For more than twenty years, I’ve studied San Francisco’s built environment as an architectural historian. North Beach—one of the city’s oldest, most layered neighborhoods—has long been central to my work.
Alongside my colleague and mentor Katherine Petrin, I walked every block of the proposed North Beach National Register Historic District. We documented, photographed, and debated the significance of every structure. We submitted a detailed nomination to the State Office of Historic Preservation in June 2024. It was deemed complete, thorough, and accurate.
And yet, for the third time in under a year, the nomination was quietly pulled from the State Historical Resources Commission agenda. No hearing. No explanation. Just buried—again.
Let’s not pretend we don’t know why.
State Senator Scott Wiener, newly elected Mayor Daniel Lurie, and District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter have decided that historic preservation—especially preservation rooted in queer, immigrant, and working-class history—doesn’t serve their political calculus. Their donor-driven, deregulation-first agenda has no room for cultural memory. Only demolition, speculation, and vertical profit.
Wiener, who has built his political identity on LGBTQ+ advocacy, is now actively undermining the physical legacy of the very community he claims to represent. You don’t get to wrap yourself in rainbow flags every June and then block recognition of the neighborhood where queer culture first took root in this city.
North Beach is where it started. Before the Castro, before Harvey Milk, there was Mona’s, the first lesbian bar in San Francisco—opened in 1933 at a time when queer people faced police raids, public shaming, and jail time for simply existing. North Beach was the city’s first queer neighborhood, with dozens of gathering places that allowed queer life to grow—underground, under siege, and against the odds.
Though no official explanation was ever given for the nomination’s removal, sources close to the process—and the political maneuvering around it—point squarely to pressure from Lurie, Wiener and their allies. Given the nomination’s repeated scheduling and removal without public comment, and the sudden political realignment following the election of Lurie, who has asked the state to delay the process, the outcome speaks volumes.
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And for what? A developer wish list masquerading as housing reform. Let’s be absolutely clear: the proposed historic district wouldn’t have blocked a single housing project. It posed no legal barrier to affordability. What it threatened was the speculative free-for-all that Wiener has championed—clearing the way for high-rises, luxury condos, and the demolition of rent-controlled housing, all in the name of “solving” the housing crisis.
This isn’t about housing. It’s about cultural erasure and political betrayal.
Wiener has spent years telling LGBTQ+ people they are seen, valued, and protected. But when it comes time to enshrine that legacy in the actual, physical spaces where queer San Franciscans built their lives, he’s absent. Or worse, working against us.
His housing bills have already put Harvey Milk’s residence and camera shop at risk, despite its local landmark status. He has gutted CEQA, removing one of the public’s last tools to challenge destructive development.
This is not progressive leadership. This is cynical, backroom sabotage.
I’ve helped landmark key LGBTQ+ sites across San Francisco: the Lyon-Martin House in Noe Valley, Compton’s Cafeteria and Glide Memorial Church in the Tenderloin, Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag above the Castro. Every one of those was a fight. But now, those fights are being forced underground. There’s no public opposition—just silent interference, procedural gamesmanship, and buried agendas.
Preservation and housing are not mutually exclusive. But erasing queer history to make room for luxury towers isn’t “abundance.” It’s surrender. To capital. To cynicism. To power.
Scott Wiener must be held accountable—not just for the bills he sponsors, but for the cultural destruction he enables under the guise of progress. He has traded the legacy of queer San Franciscans for a developer’s checkbook and a false promise of housing supply.
We deserve better.
We deserve a city that doesn’t just talk about Pride—but protects the places where that pride was born.
Shayne Watson is an architectural historian
