Bay Bridge

Pick up the beat

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Bop City. The Blackhawk. The Jazz Workshop. The Both/And. Keystone Korner. Kimball’s.

San Francisco’s world-renowned jazz club heritage has always been a part of the city’s matchless cultural identity. But the je ne sais quoi’s been missing for decades, because there hasn’t been a jazz club regularly booking national and international touring musicians into the city for more than 20 years.

That all changes this month with the Nov. 28 opening of Yoshi’s San Francisco. There’s been a Yoshi’s in Jack London Square for 10 years, the descendant of a North Berkeley sushi bar that morphed into a restaurant and music venue on Claremont Avenue in Oakland. Down by the waterfront, Yoshi’s became synonymous with jazz and was revered as both an artist- and an audience-friendly venue.

The brand-new club and restaurant at 1330 Fillmore holds down the ground floor of the freshly minted Fillmore Heritage Center, a 13-story mixed-use development that hopes to jump-start a renaissance in the scuffling Western Addition historic area. "Truthfully, I really don’t know why there hasn’t been another jazz club in San Francisco," says Yoshi’s artistic director, Peter Williams, the man charged with making sure the music part of the business stays in business. He’s been booking the artists at Yoshi’s for the past eight years. "Jazz is very risky," he continues, "and maybe people were feeling like they didn’t want to take the chance. These owners felt there was an opportunity."

The owners are Kaz Kajimura, one of Yoshi’s founders, and developer Michael Johnson. Their opportunity is costing $10 million, with the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency kicking in a $4.4 million loan as part of the total $75 million redevelopment project helmed by Em Johnson Interest, Johnson’s company.

Their idea of a new jazz club in the Fillmore District took shape four years ago, after a series of false starts with other developers and other discussed flagship venues, such as the Blue Note. Johnson sent out requests for proposals to jazz clubs around the country; Kajimura received one, and when he met with Johnson, the two hit it off. "Michael could see Kaz’s vision, and vice versa. That made it happen," Williams says. The building, designed by Morimoto, Matano, and Kang Architects, has a performance venue of 417 seats, 317 on the ground level and 100 more on a mezzanine. The restaurant, serving a modern Japanese cuisine created by executive chef Shotaro "Sho" Kamio, seats 370 in its combined dining and lounge areas. Success on the food side is a likely slam dunk — it’s in jazz presenting, much like three-point shooting, that percentages decline.

Williams is counting on Yoshi’s reputation among jazz professionals — musicians, managers, and agents — as a starting point. "We’ve put a lot of care into presenting the music in as respectful a setting as possible," he says. "I think that’s paid off for us."

CLUB DECLINE?


But jazz club culture has receded in the past 20 years, with the music finding support from institutions like SFJAZZ, which stepped into the developing void in the city 25 years ago. SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline has always looked to organizational models like the San Francisco Symphony in terms of sustaining and growing the jazz art form. "What has happened is jazz has moved more into the concert hall and into more of a special-events format than a club format," Kline says. "There hasn’t been a great growth of jazz clubs in the country. But there’s a proliferation of festivals."

There are jazz clubs — Jazz at Pearl’s, under the strong stewardship of Kim Nalley and Steve Sheraton, is certainly a necessary element of North Beach, and farther north on Fillmore is Rasselas — but Kline believes there just aren’t as many live music clubs as there once were.

Still, despite the fierce competition for eyes, ears, and dollars, the fact remains that musicians need to play. Performance has always been one of the most effective ways for jazz artists to sustain themselves and build their audience. Not only is there no substitute for hearing the music live, but venue sales have also become a larger part of the overall sales picture, observes Cem Kurosman, director of publicity for Blue Note Records.

"Now, with fewer and fewer TV, radio, and mainstream press outlets covering new jazz artists, touring has become more important than ever," Kurosman says, "although there are fewer jazz clubs on the national circuit than ever before."

The Bay Area is one of the top four jazz markets in the country, and it behooves artists to gain exposure here. That wasn’t really a problem while the region was consistently supporting the music, when the music was here in the clubs and jazz seemed to swing up from the streets.

But times have changed, and no one recognizes that better than Todd Barkan, who ran Keystone Korner in North Beach. When Keystone closed in 1983, it was one of the last San Francisco clubs to regularly book national and international touring jazz groups. Barkan is now the artistic director of Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the jazz club operated by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, and he’s also a highly regarded producer who works with numerous domestic and European jazz labels.

"The reason there hasn’t been anything in San Francisco proper for some 20 years is that it’s a new era," Barkan says. "San Francisco is not the bohemian place that it was when I started the Keystone in the early ’70s, which itself was a holdover from the psychedelic era."

While Barkan’s place could not rightly be called a dive, it was a funky little crowded club. From the stage to the bar, the setup at Keystone was significantly removed from the state-of-the-art amenities at Yoshi’s. In some ways, Yoshi’s splits the difference between the club and the concert experience, the hope being that the artists and the audience get the best of both worlds.

Barkan says the primary jazz audience now has different expectations than it used to. "It took a number of years to get the business set up to have the right kind of a club that could really be competitive and cater to a much more upscale audience, which is where the real jazz audience is now overall," he says. "For better or worse that’s where it’s at."

That audience is also spread throughout the Bay Area, which is important for a San Francisco–situated club to keep in mind. "San Francisco’s a little town," Barkan says. "With all due respect, ‘the city’ is only about 800,000. The Bay Area is 4.5 to 5 million people, but it’s very spread out." His North Beach club got a tremendous benefit from the freeway off-ramp at Broadway, which made getting into that part of the city from the Bay Bridge simpler.

But Yoshi’s San Francisco won’t survive on jazz alone, as Barkan and Williams acknowledge. "To do the kind of numbers and volume Yoshi’s needs, you have to have a diversified musical program," Barkan says.

Williams spins the challenge of putting butts in the seats as an opportunity to be creative. "I’ll have to branch out a little bit in what we do," he agrees. "I don’t think we’ll be able to do just jazz all the time." At Yoshi’s Oakland, Williams has added salsa dance nights on Mondays, and he consistently books fusion and smooth jazz performers like Keiko Matsui and neosoul acts like Rashaan Patterson.

The San Francisco spot will likely see a similar mix, though the inaugural performers are a mainstream ensemble called the Yoshi’s Birds of a Feather Super Band, which includes vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonists Ravi Coltrane and Kenny Garrett, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, and bassist John Patitucci. Veteran drummer Roy Haynes leads the band, which Williams created specially for the club’s opening.

Taj Mahal and the Phantom Blues Band follow, and later in December, Chick Corea, Charlie Hunter, and Rebeca Mauleón will perform. Next year will see guitarist Pat Metheny, pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, vocalist Cassandra Wilson, and guitarist Bill Frisell in multinight runs at the club. Williams will try various things, particularly in the early months. "December is mostly artists coming to San Francisco with one band and then going to Oakland with another," he says. Corea, Hunter, and Taj Mahal will all pull double Yoshi’s duty.

"It’s gonna be a learning experience to find out what works and what doesn’t and how the two clubs can work together," Williams says. He will also have bands play the first part of the week in San Francisco and then Thursday through Sunday in Oakland, reasoning that San Franciscans are looking for more things to do early in the week. And he wants the club to be a platform for local artists — probably early in the week as well — but says Yoshi’s will have to focus on national touring acts simply to get people into the club.

Local saxophonist Howard Wiley is bullish on the new club, hoping that, if nothing else, it brings some notice to jazz instead of more exploitative forms of expression. "I’m so tired of hearing about Britney [Spears] and strippers and all that stuff," he says. "I’m hoping and praying the pendulum will swing back and people will cherish things of value again. I always love it when more attention can be brought to the music."

Currently Intersection for the Arts’ composer in residence, Wiley put out the self-released Angola Project earlier this year. The music is based on African American prison spirituals with roots primarily in songs and stories from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, La. While Wiley hopes Yoshi’s can bring in artists like Billy Harper and David Murray, not necessarily household names even in mainstream jazz homes, he recognizes the reality of booking the club. "I’m not so into Rick Braun, but I understand," he says with a laugh, referencing the smooth jazz trumpet icon. "I just hope the club represents the music to its fullest, because it’s the only American contribution to global art."

ACCESSIBLE AVENUES


Former club owner Barkan hopes the new Yoshi’s anchors a reinvigorated jazz scene in San Francisco, one that can support another, smaller club as well, something with around 150 seats and less of an overhead, which a savvy veteran promoter like, say, himself might book. A smaller room certainly would make music more accessible to audiences. It might also underscore the notion that there just aren’t the headliners in jazz that there once were — the names needed to fill a room the size of the new Yoshi’s. "When the Keystone was up and running, we had Dexter Gordon, Elvin Jones, Gene Ammons, Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderly, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Freddie Hubbard," Barkan says. "The list was pretty inexhaustible.

"More than anything, jazz needs committed, dedicated presenters," he continues. "Yoshi’s is to be commended for what it does. They’re unsung heroes of this whole scenario."

The long-ago memories from San Francisco’s jazz club past sound like misty urban legends. Bop City, for instance, was the spot where Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker played. Saxophonist John Handy was just 18 when he joined John Coltrane onstage. Across town in North Beach, Miles Davis recorded his first live album at the Blackhawk. Charles Mingus recorded one of his best live LPs at the Jazz Workshop, and Adderly got famous from the one he recorded there. Do you remember Sun Ra’s expansive band flowing off the tiny stage at Keystone Korner? Jazz fans may have to resign themselves to the fact that it may never be like that again.

But there’s a San Francisco jazz continuum that includes those clubs, writers like the late Phil Elwood, producers such as Orrin Keepnews, and musicians including Joe Henderson, to name just a few. There have been many other forgotten heroes and great moments. And even though CD sales have slumped in recent years, reflecting the faltering music industry as a whole, there are as many good musicians around as ever, and most observers think an audience is there as well. For any live music scene to work, there have to be the players, the audience, and the venue to bring them together, and Yoshi’s hopes to do that for the Fillmore. "I just hope the Bay Area jazz community will band together, check this out, and make it work," Williams says. "It’s a huge undertaking. It’s going to be a beautiful room, there’ll be beautiful music, and if people come, it’ll be a success."

ROY HAYNES AND YOSHI’S BIRDS OF A FEATHER SUPER BAND

Nov. 28, 8 and 10 p.m., $100

Yoshi’s

1330 Fillmore, SF

(415) 655-5600

www.yoshis.com

This oil spill — and the next

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EDITORIAL The first headline the San Francisco Chronicle ran after the Cosco Busan crashed into a Bay Bridge protective fender Nov. 7 implied that nothing terrible had happened. It read, almost comically, "CRUNCH!" Initial reports suggested that only a few hundred gallons of fuel oil had spilled from the gash in the 810-foot freighter’s hull. Caltrans assured the public that the system had worked: the fender had absorbed the blow, the bridge had suffered no damage, and motorists had no cause for concern.

It wasn’t until much later in the day that the public learned just how big an ecological disaster was unfolding in the bay. And the most disturbing evidence is only now becoming clear: this was an accident waiting to happen. The regulations and processes in place to prevent a catastrophic oil spill in the bay — where thousands of ships with tanks carrying foul and toxic fuel oil sail through a fragile ecosystem every year — were, and are, tragically inadequate.

Just look at the record so far:

•The Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service on Yerba Buena Island, which has extensive radar and electronic tracking devices, was clearly aware that the container ship was heading for a collision — but was unable to stop it.

The fog was thick, and the ship, which had just made a wide S turn out of the Port of Oakland, was far from the center of the 1,200-foot-wide channel under the bridge. The Coast Guard could hardly have missed what was going on.

In fact, according to news reports, a VTS staffer radioed the bar pilot at the helm of the ship minutes before the crash and warned him that he was on an errant course. "Your [compass] heading is 235. What are your intentions?" the VTS staffer asked (essentially saying, in nautical-radio speak, "What the hell are you doing?"). The pilot, John Cota, insisted he was heading right for the center of the span and not to worry, his lawyer told reporters.

