidge, stated, “It has recently been proclaimed by local visionaries that Potrero Hill will be a more pleasant place to live someday. Someday, sooner than you can say ‘What happened?’ you may look across your back garden and find your neighborhood well along in extensive transition of its own spirit and composure…Phase One in this bold plan to rescue the community from unfathomable depths of irksome old-timey quietness and seclusion in this better-git-it-on, modren [sic] and hep cosmopolitan world scene would be to install high concentrations of gittin’-it’on’ers at key locations on the hill. The first garrison of 250 and 300 would be deployed into some 90 stucco bunkers at 20th and Carolina Streets and be called ‘Victoria Mews’…seriously.
