Water Street: A Piece of San Francisco’s Past Faces the Wrecking Ball
A stable from 1907 that’s now a garage sits next to a weathered white cottage where a window displays faded Mad magazines, which as a kid were one of my favs.
On warm days, a local writer John King said he is told, a garage door swings open so a painter can enjoy fresh air in his makeshift studio much like one a friend of mine used to have.
This hodgepodge shouldn’t be anything special but it’s an anomaly in this ever-more-affluent city, said King.
“The ominous sign is the one that says ‘for sale’ on the two gray warehouses from 1929 where A. Friscia Seafoods did business from the 1940s until it closed in 2004,” he said. “The wholesaler faces Francisco Street to the north, but the pair of Friscia buildings and their varied rhythm – the single-story warehouse has a pitched roof, its’ two-story cousin rises slightly at each end – jazzes up the west end of the street.”
Now, the Friscia property is on the market for $2.75 million, according to records.
“It’s been looked at very seriously by developersâÂ?¦The city really needs housing,” says Gloria Rogan, an agent handling the property.
King writes that what’s beautiful isn’t the architecture but the sense that you’ve stepped into a living part of the city with links to the past.
There is a range of buildings – – different ages, heights, styles – – and a range of uses from residential to office to industrial and back.
When you hear the stories the threads through time are stronger still.
The old stable near Mason also offered space for meetings of the Scavengers’ Protective Association, a sort of garbage collectors guild.
And Friscia’s crab pots bubbled away, King states.
“We’d get the crab smell, the fish smell and I’d think, ‘That’s it,” recalls Irving Gonzales, an architect who has spent 18 years in a small office across the way.
As a commercial architect he said he knows that change is part of life.
Still, “I’m sorry to see Friscia go.”
To see what he means walk two short blocks on Mason to Vandewater Street – – another one-block thoroughfare that a few years ago still had a haphazard grace.
Now the fast-fading residential boom tipped the balance.
If Friscia is the only piece of Water Street to be replaced with something larger Water Street will still have its funky urban air, reported King.
Yes, the region has a need for housing.
And even if Water Street’s buildings stay the same there will be homogenization and gentrification as today’s owners move on, according to predictions.
But as long as those settings exist they remind people of what was.
The buildings and landscapes we inherit should not be disposed of lightly or sold to the highest bidder as a matter of routine such has been done in the cultural district in Fort Worth, TX.