Imagine, for a moment, what would happen if air traffic controllers at San Francisco International Airport saw a commercial jet flying off course in zero-visibility fog and heading for the top of San Bruno Mountain. The controllers wouldn’t ask the captain what his intentions were; they would announce an imminent crash and order him to immediately increase altitude, change course … whatever was necessary. The captain wouldn’t argue that his or her instruments said everything was fine; the airliner would change course at once and sort out the question of instrument accuracy after it was out of harm’s way.

But traffic regulators on the bay operate under different rules. Even a minor course change would have prevented the accident — but according to VTS rules posted on the Web, the Coast Guard has no authority (other than in times of national-security alerts) to directly order preventative action. Under centuries-old rules of the sea, the captain of a ship is in total control and can’t be told what to do, even if a disaster is looming — and modern safety regulations haven’t caught up to that tradition.

•The ship was sailing under terrible conditions, with almost zero visibility, and even some bay captains say running a 70,000-ton vessel in an area like this in fog that thick is a bad idea. But the shipping companies have so much money on the line that nobody wants to slow down the schedules.

•It’s no secret where the fuel tanks are in a ship like this. The moment the ship took a gash that size in the hull, the authorities should have assumed that a sizable and extremely dangerous spill was in the works and begun immediate emergency containment procedures. But somehow just about everyone seemed to believe the initial reports that the crew of the ship had transferred the fuel away from the hole and only a trivial amount had escaped.

Remember, we’re talking about a rip of 100 feet, one-eighth the length of the ship, right in the part of the hull where half a million gallons of nasty bunker fuel were stored. Emergency responders should have known a spill was inevitable and gone into action right away.

Yet hours passed. No public warning was issued. Bay swimmers continued to take their morning natations — and some came back covered with oil. Nobody knew what was going on.

•The day after the spill, when it was clear an ecological disaster was happening in the bay, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom split town and went on vacation.

•So far, the taxpayers are picking up the tab for the cleanup — and in the end, it may prove difficult to get the owner of the ship to pay, even if faulty navigation equipment on the Cosco Busan was at least partly the cause of the spill. The companies that own these big ships use layers of dummy corporations, legal tricks, and secretive contracts to protect them from liability. In this case, the Chronicle has reported, the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It’s going to take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for this mess.

Meanwhile, the crab-fishing industry is out of business, and the economic impact will be dramatic.

There are obvious lessons here — and the first is that the public and all of the regulatory and response agencies at every level of government have to stop taking a nonchalant, hands-off attitude toward the ships that represent an ecological time bomb in the bay.

Shipping is part of the lifeblood of the local economy, and everyone who lives in the Bay Area has to live with the fact that giant steel vessels loaded with toxic fluids are going to be passing through a diverse and easily damaged ecosystem every day of every year for the foreseeable future. But there’s a lot that can be done to make it safer.

For starters, the VTS ought to have the mandate and the authority to regulate shipping traffic in the same way that air traffic controllers regulate planes. Among other things, the service should keep ships in port when the fog is that thick and conditions aren’t safe. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is mad about the spill response, and that’s fine — but she and her Bay Area congressional colleagues ought to push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

There’s a desperate need for a bay spill early-warning system, something that could go into effect the moment there’s a possibility of oil fouling the water — and get containment crews on hand quickly and let the public know the hazards. That’s something the State Legislature should move on immediately.

Perhaps Congress should mandate that ships passing through US coastal waters post an accident bond to ensure they don’t escape liability for disasters. But for now, the federal government needs to seize the Cosco Busan, impound its cargo, and make it clear that nothing is going anywhere until the bill for this catastrophe is settled.

And the state and federal governments need to compensate the crab fishers — and then collect the money from the ship’s owners to cover those costs.

Feinstein: easy on torture, tough on bay spill response

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so the front page head on Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle blared: ‘FEINSTEIN SLAMS SPILL RESPONSE.”
The subhead added: “This…should have never happened.”

Well, this was an easy one of course for Feinstein, pictured by the Chronicle wagging her finger in a characteristic pose of self-righteousness after a briefing on Treasure Island. She could denounce the locals, call for an investigation, and then scurry back to the safety of Washington. If she really wanted to get at the heart of theproblem and show some political courage, she could lead the way in doing what our editorial demanded: “push for legislation that would allow the Coast Guard to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

She could push for modernizing safety regulations that would allow the Coast Guard’s Vehicle Traffic Service to order preventative action when a ship is heading toward a bridge or a disaster. She could urge Congress to mandate that the owners of ships passing through U.S. coastal waters be fully identified, be accountable for their actions, and post an accident bond to insure they don’t escape liability for disasters.
(What if the ship had so damaged the Bay Bridge that it collapsed with cars on it? The Chronicle reported that the Cosco Busan is a Chinese vessel owned by either a company in Cyprus or one in Hong Kong and managed by a separate Hong Kong outfit. It will take years to get to the bottom of who should pay for the mess. Meanwhile, the public pays and the crab-fishing industry is severely damaged if not ruined for this year.)

She could urge the federal government to seize the ship, impound the cargo, and make clear that nothing is going anywhere until the ownership is identified and the bill is settled. She could urge all of this for national security reasons, since it is conceivable that a terrorist could seize ships laden with oil or explosives and wreak havoc in major harbors.

If her past is any guide, Feinstein is not about to go up against the powerful shipping interests and do anything much beyond an easy call for investigation and a Chronicle headline or two.

After all, when the chips were down on Mukasey for U.S. Attorney General, Feinstein helped subvert San Francisco values in a most egregious way. She announced her early critical support for Mukasey, abandoned Democrats opposing the nomination, led the charge for his Senate confirmation, and voted in effect for torture and to give the job of the nation’s top law enforcement officer in the United States of America to an attorney who would not take a public position against torture.

This was a snapshot of Feinstein’s shameful record: she is tough on bay spill response, easy on torture. And she’s been late and weak and undependable on Bush and the war. B3

Forget the neighbors: build away!

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OPINION Having considered San Francisco something of a utopian American city (certainly compared with others), I assumed the only reason city officials were on the verge of allowing perfect little Valencia Street to be turned into Emeryville West was that they were simply unaware of what a handful of developers and a few folks in the Planning Department were cooking up.

All they needed was to hear from the neighbors, some responsible concerned adults, to call their attention to this under-the-radar remaking of our beloved Mission. Giant, five-story luxury condo blocks would be so obviously wrong for Valencia, so against the will of the vast majority of the citizens who live here, and so clearly in violation the intent of the law we passed to protect our neighborhoods that they would simply say, "Holy cow, thank you!" and stop it.

No. See, it doesn’t work that way.

Proposition M (the law passed by San Franciscans in the 1980s to protect the way our city looks and feels from just such neighborhood-crushing development) is not treated as law or as a defining statement by San Franciscans about how they want their city developed. Rather, it is ignored.

After months of work and research, countless meetings, and coordinating the support of hundreds of concerned neighbors into one large group, we waited more than 20 hours to speak for three minutes in front of the Planning Commission about just one of these giant condo projects, at 700 Valencia.

When we finally got our three minutes (at 11:45 p.m.!), two commissioners were literally asleep. The gavel swung. Approved.

It was like the people of San Francisco never showed up.

Like Prop. M never passed.

Like the Mission didn’t exist as a real neighborhood.

The feeling was like "OK, I’ve finally done something more than vote to actually make this city I’ve lived in and loved for so many years a better place. I’ve joined up with other idealistic San Franciscans, mostly wonderful neighbors I’d never even met before, who worked far more valiantly than I on this process. And it doesn’t matter."

The law, and the people of San Francisco and the Mission, are all simply impediments, nuisances, to developers making their money, the planning commissioners getting home to bed, and the people with degrees at the Planning Department who believe, incredibly, that they should personally get to change and remake ("plan") this historic, world-famously beautiful city.

It’s happening as you read this. The middle-finger building going up obscenely in front of the Bay Bridge is just the beginning. The destruction of Valencia Street may soon be an afterthought.

I’m suddenly very skeptical about the future livability of the neighborhood I’ve proudly been part of for more than 20 years. But it may not be too late to save yours.

Call, write, and visit your supervisors! Remind them that Prop. M is still the voice of the people.*

Dan Hoyle is a Valencia Street activist. He can be reached at savevalencia@gmail.com

Feelin’ groovy: Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival report

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Circles sweethearts in Ben Lomond. All photos by Hannah Barr-DiChiara.

By Max Goldberg

With the Bay Bridge closed and Golden Gate Park rolling in 40-year-old patchouli, some local pleasure seekers headed south for the Santa Cruz Mountains where SF impresario Arvel Hernandez threw the first annual Ben Lomond Indian Summer Music Festival from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2 at Henfling’s Firehouse Tavern. This summer of love was a hot one indeed, with highland temps cresting 100. Collective skin stickiness and caravans for creekdipping sessions were the order of the day. Evenings were for replenishment, singer-songwriters, sandwiches, a slice of lemon, and, eventually, a peaceful bedding down in the cricket-charmed night.

Hernandez did a wonderful job overseeing schedules and camping, making this festival of friends seem extra…friendly. The mixing of the beaded and bejeweled with some seriously leathered biker dudes and wooly barflies was sometimes weird but totally peaceable, my knee-jerk visions of Altamont redux proving unfounded. If anything, the locals just wanted to dance, something I could relate to after a pretty steady run of whispers and drones: just because you fly the freak flag doesn’t mean you’re excused from party anthems, soul stirrings, and a beat, ya heard?

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Ship bros.

But enough of that, let my praise spill over. Martin Salata (formerly of the White White Quilt) began Saturday, stretching out some diamond blues with Circles, a new project with recordings and shows forthcoming. A botched sound job left some holes in the arrangements, but the centrifugal groove-design was apparent and had me thinking vintage Dr. John and Hawkwind. Humbled by the heat, Guardian “Class of 2007” playboys Ship played their song-quilts more plaintively than usual; the heady light of the afternoon sun crowned these angels.

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Joseph Childress gets political.

Barn Owl’s skyscraping drone was the perfect match for the sudden cool of Saturday evening. Spirits awoken, we dug in for the nighttime jamboree. Wymond and His Spirit Children’s nice spin of hippie-glam gave way to a pin-drop performance by SF-by-way-of-Colorado troubadour Joseph Childress. I’ve seen Childress several times, but never this commanding and assured: keeping a tight leash on the vocal tics and guitar thrashings, allowing room for the natural ebullience of his verses and melodies to send Henfling’s soaring.

Ammiano on Sen. Craig

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Senator Craig says he doesn’t do things like that. And, oh yes, the Bay Bridge isn’t closed.

(On the voicemail of Supervisor Tom Ammiano). B3

Freakend Alert! Wild bears, trannies ….

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This weekend’s clubs and parties: It’s a classic case of B&T this Labor Day weekend. Not B&T as in bridge and tunnel — although the fact that the BART’s open 24 hours while the Bay Bridge gets some fixin’ promises to flood the city with thankfully non-drunk driving revellers. (I myself plan to take advantage of this BART generosity by exploring some East Bay haunts I haven’t been able to visit in a while, like the White Horse Inn, the Ruby Room, and the Bench & Bar … look out Oaktown!)

Nope, it’s B&T as in bears and trannies, and a fab club called Trans Am (and more!). This week’s Super Ego column gave the lowdown on some of the events going on this week and next, here’s some more. Just for us.

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Look out!

Out of downtown

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Out of downtown

› steve@sfbg.com

It wasn’t going well for Ted Strawser, predictably. The alternative transportation activist faced an uphill battle March 14 trying to convince a San Francisco Chamber of Commerce committee to endorse Healthy Saturdays, a plan to ban cars from part of Golden Gate Park.

Representatives of the park’s museums and Richmond District homeowners had just argued their case against the measure. “Visitors want access to our front door, and we want to give it to them,” Pat Kilduff, communications director for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, indignantly told the group of two dozen business leaders gathered around a large conference table.

