How public spaces stay tucked away
Downtown havens mandated by city remain quietly closed
Even before the pandemic, some of the coolest public spaces in downtown San Francisco were easy to miss — perched on tall buildings or tucked inside towers, off the map unless you were in the know.
One two-tiered interior space features Frank Stella artwork on red teak walls. Another has a snug terrace nestled against the structure’s ornate stone cornice — 11 floors above Market Street.
Then came COVID-19. Now, even though workers are returning to the city’s downtown core, some of the best public spaces remain off limits.
We’re still living in harrowing times, no question. But at some point before too long, the city will need to give an official prod to building owners who otherwise might try to make private amenities out of community benefits that they are required to provide.
The nooks and aeries in question are required by the city’s Downtown Plan from 1985, which made room for the Financial District to expand south of
Market Street while keeping heights low in neighborhoods like Chinatown and North Beach. The legal nexus was simple: If you add a large daytime population to an area where there are no parks, then the new buildings should provide outlets for workers and visitors to have spaces where they can kick back or let off steam.
The program even has its own wonky acronym: POPOS, for privately owned public open spaces.
Since then, at least three dozen have been created, and most are conventional plazas. In some cases, though, developers chose to create upper-floor terraces or atrium-like gathering spaces — including a few with glass walls along the sidewalk that could pivot open or slide back, erasing the line between indoors and out.
When COVID-19 descended in 2020, those spaces closed down like everything else. Workers weren’t allowed into buildings. Downtown’s landscape went from vibrant to vacant.
“We anticipate the closure to continue until the threat of the virus spread has subsided.”
The pandemic continues, as each new variant makes all too clear. But offices are reopening. Workers are trickling back. Financial District sidewalks and the blocks around Salesforce Tower show welcome signs of life.
Indoor spaces now mostly have reopened, some much earlier than others. The expansive teak-clad room facing Howard Street in the LinkedIn tower, with its Frank Stella artwork and plentiful seating, has beckoned as an oasis for months; the glassed-in “greenhouse” at 101 Second St., the most popular of these spaces in pre-pandemic times, only made it possible last week to enter the space if you weren’t a tenant with a key card to swipe.
Most of our supposedly “public” rooftops, though, remain closed off.
There’s one big exception: 150 California St., where you sign in with the security guard and then can enjoy a lavenderlandscaped sixth-floor terrace. Otherwise, good luck reaching such seductive peaks as the summits of One Kearny and 343 Sansome St.
The latter is a startling high point, literally, of the traditional Financial District — an easily accessible elevator ride leads to a variegated landscape that feels wholly detached from the commotion below, with views that jumble together nearby buildings and the natural bay. The former is a snug retreat that feels almost balcony-like, albeit a balcony that allows you a telescopic perspective on Twin Peaks to the west or Third Street to the south, depending on your mood.
Sign at One Kearny, where city-mandated public space is shut down
While 343 Sansome’s rooftop has been a lunchtime favorite since it opened in the early 1990s, the owners now are renovating the space as part of a larger building renovation (let’s hope they don’t get rid of all the trees, a relaxing counterpoint to the hard-edged cityscape). I’m told it should reopen by the end of the year; until then, to quote signs at each building entrance, “Roof deck closed due to construction. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
At One Kearny, which never has been particularly welcoming, the posted explanation is much more vague.
“Due to COVID-19 virus concerns, the 11th floor rooftop terrace will be closed,” it shrugs. “We anticipate the closure to continue until the threat of the virus spread has subsided.”
How’s that for open-ended? At another building with a public rooftop, the Hampton Inn at 942 Mission St., a clerk at the front desk will inform you politely that the 15th floor terrace is closed to the public for now — except that the tower’s automatic sliding door that leads to the front desk rarely opens up to let outsiders in.
The sixth-floor rooftop of 543 Howard, which offers a great view of the tower-ringed transit center, keeps its lobby locked tight.
This is what’s dicey about every “public” space that requires entering a private building: The ultimate control is in private hands. Outdoor plazas are open to all, perceptually, no matter what codes of conduct the owner might try to apply. But if you can’t get in, or you don’t know it’s there, then even the most sumptuous semipublic nook might as well not even exist.
This has always been the case, which is why the Board of Supervisors in 2012 required metal plaques with larger lettering than what existed before. It will be even more of a challenge in coming months, as we navigate a communal future that is murky at best.
Some owners probably hope that the concerns about downtown, from the dangerous
organized retail thefts, such as a November case involving 90 people rushing into a Walnut Creek Nordstrom store to steal merchandise. Knox said the case was proof that criminals were drawn to the county, because they figured they wouldn’t be punished with Becton in charge.
Becton said she’s worked to hold those responsible for thefts accountable and noted there haven’t been other mass thefts.
Property crimes fell to a 30-year low in Contra Costa County in 2020, according to the most recent state Justice Department data. There also were the fewest shoplifting crimes since 2010.
Knox has a serious fundraising advantage. She had received $390,000 in contributions by April 23, while a committee supporting her candidacy and almost entirely bankrolled by the Contra Costa County Deputy Sheriffs Association has invested an additional $200,000, campaign disclosures show. Becton had raised roughly $295,000.
Local progressive activist Veronica Benjamin, co-founder of Conscious Contra Costa, said she hasn’t been totally pleased with Becton as D.A., though she plans to support her over Knox.
“We wish she had been a little more courageous” by charging Hall sooner, Benjamin said. “That said, I know the woman running against her would’ve never brought charges in a million and one years.”
