As many are aware by now, the earthquake cottage on Valley Street has been illegally denuded of its walls:
The easy way to view this long saga is to blame the real estate speculators who initiated this project—first John Schrader of Nova Design Build, and the new owner to whom Schrader sold this boondoggle, Benjamin Steiner of The Citadel Property Group. And, of course, they deserve every epithet that you can imagine.
But the real tragedy here is that the city officials whose job it is to protect historical resources like the Valley Street Earthquake Cottage facilitated this act of destruction, even though they are now posing as the shack’s defender.
For years, the preservation community and the neighbors pleaded with the Planning Department staff and the Planning Commission to leave the Valley Street Cottage alone, and build to its rear. Instead, the staff bought into a cockamamie idea to lift the cottage up, move it forward on the lot, and make it the second story of a new structure. We all knew that this would be a nearly impossible task. And now we see that the new owner could not even get to first base with this plan.
Worse yet, once the new owner started construction, our preservation architect Michael Garavaglia checked in with the Planning Department to see how they planned to monitor the project, and to offer any assistance they might want. He was told that everything was fine, that the Planning Department staff was in contact with the owner, and that there was nothing to worry about. Talk about being asleep at the switch…
It wasn’t until neighbors started raising the alarm that the Planning Department staff even noticed that things were going awry.
The crucial question is what happens next.
The Planning Department staff is now trying to act tough by threatening a fine of as much as $500,000. That’s big money, but it’s extremely doubtful that the Planning Department will have the guts to impose a fine anything like that.
And even with a big fine, if Steiner is allowed to finish off his demolition of the earthquake cottage, that would allow him to start over again and build some kind of monster house, without an historic structure in his way. Given the absurdly high housing prices in Noe Valley, he could make a very tidy profit on the deal.
Was the denuding of the Earthquake Cottage part of such a plan? It is still unclear why he trashed the walls of the cottage, an action that would seem only to make it harder to move the cottage as planned. Time may tell the tale.
We have demanded that Steiner be required to reconstruct the cottage, using all the historical materials that have not been destroyed. The Planning Department staff has, for now anyway, adopted this demand as if it was their idea. Fine, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
The truth is that reconstructing the Earthquake Cottage is sort of like putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It is not impossible, but certainly difficult.
We need to remember that San Francisco is the Phoenix that rose from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake and fire. In fact, that is exactly what the few remaining earthquake cottages represent—the city that knew how, once upon a time, to take care of its poor and working class folks in their hour of need.
Do the powers-that-be in San Francisco still have that will and determination today? That question is almost laughable, given that billionaires seem to be in charge, and that poor and working class folks are being driven out of the city right and left by the corporate tech invasion, by greedy landlords and by real estate speculators who know no bounds.
But we do what we always do when attacked, as the saying goes, and that is STAND UP AND FIGHT BACK.
The demand that the Valley Street Earthquake Cottage be reconstructed and restored is just one small part of that Fight Back. San Francisco belongs to all of us, not just the rich.
Marc Norton works at Oracle Park and is a proud member of UNITE HERE Local 2 and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). 48 Hills published his article “The Hidden Political History of SF’s 1906 Earthquake and Fire.” His website is Marc Norton Online.