Strawser gave it his best shot: he talked about following the lead of other great cities to create car-free spaces; he said, “Golden Gate Park is one of the best parks in the nation, if not the world”; and he made a detailed case for closure. But around the table there were scowls, eye rolls, and other obvious signs that Strawser was being tolerated, not welcomed. Some — including chamber vice president Jim Lazarus — even started to interrupt and argue with him.

Then the man sitting next to Strawser spoke up. “I don’t think this is fair,” he said. And suddenly, everyone in the room shaped up. Strawser’s ally — his only supporter in the room — was somebody no chamber member could or would dismiss. Warren Hellman doesn’t shout or bang the table — but when he speaks, downtown pays attention.

Hellman, a prominent investment banker, told the committee members that he expected them to show the same respect for Strawser that they had for the previous two speakers. The nonsense ended, immediately.

And by the time Strawser turned the floor over to Hellman, the mood had changed. The group listened raptly, smiled, and nodded as Hellman spoke in his usual folksy, familiar, disarming style.

“It’s not a lot of fun when friends fall out,” he began, “because the previous speakers and many of you all agreed on the necessity of the garage [that was built in Golden Gate Park], and we worked together.”

He pointed out that many in the group had promised during the fall 2000 election to support Healthy Saturdays once the garage was built, although Hellman was now the only member of the coalition honoring that commitment. But he didn’t chide or shame his colleagues. That isn’t Hellman’s style.

Instead, he spoke their language. The garage has never been full and needs the money it can charge for parking to repay the bonds. This isn’t a fight that’s going away, since “part of the conflict is because this park is everybody’s park.” But there are “about 100 compromises not acceptable to either side that would move this forward.” And if a solution can’t be found, there will probably be an expensive ballot fight that nobody wants.

“My conclusion is we should attempt this test,” Hellman told the group. Ultimately, when the vote was later taken in secret, the chamber didn’t agree, although it did vote to back a trial closure after the California Academy of Sciences reopens next year.

At the meeting, Hellman openly called for Mayor Gavin Newsom to get involved in seeking a compromise, something Hellman said he had also just requested of the mayor at a one-on-one breakfast meeting. A couple of weeks later Newsom — who had already indicated his intention of vetoing the measure — did broker a compromise that was then approved by the Board of Supervisors.

As usual, Hellman didn’t take credit, content to quietly play a role in making San Francisco a better place.

Healthy Saturdays isn’t the most important issue in local history — but the significance of Hellman’s involvement can’t be underestimated. His alliance with the environmentalists and park advocates might even signal a sea change in San Francisco politics.

Warren Hellman represents San Francisco’s political and economic past. And maybe — as his intriguing actions of recent years suggest — its future.

This guy is a rich (in all senses of the word) and compelling figure who stands alone in this town. And even though his leadership role in downtown political circles has often placed him at odds with the Guardian, Hellman consented to a series of in-depth interviews over the past six months.

“Our family has been here since early in the 19th century, so we had real roots here,” Hellman told us. His great-grandfather founded Wells Fargo and survived an assassination attempt on California Street by a man who yelled, “Mr. Hellman, you’ve ruined my life,” before shooting a pistol and barely missing.

The Hellman family has been solidly ruling class ever since, rich and Republican, producing a long line of investment bankers like Warren.

Yet the 72-year-old comes off as more iconoclast than patrician, at least partly because of the influence of his irreverent parents, particularly his mother, Ruth, who died in 1971 in a scuba-diving accident in Cozumel, Mexico, at the age of 59. “She was entirely nuts,” Hellman said, going on to describe her World War II stint as a military flier in the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots and other colorful pursuits. “She just loved people, a little like I do. She collected people.”

Hellman grew up wealthy and cultured, but he also attended public schools, including Grant Grammar School and Lowell High School. In between, the young troublemaker did a stint at San Rafael Military Academy — “reform school for the rich,” as he called it — for stunts such as riding his horse to Sacramento on a whim.

After doing his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, Hellman got his MBA from Harvard and went on to become, at the age of 26, the youngest partner ever at the prestigious Manhattan investment firm Lehman Bros. He developed into an übercapitalist in his own right and eventually returned home from New York and founded Hellman and Friedman LLC in San Francisco in 1984, establishing himself as the go-to financier for troubled corporations.

“He is really one of the pioneers of private equity,” said Mark Mosher, a longtime downtown political consultant and the executive director of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission on Jobs and Economic Growth, on which Hellman sits.

Hellman became what Business Week called “the Warren Buffett of the West Coast,” a man of extraordinary wealth and power. Among other accomplishments, Hellman took Levi Strauss private, recently made billions of dollars in profits selling DoubleClick to Google, and manages the assets of the California public employee retirement funds (CalPERS and CalSTRS), which are among the largest in the world.

Like many financial titans, Hellman has always been a generous philanthropist, giving to the arts, supporting schools in myriad ways, and funding the San Francisco Foundation and the San Francisco Free Clinic (which his children run). He vigorously competes in marathons and endurance equestrian events, often winning in his age bracket. And he has his humanizing passions, such as playing the five-string banjo and creating the popular Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival.

But he’s also been a prime facilitator of downtown’s political power, which regularly flexes its muscle against progressive causes and still holds sway in the Mayor’s Office and other city hall power centers.

Hellman founded, funds, and is a board member of the Committee on Jobs, which is perhaps the city’s most influential downtown advocacy organization. Hellman and his friends Don Fisher, the founder of the Gap, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein also started SFSOS, which now wages the most vicious attacks on left-of-center candidates and causes.

When the de Young Museum and other cultural institutions were threatening to leave Golden Gate Park, Hellman almost single-handedly had an underground parking garage built for them, in the process destroying 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels and drawing scorn from the left. The Guardian called it “Hellman’s Hole.”

“We at the Bike Coalition very much started out on the opposite side of Warren Hellman,” San Francisco Bicycle Coalition executive director Leah Shahum told us. “We couldn’t have been more like oil and water on the garage issue.”

But over the past two years or so, Hellman’s profile has started to change. He went on to become an essential ally of the SFBC and other environmentalists and alternative transportation advocates who want to kick cars off JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park on weekends, crossing the downtown crowd in the process. He has shared his wealth with progressive groups such as Livable City, which often fights downtown, and has stuck up for edgy fun seekers over more conservative NIMBY types. He has also publicly repudiated the attacks of SFSOS and its spokesperson, Wade Randlett, and withdrawn his support from the group.

Hellman is still a Republican, but a thoughtful and liberal-minded one who opposed the Iraq War and wrote an article for Salon.com in February titled “If the United States Were a Company, Would George Bush Be Our CEO?” (His answer: hell no.) And to top it all off, Hellman sports a few tattoos and even attended 2006’s Burning Man Festival and plans to return this year.

Unguarded and reflective, Hellman’s comments to the Guardian foreshadow the possible future of capitalism and influence in San Francisco and point to potential political pathways that are just now beginning to emerge.

Our first conversation took place at the Guardian office two weeks before the November 2006 election, when it was starting to look like Nancy Pelosi had a good shot at becoming speaker of the House of Representatives.

“I think this election in two weeks is going to be really interesting,” Hellman told us.

This Republican was cheering for the Democrats to win. “They aren’t my kind of Republicans,” he said of the people in power. Hellman didn’t support the war or approve of how the Bush administration sold it, and he wanted Pelosi and the Democrats to hold someone accountable.

“What I’d like her to do is admit that we can’t get out [of Iraq immediately], but start to talk about what the fallout has been. Discuss the enormous cost in human life as well as money, and how it’s possible the war united the Middle East against us,” Hellman said.

The one thing he can’t abide is disingenuousness. Hellman speaks plainly and honestly, and he asked us to keep particularly caustic comments off the record only a few times during almost six hours’ worth of interviews. He was self-effacing about his political knowledge and seemed most interested in working through the problems of the day with people of goodwill.

Asked what he values most in the people he deals with, Hellman said, “It’s authenticity. Do they believe things because they believe in them, or do they believe in things because they’re cynical or they’re just trying to gain something?”

Locally, Hellman has reached out to people with varying worldviews and come to count many friends among those who regularly battle against downtown.

“I love to know people,” he said. “That’s probably the single thing that motivates me. When someone says to me, ‘How can you be friends with [then–head of SEIU Local 790] Josie Mooney?’ I say, ‘Look, I want to know Josie Mooney. And if she’s awful, then we won’t be friends.’ I’m just fascinated by getting to know people. And virtually always, they’re a little like Wagner operas: they’re better than they sound.”

Hellman was the chair of the Committee on Jobs when he got to know Mooney, who chaired the San Francisco Labor Council and was a natural political adversary for the pro-business group, particularly when Hellman was leading the fight to do away with the city’s gross receipts tax, which has proved to be costly for the city and a boon for downtown.

But after that victory, Hellman turned around and cochaired a campaign with Mooney to retool and reinstate the gross receipts tax in a way that he believed was more fair and helped restore the lost revenue to the city.

“We lost, but he put $100,000 of his own money into that campaign,” Mooney told us, noting that the proposed tax would have cost Hellman and Friedman around $70,000 a year. “I think he just thought the city needed the money. It was a substantive point of view, not a political point of view.”

Mooney considers Hellman both a friend and “an extraordinary human being…. He has made a huge contribution to San Franciscans that doesn’t relate to ideological issues. A tremendous thing about Warren is he’s not ideological, even in his political point of view…. On politics, I’d say he is becoming more progressive as he understands the issues that confront ordinary people.”

Mooney is one of the people who have helped bring him that awareness. When they first met, Mooney said, Hellman told her, “You’re the first union boss I ever met.” That might have been an epithet coming from some CEOs, but Hellman had a genuine interest in understanding her perspective and working with her.

“In a sense, I think that was a very good era in terms of cooperation between the Committee on Jobs and other elements of the city,” Hellman said. “Josie and I had already met, and we’d established this kind of logic where 80 percent of what we both want for the city we agree on, and 20 percent [of the time, we agree to disagree].”

Committee on Jobs executive director Nathan Nayman — who called Hellman “one of my favorite people in the world” — told us that Hellman feels more free than many executives to be his own person.

“He’s not with a publicly held company, and he doesn’t have to answer to shareholders,” Nayman said. “He takes a position and lives by his word. You don’t see many people like him in his income bracket.”

Hellman has become a trusted hub for San Franciscans of all political persuasions, Nayman said, “because he’s very genuine. He’s fully transparent in a city that likes to praise itself for transparency. What you see is what you get.”

Hellman expects the same from others, which is why he walked away from SFSOS (and convinced Feinstein to bolt as well) in disgust over Randlett’s scorched-earth style. Among other efforts, SFSOS was responsible for below-the-belt attacks on Sups. Chris Daly, Jake McGoldrick, and Gerardo Sandoval (whom a mailer inaccurately accused of anti-Semitism).

“If all things were equal, I’d just as soon that SFSOS went away,” Hellman said. “SFSOS started doing the opposite of what I thought they would be doing, so it was fairly easy for me to part company with them. What I thought we were doing is trying to figure out ways to make the city better, not just being an antagonistic, nay-saying attack organization. I’m not a huge fan of Gerardo Sandoval, but I thought the attacks on him were beyond anything I could imagine ever being in favor of myself. And it was a series of things like that, and I said I don’t want anything more to do with this.”

Downtown, they’re not always quite sure what to make of Hellman.

“Every once in a while, he does things that irritate people who are ideologically conservative,” Mosher said. “He took an immense amount of heat for supporting the Reiner initiative [which would have taxed the rich to fund universal preschool].”

He’s given countless hours and untold riches to public schools, doing everything from endowing programs to knocking on doors in support of bond measures and often pushing his colleagues to do the same.

“My connection to him has been through the school district, and he’s really been a prince,” Sup. Tom Ammiano said. “He has even stopped calling me antibusiness. He put a lot of his energy into improving public education, and so he shows it can be done.”

