San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)

United Nations Plaza shows a tale of two San Franciscos

- CARL NOLTE Carl Nolte’s columns appear in The Chronicle’s Sunday edition. Email: cnolte@sfchronicl­e.com

United Nations Plaza, a 21⁄2-acre park where Market, Seventh, Hyde and McAllister streets come together, is a kind of civic barometer that measures the state of life in San Francisco. When it’s good, and the sun is shining, it shows all the promise of the city. When it is bad, U.N. Plaza is a mess: drugs, hopelessne­ss, the mark of a failed city.

Right now, it’s both. By day, the area is surprising­ly vibrant, with kids and games and sunshine. By night, the old demons emerge from the shadows. That’s San Francisco for you: two worlds in one place.

U.N. Plaza opened in 1975 in a spirit of optimism that came on the 30th anniversar­y of the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco. The location was a natural — connecting Market Street, the city’s main stem, with the magnificen­t City Hall. A trio of noted architects, Lawrence Halprin, John Carl Warnecke and Mario Ciampi, designed the plaza with a grand fountain as a centerpiec­e. The plaza’s pavement was inlaid with words from the preamble to the U.N. Charter, set in brass. They called it a “Walk of Great Ideas.”

U.N. Plaza never fulfilled its promise, even in its early days. The central location was an asset: It was near City Hall, theaters, the Civic Auditorium, BART, the Muni Metro subway, the Federal Building, museums, and only a short stroll from the opera house. But it was also a short stroll from the Tenderloin, and when that district began to slide into homelessne­ss and drugs, the world of crime and despair seeped into U.N. Plaza, across Market and down Seventh Street.

Seventh and Market became drug dealer central. Anything was for sale there.

By 2019, the area hit what seemed to be bottom. There were civic meetings. Politician­s came to listen.

“It’s a blight on San Francisco. I’ve never seen it this bad,’’ said Max Young, who ran a nightclub on Seventh near Market.

“City Hall turns a blind eye to this. I can’t believe it,” said Peter Sellars, who managed the Odd Fellows building, which in various forms has been on Market Street for 144 years.

It got worse after the COVID-19 pandemic began, and in 2020 the CVS pharmacy at Seventh and Market closed after it was looted when a protest turned into a riot.

I hadn’t been to that part of the city for a while, so I was dubious when my old pal Richard Perri, an artist and a painter of city life, called me. He has a studio in the Odd Fellows building just opposite U.N. Plaza. “Come on down for lunch,” he said. “We’ll go to the Proper Hotel on Market. You’ll like it. You’ll be surprised.”

And I was. I parked at the Civic Center garage and walked through U.N. Plaza. It was a sunny day for a change. The city had set up ping-pong tables, an outdoor gym, a climbing wall, a fenced dogtrainin­g area, and a skateboard park. Instead of lost souls there were kids playing checkers, two older men playing chess, young men skittering about on skateboard­s.

The Proper Hotel was a surprise, too. The lobby was as grand as a luxury hotel, and Villon, the hotel restaurant, was excellent. The hotel has a rooftop bar and lounge, and the Proper serves high tea on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Afternoon tea at Seventh and Market? Now I’ve seen everything.

Perri, for one, has seen everything. He’s 80 now and came to San Francisco from New York years ago, “with a flower in my hair,” he says wryly. “Now I’m the oldest and longest living artist on Market Street.” The MidMarket area was quiet when he first rented his studio 35 years ago, with a Merrill’s drug store, a movie theater, small restaurant­s and shops.

He saw a mini-renaissanc­e about 2000 when the Lines Ballet moved in, and ACT converted the old Strand movie house into a stage theater. And then came the drug abyss. “It’s boom and bust,” Perri said. “I saw it happen.’’

He gives a lot of credit for the most recent revival to Urban Alchemy, a nonprofit that offers “a new model for public safety.” Urban Alchemy has 1,100 employees in five cities. They are an alternativ­e to police and patrol the streets, talking to street people. The Urban Alchemists speak the language of the streets. Many of their workers are ex-convicts, or formerly homeless people out to make a new life.

They are on the streets in large numbers, cleaning, talking to people, simply being there. They also run eight homeless centers. Urban Alchemy signed a $53 million contract with the city two years ago.

The Urban Alchemists and a federal and city police crackdown seem to have made a difference in Mid-Market and U.N. Plaza.

But some people, including Sellars, who managed the Odd Fellows building for over 20 years, are conflicted about what happened. “They seem to have pushed that element out of the area, but I am not sure where they pushed them to.

“It’s all right in the daytime,” Sellars said. “But after 7, when Urban Alchemists leave, that element comes back. By 9 they come closer. By 10 there’s 50 or 60 people on the corner. It’s still scary to a lot of people. They must run a gauntlet to get to BART or Muni. You see people on drugs, you see people who are out of their mind. And in the morning, you see what they have left behind.”

“I was always taught to be optimistic,” he continued. But the leaders of the Odd Fellows, a fraternal organizati­on that owns the building, do not feel the same way. They are putting it up for sale.

“We are being forced out by these conditions,” Sellars said. “And we have been in San Francisco since the Gold Rush.”

 ?? Carl Nolte/The Chronicle ?? By day, United Nations Plaza is surprising­ly vibrant, with kids and games and sunshine, showing the city’s promise. By night, the old demons emerge from the shadows: drugs, hopelessne­ss, the mark of a failed city.
Carl Nolte/The Chronicle By day, United Nations Plaza is surprising­ly vibrant, with kids and games and sunshine, showing the city’s promise. By night, the old demons emerge from the shadows: drugs, hopelessne­ss, the mark of a failed city.
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