A rare achievement on a sketchy street
It’s a rare occurrence today that when a beloved old building comes down, the replacement has such confident power it feels like a fresh, bold start. This is especially true in a grim setting like the intersection of Sixth and Howard streets in San Francisco — where a long-empty but oddly beloved residential hotel has made way for the city’s most architecturally impressive housing complex of 2017.
The newcomer is Bill Sorro Community, a nine-story, 67-unit apartment house for lowincome residents that pairs an emphatic contemporary design with richly textured brickwork of the sort that’s far too rare in today’s age of stucco and glass.
The housing offers refuge. The building anchors the troubled intersection with optimistic strength.
This wasn’t the case with the corner’s prior occupant, a residential hotel that had sat vacant since a fire in 1988. Named the Hugo and built in 1909, it was off limits to
everyone but homeless squatters and the pigeons that turned the ramshackle structure into a bona fide roost.
But by the time the Hugo was razed in 2014, it had become a local landmark. The reason: “Defenestration,” a large-scale artwork by Brian Goggin that went up in 1997.
Intended as a short-term provocation, “Defenestration” dangled pieces of salvaged furniture from the windows and fire escape. Goggin’s headturning whimsy struck such a chord that it remained in place until the Hugo came down.
Designed by Kennerly Architecture for nonprofit developer Mercy Housing California, the new complex is nine stories rather than the Hugo’s four, and the vertical arrangement of the facade’s dappled brown bricks accents the height. The windows are set back as much as 20 inches from the outer brick surface, with even deeper setbacks between some bays to allow generous balconies for 29 units.
Add the bookend-like concrete at the property lines, plus the steel beams that separate some floors, and the straightforward elements combine to form a monumental physical presence, while inside there are homes for San Franciscans who might otherwise be on the streets.
Most of the apartments are reserved for tenants making no more than 50 percent of the area’s median income, which in San Francisco is $54,000 for a family of four. In addition, 14 units are for adults with developmental disabilities.
Sixth Street has received major investments in the past 15 years, including the quietly handsome Plaza Apartments for formerly homeless adults across the street. Even so, it’s a scene that continues to attract dangerous people, not just those down on their luck. The older residential hotels vary wildly in terms of upkeep and safety.
In other words, it’s not an obvious location for families. But that’s part of the reason that Bill Sorro Community, named for a longtime Filipino community activist, has the population it does.
“People really wanted this,” said Barbara Gualco, Mercy’s director of real estate development. “Believe it or not, there are so many families living along Sixth Street in tiny, tiny units.”
Mercy is one of the city’s largest affordable-housing developers, with such recent efforts as the 120-unit Natalie Gubb Commons on Beale Street across from the temporary Transbay Terminal. It also worked with Kennerly on 1190 Fourth St., which opened in 2015 and is one of the new Mission Bay neighborhood’s more satisfying buildings.
Bill Sorro Community, by contrast, was added to an established district where there’s a tradition of scrutinizing new projects. Planners wanted a distinctive building but also a contextual one, potentially conflicting goals that often lead to anemic designs. Not here. The expectation for masonry and punched windows, for instance, prodded architect Owen Kennerly to emphasize the facades’ deep vertical slits, each scaled two or three stories tall. He also wanted to avoid the flat monotony of a standard brick veneer, so he found a manufacturer, Sacramento’s H.C. Muddox, to fire bronze and brown bricks in a way that magnified any small imperfections in the clay. Character you can afford. “For several weekends afterwards, I was bicycling around the city with brick samples, comparing them with my favorite buildings,” said Kennerly, who runs the small Mission District firm with his wife, Sarina Bowen Kennerly, also an architect. “We didn’t see the planning concerns as constraints. They were all good urbanism.”
As is often the case with affordable-housing projects, this one moved slowly: The Hugo’s owner resisted all efforts by the city to buy it until 2009. Several more years passed while financing was arranged and bureaucratic approvals were lined up. Now there are roughly 180 residents, and locally owned restaurants will occupy the two retail spaces along Sixth Street.
By the time “Defenstration” came down in 2014, the whimsy was looking pretty sad. Bill Sorro Community is built to last — a model of farsighted redevelopment that shows progress can be made.