Progressives don’t always agree with Hellman, but they feel like they can trust him and even sometimes win him over. “If you get a relationship with him and you’re always honest about the facts and your own interests, he will listen, and that’s pretty remarkable,” Mooney said. “He shows a remarkable openness to people who have good ideas.”

His appreciation for people of all stripes often causes him to reject the conventional wisdom of his downtown allies, who viciously attacked the Green Party members of the Board of Education a few years ago.

“Everybody said, ‘Oh my god, Sarah Lipson, you know, she’s a Green Party member, she’s the furthest left-wing person on the board,’ blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And I phoned her up one day and said, ‘I’d really like to meet you.’ And she’s — leave aside the fact that I think she’s a very good person as a human being, but she’s a very thoughtful, analytic person. Listening to her opinions about things that are happening in the school district, I really respect that. I mean, what do I know about what’s going on in the school district? I know more now than I did then. But just getting to know people, and maybe get them to understand my point of view, which isn’t that penetrating.”

Many of his efforts have received little publicity, as when he saved the Great American Music Hall from closure by investing with Slim’s owner Boz Scaggs and helping him buy the troubled musical venue. “There are things that you and I don’t even have a clue that he has done,” Nayman said.

“He’s an interesting guy,” Mosher said. “He’s one of a dying breed, a liberal Republican. He has a social conscience and wants to use his money to do good.”

Actually, calling Hellman liberal might be going too far. In the end, he’s still very much a fiscal conservative. He doesn’t support rent control, district elections for the Board of Supervisors, taxing businesses to address social problems such as the lack of affordable health care, or limits on condo conversions.

He also opposes the requirement that employers provide health care coverage, which downtown entities are now suing the city to overturn, telling us, “In general, I don’t think it’s a good idea, because I’m still, even in my aging years, a believer that the marketplace works better than other things…. Universal health care I do believe in, but what I worry is that it’s going to be another damned bureaucracy and that it’s not going to work.”

Yet he doesn’t believe wealth is an indicator of worth, saying of his fortune, “It is luck. Most of what you do you aren’t better at than everyone.”

He doesn’t believe in the law of the jungle, in which the poor and weak must be sacrificed in the name of progress. In fact, he feels a strong obligation to the masses.

As he told us, “My mantra for capitalism — and I didn’t invent this, but I think it’s pretty good — is that capitalism won, and now we need to save the world from capitalism.”

Hellman looms large over downtown San Francisco. His Financial District office offers a panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, the Ferry Building, and the rest of the city’s waterfront. He likes to be personally involved with his city and the companies in which Hellman and Friedman invests.

“Usually I’m directly involved,” he told us in an interview earlier this year. “I’ve always said that I don’t like to go to the racetrack to just look at the horses. The fun of being a principal is that you’re standing at the track and not saying, ‘Gee, that’s a beautiful gray horse.’ You’re saying, ‘Come on, he’s got to win!’ So I’m almost always invariably invested in the companies that we work with, either individually or through the firm.”

Unlike many Wall Street barons who strive to control a company and bring in new executives, flip it for a quick profit, or liquidate it, Hellman said his firm tries to identify solid companies and help facilitate what they do. “We don’t usually take over companies. I always think that we provide a service to help the businesses,” he said. “Our job is kind of the opposite of owning a factory. Our job is to be sure the people who run the business feel like it’s their business.”

Similarly, he thinks capitalists need to feel a sense of ownership over society’s problems, something he thinks is taking root in San Francisco and other economic centers, particularly among the younger generations. “It’s about understanding how much suffering there is on the other side and trying to figure out how that suffering can be alleviated,” he said. “I think it’s partly good economics that as you bring people up, they’re able to do more for society. If nothing else, they’re able to buy more and shop at a Wal-Mart or something — probably someplace you would wildly disapprove of — and buy goods and services. But I don’t think it’s that narrow.”

Rather, he believes that everyone has a little progressive in them, a little desire to cooperatively solve our collective problems rather than pass them off to future generations. He sees a marked change from his days at Lehman Bros.

“Everybody was into making it,” he said, noting that many capitalists then did charity work as a means of attaining social status but focused mostly on the accumulation of wealth. But, he said, the new generation of capitalists seems genuinely interested in improving the world.

“The feeling for giving back in the next generation, in the now 25- to 35-year-olds, it’s just an order-of-magnitude difference than it was for people who are now in their 40s and early 50s,” Hellman said. “I’m very encouraged.”

Yet the flip side is that, in Hellman’s view, downtown doesn’t wield as much power as it once did. Low political contribution limits have made politicians less dependent on downtown money, creating fewer shot callers, while democratizing tools such as the Internet have broadened the political dialogue.

“For the last 30 years we have become an increasingly tolerant city, and that’s great,” he said. “In the old days, [the Guardian] complained about downtown, and yeah, no shit, downtown really did control the city. The benefit was as that slipped away, the city became fairer and more open to argument. So now downtown hardly has any power at all anymore. In a sense, that’s a good thing. Tolerance grew tremendously when the city wasn’t dictated to.”

That tolerance caused street fairs to pop up all over town and festivals such as Hellman’s Hardly Strictly Bluegrass to blossom in Golden Gate Park. Bike lanes have taken space from cars, events such as Halloween in the Castro have gotten crazier, street protests have gotten bigger and more frequent, and people have felt more free to fly their freak flags. And all that freedom eventually triggered a backlash from groups of isolated NIMBYs who complain and often find sympathetic ears at city hall.

“Sometimes you get the feeling in this city that in the land of the tolerant, the intolerant are king,” said Hellman, whose festival has endured noise complaints even though the music is shut off by 7 p.m. “There is a continuing pressure to do away with fun, because fun is objectionable to someone, [but] we need to think about not creating a new dictatorship of a tiny group of people whose views are not in line with the opinion of most of the people of San Francisco…. You should try to balance the good of a lot of people versus the temporary annoyance of a few people.”

Preserving fun and a lively urban culture is a personal issue for Hellman, who plays the five-string banjo and calls his festival “the most enjoyable two days of the year for me.” He helps draw the biggest names in bluegrass music and acts like a kid in a candy shop during the event.

“I feel very strongly that an important part of our culture is built on the type of music and type of performance that goes on at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass,” Hellman said. From parables set to music to songs of struggle and the old union standards, “that kind of music is the conscience of our country.”

He considers bluegrass a vital and historically important form of political communication, more so than many of the upscale art forms that the rich tend to sponsor. “I’m glad that we have first-rate opera, but it’s equally important that we foster the kind of music, lyrics, etc., that support all this,” he said. “Somebody once said that most of the great Western philosophy is buried in the words of country songs. And that’s closer to the truth than most people think. A big passion of mine is to try to help — and people have defined it too narrowly — the kinds of music that I think have a hell of a lot to do with the good parts of our society.”

Perhaps surprisingly for a Republican venture capitalist from the older generation, Hellman also considers the countercultural freaks of San Francisco to be some of the “good parts of our society.” That’s why he attended Burning Man for the first time last year and why, he said, he loved it, as much for the culture and community as for the art.

“I went to Burning Man because as much as possible I want to experience everything,” he said. “I want to just see directly what it’s like. I knew I’d enjoy it. I never doubted that. But what really overwhelmed me is it was 40,000 people getting along with each other. I mean, it’s pretty intense. There were dust storms and the world’s most repulsive sight: nude men over 70 just dangling along. But I never saw an argument. It was 40,000 people just enjoying each other.”

It was most striking to Hellman because of the contrast with the rest of society. As he said, “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”

While Hellman supports Schwarzenegger — calling him “a good advertisement to California” — he has nothing good to say about his fellow Republican in the Oval Office. He calls Bush’s tenure “an absolute four-star disaster.” The invasion of Iraq is the most obvious problem, he said. “Our war policy has slowly veered from being ‘Don’t tread on me’ to we’re going to jump on your neck.”

But his antipathy to certain aspects of the Republican Party began even earlier, when the religious right began to take over.

“I thought we were not that polarized during the Clinton administration. I was somewhat encouraged,” Hellman said. “Maybe there was an undercurrent of strident religious behavior or strident conservatism, but not the conservatism that I think the Republican Party used to stand for, which was fiscal conservatism instead of social conservatism. Somehow, there was this angst in this country on the part of religious people who I guess felt this country was being taken away from them, and they were the kind of stalwart or underpinnings of society. And they took it back.”

But in the wake of that disaster, Hellman thinks, there is an opportunity for reasonable people of goodwill to set the future political course. As Nayman said of Hellman, “He does believe there is a middle way pretty much all the time.”

Politically, that’s why Hellman gravitates toward the moderates of both major parties, such as Schwarzenegger and Newsom. He looks for people who will marry his economic conservatism with a regard for things such as environmentalism and social justice.

“It’s very tough to be a big-city mayor,” Hellman said. “[Newsom is] probably the best mayor we’re entitled to. He’s got this fantastic balancing act.”

Hellman said downtown hasn’t been terribly happy with Newsom for supporting striking hotel workers, getting behind Ammiano’s health insurance mandate, supporting tax measures, and generally letting the Board of Supervisors set the city’s agenda for the past two years.

“Their measure is he has 80-percent-plus popularity, and he ought to spend some of it. Well, they might not agree with what he would spend it on. And he’s been unwilling to spend very much of it. In some parts of the business community there is disappointment with him, but I don’t think that’s right. He didn’t hide what he would be like.”

What Newsom said he would be — a big reason for his popularity — is a mayor for the new San Francisco, a place where the city’s traditional economic conservatism has been tempered by a greater democratization of power and an ascendant progressive movement that expects its issues to be addressed.

“I don’t like people who are intolerant,” Hellman said. “I don’t like people that are telling you something to get some outcome that, if you understood it, you probably wouldn’t want. I like people that are passionate.”

Asked, then, about Sup. Chris Daly, the nemesis of downtown and most definitely a man of strong political passions, he said, “I admire Chris Daly. I disagree with Chris on a lot of things he believes, but there are also probably a lot of things I would agree with Chris on. And I respect him.”

Hellman is the rare downtown power broker who wants to bridge the gap between Newsom — whom he calls a “moderate to conservative establishment person” — and progressives such as Daly, Mooney, and the Bicycle Coalition. The middle ground, he said, is often a very attractive place, as it was with Healthy Saturdays.

“I’m sure you spend time in the park on Sunday, and it’s a hell of a lot nicer in there on Sundays than Saturdays,” Hellman said. But even more important to him, this is about integrity and being true to what Golden Gate Park garage supporters promised back in 2000.

“They were proposing Saturday closing at that time, which I’ve always thought was a good idea,” he said. “And we made a commitment to them, or I thought we made a commitment to them, that let’s not have Saturday closure now, but as soon as the garage was done, we’d experiment with Saturday closure.”

We brought up what Fine Arts Museums board president Dede Wilsey has said of that pledge, that it was under different circumstances and that she never actually promised to support Saturday closure after the garage was completed.

“There’s a letter. She put it in writing,” he said of Wilsey. “She signed a letter on behalf of the museums saying that when the de Young is done, we should experiment with Saturday closings.”

The Bike Coalition’s Shahum said that even when Hellman was an enemy, he was a reasonable guy. But it’s in the past couple of years that she’s really come to appreciate the unique role he plays in San Francisco.

“He showed decency and respect toward us,” she said. “We never saw him as a villain, even though we disagreed completely. Later he really stepped up and has been a leader on Healthy Saturdays. And what I was most impressed with is that he was true to his word.”

Supervisor McGoldrick, who sponsored the measure, echoed the sentiment: “Hellman was certainly a man of his word who acted in a highly principled way.”

So why does Hellman now stand apart from the downtown crowd? Has he parted ways with the economic and cultural power brokers who were once his allies?