Solano County: Bent badges and acknowledging racism
In Solano County, District Attorney Krishna Abrams is trying to hold off Chief Deputy District Attorney Sharon Henry, who has endorsements from various Democratic groups while Abrams counts the local deputy sheriffs association among her supporters.
Abrams has been District Attorney in Solano County since 2014. In that time, she says she has increased use of pretrial diversion programs such as restorative justice while holding people charged with serious and violent crimes accountable.
She has also encountered criticism for her handling of law enforcement killings, like when she cited the public’s eroded trust in recusing her office from investigating two separate Vallejo police shootings. Abrams ultimately appointed an outside special prosecutor to look into the 2019 killing of rapper Willie McCoy in a Taco Bell drivethru, and Attorney General Rob Bonta agreed last year to take over the investigation into the deadly 2020 shooting of Sean Monterrosa in a Walgreens parking lot, but Bonta said Abrams had “unilaterally abdicated her responsibility.”
During a May 4 forum, Abrams declined to take a position on whether there was racial bias in local policing, though she said she wanted to continue the public discussion about the problem. “I meet with a lot of pastors and we talk about the different issues that come up in the community,” she said.
Henry seized on the D.A.’s answer.
“Racial bias is everywhere,” said Henry, whom Abrams recruited as her second in command. “You have to have a district attorney who is willing to truly acknowledge that. It’s going to take much more than just going out and talking to pastors.”
After raising $40,000 this year, Abrams has the fundraising advantage over Henry’s $27,000.
The district attorney race takes place against a backdrop of a scandal in Vallejo. Officers allegedly have had a practice of bending the tips of their badges after an on-duty shooting. In March, several officers admitted in sworn testimony that this happened, the Vallejo Sun reported.
But Abrams said an investigation found no evidence to support the officers’ statements, though officials have declined to release the report on the inquiry.
“If (officers did that) it would horrify me,” she said. “The report has come back and did not verify the allegations that were in the newspaper.”
Some in Solano County have been pushing for a civilian oversight board, which Abrams said she doesn’t support because it’s not needed. Henry disagreed.
“I definitely think the citizens of Solano County should explore civilian oversight of law enforcement,” she said. “Miss Abrams says there’s sufficient checks and balances, and yet allegations of misconduct still exist.”
Santa Clara County: D.A. faces first challenge in years
It was the stumble debated about online, with Santa Clara County’s incumbent district attorney accused of sticking his foot out to trip a rival during an April 29 candidates forum.
The disputed trip overshadowed what had been a spirited debate about who should lead the largest prosecutor’s office in Northern California, one that has sometimes been a laboratory for reform around the country.
This year’s race is new territory for three-term District Attorney Jeff Rosen, who hasn’t been in a contested election since 2010, when he was the challenger and ousted the county’s first female D.A., Dolores Carr. Now Rosen, who says he’s the first registered Democrat to hold his nonpartisan office, is fending off competition from the left and the right, as he battles progressive public defender Sajid Khan and former prosecutor Daniel Chung, who’s suing Rosen for allegedly forcing him out of the District Attorney’s Office.
Khan, who’s won endorsements from progressive groups and a smattering of state and local elected officials, might be the closest analog to the 2019 Boudin. The South Bay native and son of Muslim immigrants is a veteran public defender who has made rehabilitation and alternatives to incarceration the central issues of his campaign, and says treatment and diversion programs should be on the table even for people accused of robbing people, committing domestic violence or stealing cars.
“We need to have a D.A.’s Office culture that doesn’t celebrate convictions and high conviction rates and life sentences,” Khan said during the forum hosted by Sacred Heart Community Service. “We need to have a D.A.’s Office that celebrates solving harm … and connecting people with services that make them, their families and communities safer in the long term.”
Chung, another South Bay native raised in a single-parent immigrant household, accuses Rosen of being too reformminded and said he entered the race because he doesn’t think the current administration is focused enough on the primary duty of prosecuting crimes.
“If you care about justice, including racial justice for defendants, you also have to care about justice for victims,” Chung said at the forum. “We need balance in our system.”
Rosen is presenting himself as that balance. He said he was one of only a few elected prosecutors at the time to support both Propositions 36 and 47, the voter-approved initiatives that reined in California’s three-strikes law and decreased penalties for lowerlevel crimes, respectively. Rosen also created the nation’s first conviction-review unit in 2011, which he said has since exonerated seven wrongfully convicted people.
“We have to do both of those things — both criminal justice reforms as well as public safety,” Rosen said at the forum. “If you only pursue one of those, you end up with neither.”
With more than $532,000 in campaign donations — much of it from attorneys and Realtors — Rosen has raised more than his two challengers combined. But he and Khan aren’t that far apart in campaign spending; both have dumped well over $200,000 into their races, and Khan actually outraised Rosen in the most recent reporting period that ended in April.
Chung, who entered the race in October, has managed to raise only $22,500 for his upstart campaign. But his persistent criticism may be getting under his former boss’ skin, as their run-in at last month’s forum seemed to indicate.
As the debate concluded, Rosen rose from his middle seat at a rectangular table inside of a classroom and began collecting his papers. Chung, who sat to Rosen’s left, stood and offered his hand to Rosen, who didn’t take it. Chung then moved behind Rosen and shook hands with Khan. As Chung moved back to his seat, Rosen picked up his briefcase from against the wall. Chung stumbled over Rosen’s left foot and caught himself on Rosen’s chair.
“Oh, sorry,” Rosen said. “You just tripped him,” Khan confronted Rosen.
“No, he just tripped,” Rosen retorted.
The three candidates then awkwardly sat down as the moderator finished her closing remarks, telling attendees how important it is for them to vote.