1095 Market Street
San Francisco, California 94103
www.shapingsf.org/grant_bldg
grantbldg@yahoo.com
The Grant Building was constructed in 1904, one of the first steel-frame buildings in San Francisco. Nine-stories high, its walls are faced with 2-1/2-foot thick ceramic bricks. It probably is heavier than most buildings built after it, even those much taller. The Grant building sits on the edge of the historic wetlands that extended up what is today Seventh Street from Mission Bay, filling most of today's south of Market Street.
The Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 swirled around the Grant Building, but it survived, probably thanks to the combination of its enormous weight and the fact that it rests on higher, drier land than the areas around it, especially to the south and east. The engineer for the Grant Building was Washington Roebling (1837-1926), who worked with his father, John Augustus Roebling, to complete the Brooklyn Bridge, which has also stood up for a very long time.
At the time of construction, the Grant Building was only a block from the elegant pre-earthquake City Hall, a building that took twenty-seven corrupt years to build and fell into rubble during the quake, revealing that its walls were filled with sand. One block up Market at 8th Street was an old ballpark; it, too, became a pile of ashes after the quake.
After Market Street's role as San Francisco's commercial center was restored by the late 'teens, the Grant Building anchored a busy mid-Market working-class shopping district. Throughout the go-go, stock market-obsessed, union-busting 1920s the Grant Building prospered, home to lawyers and accountants and a range of small offices.
In 1943 a nearly forgotten labor radical by the name of Warren Billings was pardoned by the Governor of California after he had spent over 25 years in jail for a bombing he never committed. Billings had spent his time in Folsom Prison becoming a skilled watch repairman, and he settled into the Grant Building in Suite 205 from his release until his death in 1972, where he fixed watches.
The construction of the BART and Muni tunnel on Market Street in the late 1960s-early 1970s ruined the discount emporiums of the mid-Market neighborhood, driving shoppers to the suburbs and neighborhoods. The area was gradually absorbed by the impoverished adjacent areas in the Tenderloin and South of Market as other parts of town came under the redevelopment wrecking ball.
Mid-Market has been a seedy and scary area in San Francisco since the 1970s. Sex shops, discount tourist shops, and low-end eating places proliferated, while the street scene has been dominated by the heroin and crack cocaine trade, with its concomitant psychosis and violence.
The Grant Building went through a prolonged depression. When the Nate Berkowitz and associates took it over in the late 1980s a great deal of the building was empty. Renting to nonprofit service agencies, small businesses, writers and artists, alternative media producers, etc., they slowly brought the building to life. An amicable climate prevailed in the building as a creative and collaborative ferment combined with reasonable rents to give tenants space to carry out their missions, few of which had profit as their goal.
The Berkowitzes and their partners sold the building in August 2000. The buyer resold it within a couple of weeks of takng possession, "flipping" it for a profit of over $1.5 million to a property management company called Seligman Western Enterprises, in a strategy to buy up and gentrify properties along Market Street. Seligman Western Enterprises is linked to Sterling Bank and Seligman & Associates (a Southfield, Michigan, developer).
Seligman's stated goal is to turn the Grant Building into a luxury office building, an idea that seems insane to longtime tenants who are all too familiar with the gritty realities of the neighborhood. In any case, our vision of the future of the Mid-Market area includes space for community nonprofits, writers and artists, small businesses, social services, and affordable housing--and not the sort of gentrification that rips the heart out of a neighborhood and further hollows out the City.