No, he said, “I think they parted ways with me.” *

 

Don’t Trash California

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By Sarah Phelan

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Slow is how I was feeling in all this heat, as I drove towards the Bay Bridge, direction San Francisco, and maybe it was because I was driving slowly, too, that I saw the huge illuminated “Don’t Trash California” sign that’s been newly installed on the approach to the toll gates.
Brought to us by Toll Roads, an Orange County and SoCal-based organization that has partnered with Caltrans, the sign is obviously intended to stop people trashing our state (at least physically, if not verbally).
Nice touch, I thought, as the driver in front of me tapped cigarette ash out of his window, and a plastic bag flew across six lanes of freeway traffic. It’s time people stopped dumping shit out of car windows. Maybe if they could see where their shit ends up, they’d give more of a shit about their shit.Maybe we need Al Gore to make another documentary, following the path of a fast food wrapper from your car and into someone else’s lneighborhoods and into the waterways that lead to the giant silver mobius that is the World’s Ocean.
Or maybe we could just use our friggin’ imaginations. The kids in West Oakland WON’T enjoy finding your beer can in their back yard. Nor will the sea lions at Pier 39. And it won’t help feed the starving polar bears.
And if the California Department of Transportation, Division of Maintenance, didn’t have to spend more than $40 million just to clean up litter on freeways and highways, maybe they’d have more dough for fixing the pot holes that drivers are always complaining about.
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The meltdown opportunity

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EDITORIAL A few hours after the explosion that melted part of the East Bay approach to the Bay Bridge, Mayor Gavin Newsom was meeting with reporters at the state Democratic convention in San Diego. Yes, he told them, there would be an economic impact from the freeway meltdown. Yes, it would be a hardship for thousands of commuters. "Yes, it’s a mess," he told us. "But it’s also an opportunity."

Newsom is right – and if he and other regional and state officials are willing to take advantage of that opportunity, it could be a rare chance to shift commute patterns in the Bay Area away from the automobile.

The evidence on the first post-meltdown travel day was encouraging: Extra BART trains were running. Extra ferries were in service. The Muni lines that connect to the ferry terminal (even the star-crossed T line) were more or less on time. And huge numbers of people who normally would have driven their cars to work took mass transit.

Part of that, of course, was due to the decision by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to offer free rides on trains, buses, and ferries. But part of it was because there simply wasn’t any other choice: the only option for a lot of East Bay residents who wanted to get into San Francisco without facing a real traffic nightmare was to leave their cars at home.

The new commute won’t be a perfect convenience for everyone – but if the state and the counties keep their end of the deal, it won’t have to be that bad. In fact, in 1989, when the Loma Prieta quake brought down the Bay Bridge, San Francisco survived just fine. For those few weeks without transbay driving, downtown was remarkably pleasant – the streets weren’t clogged with cars, the noise level was down, the air was cleaner, and pedestrians and bicyclists didn’t have to fear for their lives.

Meanwhile, the business of the city went on; people adapted; and when the bridge reopened, they got right back in their cars.

That’s what has to change this time around.

For starters, Newsom and Oakland mayor Ron Dellums ought to convene a summit on reducing car traffic and set a firm goal of, say, a permanent 25 percent reduction in auto traffic on the Bay Bridge. That would involve major, lasting improvements in regional transit: The number of ferries, now at double the normal capacity, would have to remain high, and fares would have to be kept low enough to be competitive with driving. BART would also have to increase capacity, and Muni would have to run more busses to take people quickly from BART terminals to other parts of town.

That’s going to cost some money, in part because the East Bay-to-San Francisco ferries are privately owned and won’t carry passengers free or at reduced fares unless the state is going to keep ponying up money – which is a good reason for the legislature to look at creating public ferries for the long term.

But compared to the costs of continued congestion and the impact on global climate change that come from all these cars, it’s too good a deal to pass up.

San Francisco city planners tend to look at ways to accommodate more cars as the city grows. Newsom and Dellums, along with other Bay Area officials, need to derail that assumption and use this opportunity to make permanent reductions in car use. *

When We Were Cars

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By Sarah Phelan

Somehow I assumed public transit would remain free for a week, after Sunday’s meltdown. Silly me.
Never mind headlines about yesterday’s commute, warning that “Monday was easy–but that won’t last.”
Today, we’re back to paying for ferries, buses and BART–a move that will likely get commuters back into their car–and into traffic jams. Makes perfect (non) sense to me. Either way, I’m gonna keep on enjoying the brilliance of not driving, which feels a bit like this photo of traffic on the Bay Bridge, which is titled the “Traffic jam I wasn’t in.”
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The Upside of the Downside of the Meltdown

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By Sarah Phelan
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My morning commute from the East Bay was exactly the same as it was before the MacArthur Maze meltdown. But then, I was traveling to San Francisco on a ferry.
My friendly ferry crew predict that ridership will jump, once people experience the living hell of thousands of drivers trying to find an alternative to an overpass that now looks like a strip of toffee that’s been left out in the sun–a meltdown that has put the connector linking westbound I-80 and southbound I-880 out of commission, as well as the elevated roadway that carried eastbound traffic from the Bay Bridge onto I-580.
They also might get religious about riding the ferry, or the Transbay Express or BART, once they also realize that all public transit is free, at least for now.
The Loma Prieta earthquake and the collapse of the Bay Bridge was what got ferry service between the East Bay and San Francisco started in 1989. Maybe now, a tanker overturning and the melting of an overpass can get people to do what they outta be doing anyways, in the face of climate change: take public transit. Added bonus: if you’re lucky enough to take the ferry you can shout “Adios suckers!” as you glide to and fro beneath the Bay Bridge climate-changing commute.
Double added bonus: maybe this meltdown will get people talking about making public transit permanently free. Right now, commuting to SF by ferry costs $4.00 one way, if you buy 20 tickets, or $5.50 if you buy one.
Commuting by BART costs $2.75 one way, while driving the Bridge costs $4.00 (the toll from Oakland to SF) plus the cost of gas and wear and tear in car to the driver, plus the cost of air quality and wear and tear on the road (including the cost of a possible meltdown when a tanker explodes!) to the Bay Area, plus the cost of climate change to planet Earth.
Can we really “afford” to keep on driving and screw up conditions on the third rock from the Sun?

Halloween on the Parking Lot (Pier)

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By Sarah Phelan

When Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Bevan Dufty announced that they are thinking of holding Halloween at Pier 30-32 I was like, Pier Where? I walk along the Embarcadero on my way to work pretty much every day and I’ve never noticed a Pier 30 or a Pier 32, come to think of it. Today, I discovered why I couldn’t recall this elusive piece of pierdom: It’s actually a giant friggin’ parking lot.

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The lot begins at the base of the Bay Bridge, where Bryant Street spits onto the Embarcadero at Pier 28, the Hi Dive Bar and Red’s Java House, and sprawls all the way to Pier 36—which is opposite the Delancey Street Restaurant. (Did Gavin came up with this particularly bizarre relocation idea while gazing from the windows of Delancey Street, during one of his infamous faux rehab sessions, while SF was buzzing with rumors of his sex scandal with Ruby Rippey Tourk and people were posting Betray pictures of him all over?)

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Halloween on the Pier

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By Sarah Phelan

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Sup. Bevan Dufty are apparently speaking again, or at least speaking together to other people. We say this because they just issued a press release saying that they’ve “asked the Port Director to explore the feasibility of having a no-alcohol entertainment event at Piers 30-32 for Wednesday, October 31, 2007.” All of which is City goobledegook, which, roughly translated, means, ‘We want to hold Halloween on the waterfront, but no, you won’t be able to have a stiff drink to take the chilly edge off. ‘

Dang! It’s enough to make a partier want to head inland and hit up a bar in the warm and fuzzy Castro, instead.

Yeah, we know, it’s too early in the process to rain on anyone’s Halloween Parade, and maybe the pier will be fabulous and we can all dress up as Pirates and have friends dressed as the Parrots of Telegraph Hill clinging on our shoulders, yelling “Pretty Polly!” and “Walk the Plank!”, (along with unprintable expletives about how cold they are.) And there’s enough ghosts along the waterfront–sunken ships, dead fishing industries, and the souls of the workers who died building the Bay Bridge–to spook out the whole darn City. Hey, wonder what costume the Gavsta will be wearing this year?

Stop the presses! Here come the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration from the nation’s biggest chains (Hearst, Singleton, Gannett, Stephens) Why people get mad at the media (l4)

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

As expected, Federal Judge Susan Illston ruled on Tuesday April l0 that Clint Reilly can go to trial in his antitrust suit opposing the Hearst/Singleton deal to monopolize the Bay Area newspaper market.

The San Francisco Daily, a free daily, played the story the way it ought to be played: on the front page, with a strong head, “Newspaper monopoly trial allowed, Bid to block it quashed,” and a good lead that said, “A federal judge yesterday cleared the way for an unprecedented jury trial to determine if the consolidation of newspapers in the Bay Area violated antitrust laws.”

The Chronicle and the Singleton papers continued to run the story as if it were a rummy little squabble between a lone angry reader and a big company out there somewhere, without any redeeming journalistic or public interest values.
But the Chronicle did move the story from its usual burial spot in the business section to a new burial spot: straddling the fold on page 4 of its Bay Area section with yet another Rip Van Winkle sleeper head, “Judge permits trial over newspaper deals.”

The story is even harder to find on the Chronicle’s website. When I checked about 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, It ranked 23rd on the list of Bay Area stories, behind Farley the cartoon strip, and behind such blazers as “Bay Bridge Labor Day closure may begin early” and “Rain, rain will go away–’til possibly Saturday” and “Out to pasture they go–3 police horses retire/Long in the tooth, these mounts head to Santa Rosa ranch” and “Muni breakdown creates delays.” However, it did rank ahead of “Miniature boats provide major fun.”

More: not only are the Galloping Conglomerati blacking out and mangling a major story involving their own papers,
but worse they are continuing to reverse their own historic free press and sunshine-in-the-courts positions. They are continuing to press the documents of secrecy, stonewalling, and collaboration in federal court to cover their
moves to monopoly.

Alas, Illston allowed the publishers to keep their records sealed, and the Reilly responses sealed, in their latest filings on April 6, despite her earlier order to open the court records on the demand of the Guardian and the Media Alliance. (The Guardian is appealing her decision and will continue to press to open up the records and keep them open throughout the trial, which is scheduled to begin on April 30.)

Too bad. You can tell, just by glancing at the extensive list of Reilly declarations and records that the publishers want to keep under seal, that there is a lot of explosive stuff in the hopper. Meanwhile, the Riley case remains the only major impediment to the Hearst/Singleton deal. And I am getting the impression that Riley is building a strong case and that Hearst and Singleton are getting extremely nervous about the outcome. It’s going to be a helluva trial.

Check the publishers’ filings below for a preview of coming attractions and the lengths to which they will go behalf of court secrecy and stonewalling. Check also the move by the Guardian attorneys, the First Amendment Project in Oakland, to request Illston to review her sealing order. Most important, check Illston’s excellent, well-reasoned order denying summary judgment. She nails the Hearst/Singleton position on point after point. B3

1. Click here to view the declaration of Joseph J. Lodovic, president of MediaNews Group/Singleton

2. Click here to view the declaration of Daniel E. Ehrman J., vice president of planning and development of Gannett

3. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst, MediaNews Group/Singleton, Stephens Group, Gannett, and California Newspapers partnership (B3: a business partnership of the papers)

4. Click here to view the proposed order to seal from the MediaNews Group/Singleton

5. Click here to view the letter from the Guardian and its First Amendment Project attorneys asking Judge Illston to review her decision allowing the publishers to seal documents

6. Click here to view the Illston order of April l0 denying the Hearst/Singleton motion for summary judgment and giving Clint Reilly standing to sue

Mission: fresh-air beer

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Listen up, troops: Spring is here and decent weather may be on the radar. It’s time to escape from the barracks and attack life with a blitzkrieg of beer and BBQ. Below is a list of checkpoints that are reported to condone and encourage the outdoor consumption of alcohol.

Good luck, soldier. Now get out there and knock ’em back!

