San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Activist known as ‘mayor of Noe Valley’
“Peter was a leader we could all rally around.”
Dr. Courtney Broaddus, longtime Noe Valley resident
For 19 years, Saturday morning shoppers at San Francisco’s Noe Valley Farmers Market were greeted at the entrance by its co-founder Peter Gabel, recognizable in his shoulderlength hair, parted down the middle.
Gabel was not a merchant but a de facto community organizer and philosopher known as the “mayor of Noe Valley.” He was as reliable as any vendor, but on the last Saturday of October, the mayor was not at his station on 24th Street, welcoming friends and strangers alike and looking after dogs, which aren’t allowed inside the market.
In his place was a photograph on a table with candles and a book to sign. A friend played Mozart on the cello. That table had one of the longest lines of the day as the market became an impromptu wake for Gabel, who died unexpectedly on Oct. 25. His death was confirmed by his partner, Lisa Jaicks. The cause of death was a heart attack because of blood disease, she said. He was 75.
“People coming to the market were shocked by his death and told me how Peter would recognize each of them as an individual person who had worth,” said Jaicks, who stood in his place at the Farmers Market entry and consoled the Saturday shoppers. “He would make them feel that building community was possible and a way to a better life for everybody.’’
Gabel was prominent in saving the independent bookstore Cover to Cover when it announced it would have to close in 2003. He organized 40 resident-saviors who each loaned $5,000 to save the store. They became knows as the Mag 40 (short for magnificent), and their $200,000 influx gave the store another nine years of life before it was taken over by a successor, Folio Books.
“Peter was a leader we could all rally around,” said Mag 40 member and longtime Noe Valley resident Dr. Courtney Broaddus, a retired UCSF physician. “He just brought people together to do things for the good of the neighborhood. And he had solutions. That was the fun part about it.”
The Noe market was a solution to a bitter fight among workers who wanted to unionize at the Real Food market on 24th Street. The store closed without notice on Labor Day 2003, which caused Gabel and two others to call a community meeting at Noe Valley Ministry. Gabel had the inspiration to turn the church parking lot into a Saturday market.
He could envision it all, including the finer grammatical points of what the market would be called. It had to be “Farmers,” not “Farmers’ ” The apostrophe commonly employed by farmers’ markets connotes a sense of ownership — something Gabel rejected.
“Peter led an hour-long discussion in our board meeting as to why there should be no possessive in ‘Farmers,’ ” said cofounder Leslie Crawford. “It was an inclusive act of grammar
“Noe Valley will miss him tremendously. He was the conscience of
the neighborhood.” Rafael Mandelman, S.F. supervisor
and intention. For Peter, everything was about inclusiveness.”
Opened in December 2003, the Farmers Market was a positive form of protest against the Real Foods ownership in Utah and an immediate success. An average of 2,000 shoppers browse among 22 vendors a week. Gabel insisted that it be run by volunteers who live nearby, not by a commercial entity or consortium.
To make sure that the parking lot where it took place would not be sold and developed, Gabel and his crew lobbied the city to have it turned into a public park. Then they used jackhammers to erase as many as 40 striped parking slots, which were replaced with paving stones.
Christened Noe Valley Town Square, it opened in 2016. Apart from the market on Saturdays, the Town Square is used for yoga classes, dance classes, and dogs and strollers evenly matched.
“Peter had a knack for turning things other people would see as obstacles into benefits for the neighborhood,” said Chris Keene, founder of the Friends of Noe Valley Town Square. “He just never stopped going.”
Peter Joseph Gabel was born Jan. 28, 1947, in Hollywood. His mother, Arlene Francis, was an actress, and his father, Martin Gabel, was an actor, director and producer. An only child, Peter moved to Manhattan as an infant when his mother was cast in “All My Sons,” the film starring Burt Lancaster and Edward G. Robinson.
At age 17, he served as a tour guide at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. He also appeared as a mystery guest on “What’s My Line?,” the popular game show where Francis was a regular and her husband was a guest panelist. On the day their son appeared, neither parent was able to guess his job or identity until their blindfolds came off.
Later, when Peter was at Harvard, he was a guest for a second time, and again, his own parents were unable to figure out his occupation as assistant editor of the Harvard Lampoon. Gabel graduated in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, but he had a medical deferment on account of his poor vision.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Gabel received a fellowship to teach at Boalt Hall, now Berkeley Law, which got him back to California. While teaching, he also became a student again to pursue a doctorate in psychology at the Wright Institute at Berkeley. He worked briefly as a psychotherapist in private practice and served as chair of the Berkeley Police Review Commission.
Gabel moved to San Francisco in 1978 when he joined the faculty of the New College School of Law. He taught public interest law and served as dean of the law school and president of New College, which maintained a 1960s ethos right up until the day the Mission District campus folded in 2008.
He continued teaching law at John F. Kennedy School of Law in Pleasant Hill, and wrote for legal journals. He also served as Editor at Large of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish magazine based in Berkeley, and wrote three books on philosophy and social theory.
In 1988, Gabel was attending the 50th birthday party for Harry Britt, the progressive gay supervisor who succeeded Harvey Milk, where he was introduced to Jaicks, a union organizer working with restaurant workers and hotel employees. They moved into a room in a commune made up of a handful of staff members at New College in a big house in the Castro district. When their son, Sam Jaicks Gabel, was born in 1995, they got their own place in Noe Valley, later settling in an apartment on Elizabeth Street.
Gabel’s first neighborhood action was to help organize a protest against a plan by Noe Valley Ministry to rent its steeple out as a cell phone tower. Every Sunday during church, they walked a picket line, singing lyrics written by Gabel, and applied to popular resistance songs. “Let My Steeple Go,” was a favorite. Eventually, the plan was dropped and the relationship with the church repaired.
Five months ago, Gabel was diagnosed with AL amyloidosis, a disorder in which an abnormal protein builds up in tissues and organs. The week he died he was lighting up Supervisor Rafael Mandelman’s cell phone with ideas for improving the Town Square infrastructure.
“Noe Valley will miss him tremendously. He was the conscience of the neighborhood,” Mandelman said. “Peter was one-of-a-kind, an absolutely irreplaceable man.”