Big guns

ZEITGEIST


The HQ of patio bars — the grand pooh-bah, the big cheese. Hands down the biggest, baddest patio west of the bay. Although owing to the line of porta-potties, it’s probably one of the stinkiest. This is your safe station, no matter what company you’re signed up with. Zeitgeist’s commissary will stock you up on burgers and fries, and its Bloody Marys will keep you flying.

199 Valencia, SF. (415) 255-7505, myspace.com/zeitgeistsf

EL RIO


Outer Mission hideaway El Rio is big enough for large outfits but romantic enough for a date while on leave. A portion of the yard is sheltered by a tent for rainy-day ops — and there’s nothing to stop you from lighting up. Mmmm — gotta love the smell of cigarettes in the midafternoon.

3158 Mission, SF. (415) 282-3325 www.elriosf.com

PILSNER INN


Few cantinas can muster as many features as the Pilsner Inn. Twenty-four beers on tap, two pool leagues, and a lush, landscaped garden patio with two koi ponds should be enough to make anyone stand at attention. A strong contingent here flies the rainbow flag, but the Pilsner welcomes troops from all outfits to its relaxed environs.

225 Church, SF. (415) 621-7058, www.pilsnerinn.com

Smaller outposts

PAPA TOBY’S REVOLUTION CAFÉ


This little Mission spot will flash you back to life as a guerrilla fighter in Cuba or Guatemala. A beer and wine café with a secluded backwoods feel and a heated streetside patio, Papa Toby’s Revolution Café offers a variety of troop entertainment, from free trade to tango lessons. With enough alcohol here, you may be able to brainwash your copilot into believing he or she is the reincarnation of Che Guevara.

3248 22nd St., SF. (415) 642-0474

FINNEGAN’S WAKE


An enclave of Cole Valley regulars is keeping Finnegan’s Wake top secret. The back patio is a mini-Zeitgeist, equipped with a grill and picnic tables. Surrounded by apartments, this little retreat goes on lockdown after 21:00 hours, making this site good for daytime expeditions only.

937 Cole, SF. (415) 731-6119

GOLD CANE COCKTAIL LOUNGE


The patio of this Haight Street joint has a nicely elevated rear portion — high ground, easy to defend from marauding tourists and the like. And if you can’t successfully pilot your hand-rolled smokable through the crowd, you’ve no business flying so high, soldier.

1569 Haight, SF. (415) 626-1112

MAD DOG IN THE FOG


Bright red and green paint often makes the Mad Dog in the Fog’s vibrant little patio hard to handle without a pint or two. Local hostiles have managed to shut down maneuvers here after 22:00, so your best bet is to set up a happy-hour camp during the soccer off-season — around World Cup time, soccer insurgents outfitted in reversible jerseys and knee-high socks seize the position.

530 Haight, SF. (415) 626-7279

THE AXIS OF BURGERS


Taken together, Flippers restaurant and Marlena’s bar in Hayes Valley can provide a prime afternoon drinking and lounging target. Flippers serves burgers, beer, and wine. Its patio is outfitted with a variety of flora: lilies, trees, and lawn. Right next door, with a full bar, Marlena’s has a minimal cagelike smoking facility with just three benches gated off from the street.

Flippers Gourmet Burgers, 482 Hayes, SF. (415) 552-8880

Marlena’s, 488 Hayes, SF. (415) 864-6672

MARS BAR AND RESTAURANT


A secluded SoMa bar and restaurant often overrun by hordes of concertgoers and workers from the neighboring Concourse Exhibition Center in the evening, Mars Bar and Restaurant makes for an excellent outdoor lunch break. Late at night you’ll often locate barkeeps from other watering holes gathered here to blow their tips.

798 Brannan, SF. (415) 621-6277, www.marsbarsf.com

Coast Guard

PIER 23 CAFE


This waterfront bar and restaurant features live music most nights of the week. Its outdoor area is an expansive field of patio furniture flanked by the bay. A popular evening destination for locals, Pier 23 Cafe just underwent a complete remodel, now ready for inspection.

Pier 23, SF. (415) 362-5125 www.pier23cafe.com

RED’S JAVA HOUSE


Little more than a kitchen shed up front and a tent with bar in back, Red’s Java House is nestled beneath the Bay Bridge on Pier 30. The only thing that might obstruct your skyward reconnaissance is the occasional SUV parked next to the fenced-off, bare-bones patio. There’s a widescreen TV for sports fans in the tent and a menu of burgers, dogs, and fish and chips.

Pier 30, SF. (415) 777-5626

MOMO’S


Right next to PhoneCompany Park, Momo’s has a limited view — the baseball stadium and a massive apartment complex obstruct most of the horizon. The bar is incredibly well equipped, but Momo’s is a restaurant, which may impair smoking operations. While there, enrich yourself with the art installation in the front garden box: a giant heart-shaped olive. Enriching!

760 Second St., SF. (415) 227-8660, www.sfmomos.com

Eastern Theater

JUPITER


Just a short flight east of San Francisco, Jupiter is the majordomo outdoor operation of the East Bay. This two-story brewpub and pizza restaurant in downtown Berkeley is attached to a giant compound replete with heating lamps and ivy. You’ll have to stow those stogies, though: this place is a restaurant and doesn’t take kindly to smoking.

2181 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 843-8277, www.jupiterbeer.com

BECKETT’S


The two-story Irish pub is equipped with two fireplaces and two functional bars. Its patio is a small balcony above a cobblestone alleyway — the perfect size for an elite task force to secure a position and commence a-blazing.

2271 Shattuck, Berk. (510) 647-1790, www.beckettsirishpub.com

OASIS RESTAURANT AND BAR


Deep into East Bay territory is the Oasis Restaurant and Bar. By day this Oakland position operates as a Nigerian restaurant; at night it becomes a grooving outdoor lounge with DJs and two dance floors. A staggering canyon of cement surrounds the small rear patio. The heated paradise has multiple tables and chairs, a stage, a massive sound system, and a wraparound grass-covered overhang.

135 12th St., Oakland.

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MORE OUTDOOR DESTINATIONS

Carmen’s, Pier 40, SF. (415) 495-5140

Cinch, 1723 Polk, SF. (415) 776-4162, www.thecinch.com

Connecticut Yankee, 100 Connecticut, SF. (415) 552-4440, www.theyankee.com

Eagle Tavern, 398 12th St., SF. (415) 626-0880, www.sfeagle.com

Jay ‘n Bee Club, 2736 20th St., SF. (415) 824-4190

Kennedy’s Irish Pub and Curry House, 1040 Columbus, SF. (415) 441-8855, www.kennedyscurry.com

Lone Star Saloon, 1354 Harrison, SF. (415) 863-9999, www.lonestarsaloon.com

Lucky 13, 2140 Market, SF. (415) 487-1313

Medjool, 2522 Mission, SF. (415) 550-9055, www.medjoolsf.com

Mix, 4086 18th St., SF. (415) 431-8616

Parkside, 1600 17th St., SF. (415) 503-0393, www.theeparkside.com

Il Pirata, 2007 16th St., SF. (415) 626-2626

Ramp, 885 Terry Francois, SF. (415) 621-2378

Red Jack Saloon, 131 Bay, SF. (415) 989-0700

Rosewood, 732 Broadway, SF. (415) 951-4886, www.rosewoodbar.com

Wild Side West, 424 Cortland, SF. (415) 647-3099

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San Francisco’s erupting skyline

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San Francisco has always been a city defined by its hills and the bay. Our city has an image and character in its urban pattern that depend especially on views, topography, streets, building form, and major landscaping.

The bay is a focus of major views. Hills allow the city to be seen and, more than any other feature, produce a variety that is characteristic of San Francisco. This pattern — a visual relationship to hills and the bay — gives the city “an image, a sense of purpose,” according to the 1971 Urban Design Plan.

Since then it has been official city policy to recognize and protect this relationship.

In the last four years, Rincon Hill developers negotiated with two planning directors — Gerald Green and Dean Macris — to allow towers up to 550 feet tall between Folsom Street and the Bay Bridge. Nine have already been approved. Two under construction are already visible on the skyline. More are on their way. The Rincon Hill towers will be higher than the top of the bridge towers. Views of the bridge towers from Dolores Park, upper Market Street, and Twin Peaks are literally being eliminated.

The remnants of the Urban Design Plan are in tatters because developers and planning staff want to eviscerate height limits south of Market to create an artificial hill of residential towers up to 100 stories tall from Market to the bridge approach. Their avowed rationale is to develop a transit terminal at First and Mission streets — a terminal with a multibillion-dollar funding shortfall.

And all of this is happening under the political radar.

When staffers made their one and only presentation to the Planning Commission about this new mega-high-rise district, the meeting was not broadcast or even filmed. And this was for a presentation that depended on visuals.

Who will live in these towers? Empty nesters who can afford multimillion condos and people with multiple homes around the country and world.

The Planning Department claims these will be vital new neighborhoods. But they won’t be for families with children or government employees or hospitality industry workers or artists. They won’t be for people working in San Francisco who are trapped in a daily two-hour commute because housing costs are out of sight. They won’t be for the people working in San Francisco who are most in need of moderately priced housing.

There won’t be a single new housing unit for low- or moderate-income people in the new Rincon Hill. Every single developer opted to not build on-site affordable units.

What happens when people crossing the Bay Bridge can no longer see the hills in the center of the city? When people in the city face a wall of buildings so high even the Bay Bridge towers can’t be seen?

Entrances — such as the Bay Bridge — are important for a sense of orientation to the city. Blocking street views of the bay, distant hills, or other parts of the city can destroy an important characteristic of the unique setting and quality of the city.

Since the Gold Rush, people have come to San Francisco to make their fortunes. There is constant tension between those who want to make money off our city and those who want to live in the city.

San Francisco tore down the Embarcadero because it cut the city off from the bay. Now we are erecting another, much higher barrier. To the barricades!

Sue Hestor

Sue Hestor is a lawyer and activist specializing in land use and environmental issues.

Too many big buildings

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Housing is now being stuffed into downtown blocks, more than 7,000 units in the stretch running from Market Street to the Bay Bridge. This means less driving, less subdivision sprawl and fewer car-dependent office parks in the outer ‘burbs, all worries that older high-rise foes had.

"A Skyscraper Story," by Marshall Kilduff, San Francisco Chronicle, 1/29/07

EDITORIAL Actually, no.

There are indeed a lot of new housing towers under way in San Francisco, some of them soaring to heights that will block the sun and sky and wall off parts of the city from its waterfront. But there’s not a lot of evidence that they’re doing much to cut down driving and office parks.

In fact, when we went and visited a few of these spanking new buildings a year ago, we found that few of the residents actually worked in downtown San Francisco. They were mostly young Silicon Valley commuters who slept in their posh condos at night but got up in the morning and drove their cars (or in some cases, rode vanpools) to jobs at office parks or car-dependent corporate campuses 20 to 30 miles south.

There were a few former suburbanites around — but again, they weren’t San Francisco workers. They were retired people with plenty of cash who wanted to move back to town after the kids left home.

As Sue Hestor reports in "San Francisco’s Erupting Skyline" on page 7, the Planning Department is quietly but aggressively moving to raise the height limits around the edges of downtown, particularly in the South of Market area. There’s been little protest, in part because so many of the new towers are largely for housing, not offices.

Some of the giant new buildings are very much the same sort of projects we — and much of progressive San Francisco — have been fighting against for 30 years. The Transbay Terminal will be anchored by a 1,000-foot-high commercial building that will soar far above the Transamerica Pyramid. But somehow activists seem willing to accept high-rise housing in a way they would never tolerate offices — if it’s presented as a cure to sprawl.

But that requires a big leap of faith: you have to accept that San Franciscans who will walk or take transit to work are going to wind up living in those buildings. And since much of the housing is going to consist of very high-end condos — in the million-dollar range — that almost certainly won’t be true.

The new wave of development has tremendous problems and needs far more careful scrutiny than it’s getting. The Planning Commission ought to demand a demographic study to determine whether this housing actually meets the city’s needs — and put a halt to it if it doesn’t. *

Valentine’s Day date ideas

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culture@sfbg.com
Putting together a good date can be like planning a bank robbery. You’re investing time, you’re fronting a bunch of money, and you’re coordinating complicated logistics — all in hopes of breaking the law. In this case, Murphy’s Law. I mean, let’s face it, half the time Valentine’s Day dates carry so much nervous tension and promptitude that we should all consider ourselves lucky if we wake up on February 15 with all our fingers — never mind whether we wake up alone!

There is no foolproof plan for a good date, but there is one factor that can be almost impossible for even the most lethargic lothario to mess up: the view. A nice view is always a nice view, even if you’re enjoying it with a person you think you just might hate.

So sure, you might leave the tickets at home, lock the keys in your cars, tear your inseam, spill wine on your date, or find out that she’s allergic to shellfish after you’ve made her try your seafood bisque. But at least your date might still gasp out, “The… moon… looks… pretty…” before the EMT places an oxygen mask over her mouth and wheels her out of your life forever.

THE SURE THING

These are the places where either the views or the reservations are guaranteed. The rest (ahem) is up to you.

Buena Vista Café
This place is a good bet. Get a classic Irish coffee at the place that invented it while looking out at romantic sailing ships on the Hyde street pier. They don’t take reservations, and Valentine’s is no different, so call to see how long the wait is. (Since it’ll be a Wednesday, the wait could be as good as 15 minutes.)
2765 Hyde St, SF; (415) 474-5044, www.thebuenavista.com. Mon-Fri 9am-2am, Sat-Sun 8am-2am

Greens
This vegetarian restaurant offers views of the Fort Mason marina. Two can eat for less than $100. And if your special friend is a veggie, forget the windows — they’ll be blown away just looking at all their options on the menu.
Building A, Fort Mason Center, SF; (415) 771-6222. Mon-Fri 5:30pm-9pm

Fishermen’s Grotto
This restaurant is sunk deep into the kitsch and tourism of the wharf. Since Valentine’s Day is on a Wednesday this year, you might still be able to get reservations as late as a couple days in advance.
9 Fishermen’s Wharf, SF; (415) 673-7025, www.fishermensgrotto.com. Mon-Sun 11am-11pm

Cliff House — Sutro’s Restaurant
So yeah, the new exterior looks horrible, but the views from inside are just as good as ever. The bistro section doesn’t take reservations, so look for a good spot at the bar — they have three cocktail lounges — and enjoy the scenery and a drink while waiting for your table.
1090 Point Lobos Ave, SF; (415) 386-3330, www.cliffhouse.com. Mon-Sun 9am-10pm

RISKY BUSINESS

Feeling adventurous? Try an out-of-the-ordinary option to impress your one-of-a-kind date.

Beach Chalet Brewery and Restaurant
This art deco dinner option is tucked inside Golden Gate Park, overlooking Ocean Beach. Reservations are recommended, though walk-ins may be able to find seats too. (Call to see if tables are available). At the very least, their bar is first come, first served — and hey, they’re a brewpub. The view isn’t as breathtaking as some (about half of it is parking lot), but it does have the clearest views of ocean waves.
1000 Great Hwy, SF; (415) 386-8439, www.beachchalet.com. Sun-Thur 5pm-10pm, Fri-Sat 5pm-11pm.

Tower Market
Weather permitting, you could get some food a la carte from their deli and have yourselves a picnic on Twin Peaks while the sun goes down. Throw in a bottle of wine —perhaps Sebastiani’s 2003 Merlot, buttery with a smoky finish — and a blanket, and you just might get to miss the moonrise.
635 Portola Drive, SF; (415) 664-1609. Mon-Sat 8am-8:30pm, Sun 8am-8pm

Poncho Villa’s
Well, not the most romantic – or is it? If you’ve got just the right ruca, bonding with burritos by the Bay Bridge, sipping tallboy Tecates out of paper bags, and watching boats glide by the docks could be the perfect evening.
Pier 1, SF; (415) 982-2182, panchovillasf.com. Open until 10pm

FLIRTING AT THE FERRY BUILDING

Everything here’s going to be a bit pricier. But Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge have your back, so it just might be worth it.

Hog Island Oyster Company
This oyster bar is first come, first served, but they’re only open until 8pm.
1 Ferry Plaza, SF; (415) 391-7117, www.hogislandoysters.com. Mon-Fri 11:30am-8pm, Sat-Sun 11:30am-6pm

Slanted Door
Showing up at 5:00 might get you seated, and, as always, the bar is first come, first served.
1 Ferry Plaza Bldg 270, SF; (415) 861-8032, slanteddoor.com. Mon-Thu 5:30pm-10pm, Fri-Sat 5:30pm-10:30pm

Sinbad’s
This old-school seafood restaurant is a classic standby. As an added bonus, their menu —including the lobster thermidor — is priced competitively. Call ahead to see if you can still get a table.
Pier 2 Embarcadero, SF; (415) 781-2555. Mon-Sun 10am-11pm

Guaymas
If you can swing it, take the ferry across the bay and cab it to this waterside Mexican seafood restaurant. It’s never been busy in the past, but they’re advertising a special prix fixe menu for the first time, so call about getting seated.
5 Main St, Tiburon; (415) 435-6300. Mon-Thurs 11:30am-10pm

Liquor and Love

Ok. You made it through dinner without bleeding. Congratulations. Now what? Sweep that special someone off their feet and into bed with another great view — and plenty o’ booze. These bars all offer the best moon-wedge garnish for your cocktail.

The View Lounge
The city seems a thousand miles away (and 36 floors down) as jazz flows through the cavernous rooms of The View Lounge. This sky-high bar is open to the public and features shell-shaped windows big enough to make you feel like a boardroom exec. The drinks are pricey, but the jazz is free. And they don’t take reservations, so you’ve got just as good a shot at a seat as anyone else.
Inside the Marriott, 55 4th St, SF; (415) 896-1600

Harry Denton’s Starlight Room
Denton’s place is having a special Valentine’s version of its weekly Indulgence club night, run by Sebastien Entertainment (415-979-3031). Starting at 8pm, there’ll be DJs, chocolate vodka truffles, champagne, and dancing. The cover is only $15, but the place will be busy. Call Sebastien Entertainment to see if they’re packed. Or reserve a booth or bottle service, if you roll like that.
Inside the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, 450 Powell, SF; (415) 395-8595

Orbit Room Café
This art-deco bar also has café fare (bagels and pastries) and features a rare first-story view of downtown from high up on Market Street.
1900 Market St, SF; (415) 252-9525. Mon-Thurs 7am-12am, Fri-Sat 7am-2am

Bloom’s Saloon
Bloom’s is kind of a grimy sports bar. But perched on the north slope of Potrero Hill, it has the best view of downtown east of Twin Peaks.
1318 18th Street, SF; (415) 861-9467

THE MORNING AFTER

Wow. You woke up with company. Now pull out the hat trick with View Number Three and get mom’s grandkids on lockdown — or at least get laid again…

Seal Rock Inn
This hotel and breakfast spot is perched on the cliff above the Cliff House.
545 Point Lobos Ave, SF; (415) 752-8000, www.sealrockinn.com

Louis’ Restaurant
Greasy spoon style! Dig the orange tile inside and the ruins of the Sutro Baths outside.
902 Point Lobos Ave, SF; (415) 387-6330

V-DAY VENUE DON’TS

Unless you’re a high roller, or the restaurant’s owner, these places won’t be worth the trouble.

Pier 23 Café
This come one, come all waterfront restaurant and bar would be a great bet, except they will be CLOSED FOR REMODELING!
23 The Embarcadero, SF; (415) 362-5125, www.pier23cafe.com.

Julius’ Castle
Don’t bother with this Telegraph Hill restaurant either. It’s also closed for renovations.
1541 Montgomery, SF; (415) 392-2222

Top of the Mark
The Mark is having a special Valentine’s Day dinner and no one will be seated without reservations.
1 Nob Hill Circle, SF; (415) 616-6916, www.topofthemark.com

Equinox
It’s healthy to be wary of revolving restaurants in general, but they’re also having a special prix fixe V-day menu.
Hyatt Regency, Embarcadero 5, SF; (415) 291-6619

Butterfly
Their prix fixe menu is $75 per person, plus 18% gratuity. And there’s no mention of champagne being included; so if you just drink water, you’ll get out of there for $177.
Pier 33, The Embarcadero, SF; (415) 864-8999

PG&E’s extreme makeover

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› steve@sfbg.com
Mayor Gavin Newsom called a meeting with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. president Thomas King in July to let the utility chief know that the city intended to pursue public power projects on Treasure Island and Hunters Point.
“It was just to tell him that we’re going to do it,” Newsom spokesperson Peter Ragone said of the meeting. “The mayor thought it was a gentlemanly thing to do.”
King used the occasion to start an aggressive new offensive — and to preview PG&E’s latest political strategy.
In an Aug. 10 letter to Newsom, King promised not to fight the city’s plans in court and pledged to develop a better relationship with the city.
“We know that it was in this spirit of cooperation that you approached us last month, and we want to foster this spirit and forge an even stronger partnership in efforts to protect our environment in the years ahead. That’s why I wanted to respond to your questions and suggestions — and to share with you some ideas of my own,” King wrote, listing one of those ideas as helping the city develop energy from tidal power at the mouth of the bay, which Newsom had recently announced a desire to pursue.
The day after PG&E wrote the letter, Newsom and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) head Susan Leal announced the city’s intention to supply public power, mostly from clean solar and hydroelectric sources, to the redevelopment project on Parcel A of the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard, where the politically connected Lennar Corp. (which is also part of the team with the rights to build on Treasure Island) has the contract to build 1,600 new homes.
“What we want to provide is a green community at a rate that meets or beats PG&E,” Leal told the Guardian, noting the history of environmental injustices that have been heaped on the southeast part of town. “We’re very excited about what’s going on at Hunters Point. . . . It’s important that the city do the right thing for that community.”
And just as PG&E was pledging cooperation, it aggressively set out to undermine the city’s plans with competing bids and continued its fiercely adversarial posture in another half-dozen realms in which it must work with the city, battles that have cost San Franciscans millions of dollars.
“This is a competitive world and this is fair game, don’t you think?” PG&E spokesperson Darlene Chiu — who used to be Newsom’s deputy press secretary — told us of company efforts to subvert the public power projects.
Last month PG&E also hired away SFPUC commission secretary Mary Jung, who had been privy to closed-session discussions about various city strategies for dealing with PG&E. Jung, who did not return a call for comment, was required to sign a confidentiality agreement and threatened with criminal charges if she spills city secrets, although city officials acknowledge that would be difficult to prove.
PG&E has also launched a high-profile public relations offensive designed to repackage the utility as a clean and green crusader against global warming and a supporter of community programs such as the mayor’s pet project, SF Connect, to which it contributed $25,000 last month.
“The company has a long and continuing history of fighting against the city rather than working with the city on issues involving municipal power, improved reliability, connecting city facilities, and protecting ratepayers,” Matt Dorsey, a spokesperson for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, told us. “If PG&E wants to demonstrate its good corporate citizenship, it can start by changing the nature of its relationship with the city.”
BIG BUCKS
If anyone from the Bay Area needs a reminder about the big money, bare-knuckle approach PG&E uses when its interests are threatened, they need only look up the road to what’s happening in Sacramento and Yolo counties.
PG&E has so far spent more than $10 million fighting Propositions H and I in Yolo County and Measure L in Sacramento County, which together would allow the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) to annex more than 70,000 customers in Davis and surrounding communities.
The PG&E effort has saturated mailboxes and the airwaves with messages that inflate the cost of taking over its transmission lines, imply threats of a drawn-out legal battle, and make bold claims of its being an environmentally friendly utility (for example, including nuclear power in its calculations of how “green” PG&E is).
“They’re trying to spread fear and confusion,” Davis-based public power advocate Dan Berman told us. “A new thing comes out every day. But we keep citing the message of lower rates and better service.”
In fact, SMUD has rates that are about 30 percent lower than PG&E’s and a power portfolio that includes significantly more energy from renewable sources than PG&E uses. Even King’s claim that PG&E is “the leading solar utility in the county, having hooked up more than 12,000 solar-generating customers” is misleading. The number is large because PG&E has the largest customer base in the country, but the solar rebates were state mandated and SMUD inspired and come from ratepayer surcharges.
Still, PG&E justifies its aggressive campaign in Yolo County in terms of warding off a hostile takeover of its customers. For residents there and new customers in San Francisco that the SFPUC wants to serve, PG&E’s Chiu repeats the mantra that “we have an obligation to provide services.”
Yet critics of the company say the campaign is about more than just holding on to those customers. Right now more than a dozen California communities are pushing for public power, most involving community choice aggregation (CCA) — which allows cities to buy power on behalf of citizens, potentially bypassing PG&E.
“That’s one of the reasons they’re pulling out all the stops in Davis, because if this goes through, it will embolden other communities,” Barbara George of Women’s Energy Matters told us.
San Francisco was an early city to pursue CCA, but plans to implement it have moved slowly, and now other communities — including Marin County and the cities of Oakland and Berkeley — are even further along.
“San Francisco is way behind in community choice,” George said. “The mayor is giving PG&E a lot of time to put out its claims to be green in order to fight this.”
Part of that push involves a slick 16-page mailer sent out in August by “The New PG&E” outlining “a proposal for an unprecedented and far-reaching partnership with the city of San Francisco to create the cleanest and greenest city in the nation.”
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi — a longtime public power advocate — is skeptical. “I welcome it, but I don’t buy it,” he said. “Their desire to work with us is typically predicated on the receding of our efforts to pursue public power.”
In fact, King seemed to say as much in his letter to Newsom when he wrote, “We see the investment of time, money and political capital in the public power fight as a distraction from the real need — providing clean, reliable and safe power to San Francisco.”
Chiu denied that there is a quid pro quo here, saying, “It is our intent to help San Francisco become clean and green, whether or not it comes with the city’s blessing.”
Yet Leal said the company seems more interested in stopping public power than going green. Rather than trying to undermine the city’s plans for the area, she questioned, “Why don’t they have the rest of Hunters Point, which are already their customers, be a green community?”
COMPETING WITH PG&E
Lennar is expected to announce in the next week or two whether it will go with public power or PG&E at Hunters Point. “No final decision has been made at this point,” Lennar spokesperson Jason Barnett told us.
Yet it didn’t have to be this way. Lennar’s redevelopment project is being subsidized with public funds that could have been conditioned on public power. Even as late as Oct. 17, when the San Francisco Redevelopment Board agreed to change Lennar’s contract to let the company out of building rental units, public power could have been part of the trade-off. Agency chief Marcia Rosen did not return Guardian calls asking why the public agency didn’t take advantage of this leverage.
For her part, Leal said, “I’m not afraid of competition.” It was a point echoed by Ragone, who said Newsom believes the city shouldn’t be afraid to compete with PG&E on Hunters Point or Treasure Island or to stop a PG&E bid to help develop clean tidal power.
But Mirkarimi doesn’t necessary agree. “Why do they have that right?” he asked, arguing the city shouldn’t let PG&E take control of new energy resources or customers who should be served by public power. “The tentacles of PG&E haven’t receded any less at City Hall and we should always be on our guard.”
Leal and Ragone each acknowledged that competing with PG&E isn’t always a fair fight. After all, in addition to having the resources of nearly 10 million customers paying some of the highest rates in the country, PG&E is also alleged in a lawsuit by the city to have absconded with $4.6 billion in ratepayer money during its 2002 bankruptcy, in what Herrera called “an elaborate corporate shell game.” On Oct. 2, the US Supreme Court denied review of a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal ruling favoring the city, sending the case back to the trial court to determine just how much PG&E owes ratepayers.
That is just one of several ongoing legal actions between the city and PG&E, including conflicts over the city’s right to power municipal buildings, PG&E’s hindrance of city efforts to create more solar sites, and battles over the interconnection agreement that sets various charges that the city must pay to use PG&E lines.
MONEY IN ACTION
A good example of PG&E tactics occurred during the July 26 meeting of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is overseeing work on the Bay Bridge. As part of that work, a power cable going to Treasure Island needed to be moved, but the Treasure Island Development Authority didn’t have the $3.4 million to do it.
So PG&E executive Kevin Dasso showed up at the MTC meeting with a check made out for that amount, offering to pay for the new cable and thus control the power line through which the SFPUC intends to provide public power to the 10,000 residents who will ultimately live on the island.
“This deal with Treasure Island was really egregious. They came in like a game show host and held up a check to try to stop this baby step toward public power on Treasure Island,” said Sup. Tom Ammiano, who also sits on the MTC board. “It shows PG&E is not asleep at the wheel by any means, and anybody who’s elected is going to need to stay vigilant.”
Ammiano was able to persuade the MTC to loan TIDA the money and preserve the city’s public power option. PG&E officials are blunt about their intentions. Chiu said, “We both want to provide power to Treasure Island.” So officials note the importance of being vigilant when it comes to PG&E.
“There will be other meetings where PG&E will wave around $3.4 million checks,” Leal said. “And at some of those meetings, we won’t be there to stop them.”
So public power advocates are concerned that public officials are letting PG&E rehabilitate its public image. Newsom has recently shared the stage with PG&E executives at a green building conference in San Francisco and the Treasure Island ceremony where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark global warming measure that PG&E long opposed before ultimately supporting. Ragone said neither these events nor PG&E’s contribution to SF Connect nor his direct dealings with King indicate any softening of Newsom’s support for public power.
“We’re going to do what’s in the best interests of the city of San Francisco,” Ragone said. “This is the first mayor to support public power, and that hasn’t changed at all.” SFBG
To see the letter from King to Newsom and other documents related to this story, go to www.sfbg.com.

After oil

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OPINION Every day a river of cars flows across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, bringing workers, tourists, and visitors to the city. Nearly all run on petroleum fuels. Every day a staccato procession of planes lands at SFO, bringing tourists, conventioneers, and returning residents. All fly on petroleum fuels. Every day a phalanx of trucks delivers food to grocery stores, restaurants, and corner markets. All run on petroleum fuels. Every day roads are paved, potholes are filled, roofs are tarred, machinery is lubricated, and tires are replaced. All are done with petroleum-derived products. Every day hundreds of thousands of purchases take place, every one enabled by petroleum.
What will happen when the petroleum behind all these activities costs $100 a barrel? $200 a barrel? Or more? San Francisco’s viability as a major West Coast city is based on cheap petroleum. But the century of cheap petroleum is quickly coming to an end, and an era of expensive, scarce oil is dawning. Just as US production of oil peaked in 1970, production of oil from an increasing number of other countries has peaked as well. Currently, 33 of the top 48 major oil producers in the world are in irreversible decline, among them the United Kingdom, Norway, Mexico, and Indonesia. Within a few years — and indeed some claim it has already happened — global oil production will peak, then begin a protracted decline. The consequences are unthinkable. A world — and a city — built on cheap petroleum faces the largest challenge of modern times.
Nothing exists that can seamlessly replace petroleum. For transport, ethanol and biodiesel have been touted but both require tremendously higher levels of energy inputs for production compared to petroleum, and the competition with food production is already apparent with the rising price of corn in the Midwest. For other uses — lubrication, paving, plastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, inks, solvents, detergents, rubber, and thousands more — no drop-in substitute is remotely ready. Alternate sources — such as the tar sands of Canada — produce in net only a half barrel of oil for every barrel of energy consumed. As petroleum production reaches its peak, every aspect of our lives will be profoundly impacted.
What can be done? First, it’s important to understand the phenomenon. Peak oil is not an oil company conspiracy, nor is it the result of OPEC’s actions — this is the result of a century and a half of ever-rising exploitation of a finite energy source. Second, we need to examine how we use energy in San Francisco to determine ways to either reduce consumption or find nonfossil alternatives to supply it. We need to examine our food supply — completely dependent on petroleum for planting, harvesting, processing, and transporting — along with city operations and residential, commercial, and transportation requirements to assess their vulnerability in an era of rising energy prices.
In April, San Francisco became the first major city in the United States to pass a peak-oil resolution, and on July 28 the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission held the first in a series of hearings on the issue of peak oil. Over the next year the commission will hold additional public hearings to educate and inform the citizenry of San Francisco on peak oil and will be launching a study to identify the possible responses we can take. SFBG
Ross Mirkarimi
Sup. Ross Mirkarimi represents San Francisco District 5.

Fair fees for rich developers

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EDITORIAL The information that emerged from the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use Committee on July 12 was mind-bending: According to a new city report, private developers will not even consider going forward with a big housing construction project unless the profit margin is at least 28 percent.
Think about it: Without a guaranteed profit about three or four times larger than what most normal businesses strive for, the developers won’t pour an ounce of concrete. And they still complain that the city wants them to build more affordable housing.
As housing activist Calvin Welch pointed out at the hearing, it used to be illegal in most states to charge that much interest on loaned money. The word for it was usury.
And in much of the construction industry, profit margins are far, far slimmer than that. On big public-works projects, like the Bay Bridge retrofit and the construction of the new terminal at San Francisco International Airport, the margin was designed to be about 5 percent.
As Steven T. Jones reports on page 15, this information, which has received very little press attention, ought to be the strongest boost yet for advocates of what’s known as “inclusionary housing” legislation — rules that would require developers building market-rate housing units to set aside a percentage of those units for sale or rent at levels that are affordable to nonwealthy San Franciscans. The current law requires that 12 percent of the units in any project have to be priced below market rate. (That goes up to 17 percent if the affordable units are built somewhere off-site or if the developers simply pay a per-unit fee into a city low-cost housing fund.)
Sup. Chris Daly, who has long been an advocate of inclusionary housing, forced the developer of One Rincon Hill, a high-rise condo project, to hike the affordable-housing share to 25 percent last year — and that convinced him that the city’s legal requirement was too low.
So now the supervisors are looking at increasing the levy, and as part of the discussion, a task force operating under the Mayor’s Office of Housing hired a consultant to look at industry finances and standards. If the report is correct, and 28 percent margins are considered a minimum in San Francisco’s private-sector housing market, then the rather modest increases the supervisors are looking at (a hike from 12 to 15 percent of below-market-rate units and some tighter rules for enforcement) are eminently reasonable. In fact, the legislation isn’t nearly ambitious enough.
Suppose the city mandated 25 percent below-market-price units in all new housing projects of more than, say, 20 units. Would the developers really walk away, saying that profits of, say, 20 percent just weren’t enough? Somehow, we doubt it — in fact, we suspect there are plenty of builders out there who would be more than happy with that level of return. And suppose the market for high-end, million-dollar condos — which clearly aren’t serving the unmet housing needs of the city anyway — started to dry up. So what? San Francisco doesn’t need more housing for the very rich. In fact, the overall impact of these luxury housing projects on the city is almost certainly negative — that sort of housing tends to drive out blue-collar industry and is already turning parts of the city into a bedroom community for Silicon Valley.
Daly argues that without these new market-rate projects, very little affordable housing will be built. And he has a point. Government subsidies and nonprofit programs are immensely valuable, but there’s never enough public cash to meet the stratospheric need for affordable housing in San Francisco.
But there’s no reason for the city to be held hostage by developer profits that exceed all reason. At the very least, the board should approve Daly’s proposals — and should look seriously at jacking up the requirements even more. SFBG

Dellums’s outlook

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By Sarah Phelan
At Ron Dellums Party, Kimball’s Carnival

Leaving San Francisco, we could feel the temperature rise as we crossed the Bay Bridge. By the time we got to Kimball’s, the party for Ron Dellums was absolutely raging.

Dellums is beating Ignacio De La Fuente 44 to 36 percent in the race for mayor of Oakland, but with only 1 percent of precincts reporting, the outcome is far from clear. Nevertheless, Dellums was looking relaxed and stately.

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