Arts’ new heart
S.F.’s cultural center shifts to once-seedy Central Market with ACT’s Strand the gem of growing collection of groups
For half a century, San Francisco’s Mid-Market Street has been bad but always about to get better. Now it’s about to get its lighthouse — painted red and pulsing from within, with a two-story video screen sending blue LED light through a glass front and across United Nations Plaza.
The lighthouse is the Strand, a oncetawdry movie house that has been reborn as a second stage for the American Conservatory Theater, the city’s most prominent repertory company. The Strand was originally called the Jewel, and with its May 14 ribbon-cutting, it will be the jewel again — of the Central Market Arts District, a civic master plan to put arts organizations into boarded-
up storefronts and rundown mid-rises between Fifth and Eighth streets.
The Strand will get the glory, but it is just one building among 15 along Mid-Market that have either been purchased or leased by city agencies and nonprofits to stave off further displacement of the arts.
“The Central Market Arts District is the center of our city geographically,” said Tom DeCaigny, director of cultural affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission. “And it’s a place where the arts tell the stories that make up our city.”
Those stories are embodied in the Strand, a $34 million bet that uptown theatergoers, downtown tech intelligentsia, bicycle and BART commuters, F-Market streetcar riders, and the masses on the wide brick sidewalks will stop in for a coffee, a cocktail, a meal or a play.
Backdropped by the massive green glass of the Federal Building, the Strand, on the south side of Market, midblock between Seventh and Eighth, now looks like a quaint red-brick box. But it was one of the flashiest things on a flashy street when it opened in 1917 as a vaudeville house. Then it became a repertory cinema, then a foreign film house, then a bingo parlor, then a house featuring skin flicks.
Full house of dead birds
Then it became home to squatters who turned the upstairs offices into a rooming house and shooting gallery, and to birds that flew in through a hole in the ceiling and could not find their way back out. When ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff first saw it, there were 725 seats, and a dead bird in every one of them.
“It took a lot of persuasion of our board that this neighborhood is going to turn around,” Perloff said, “because people have been talking about Mid-Market for 50 years and it hasn’t turned around.”
Then suddenly the turnaround happened, kicked into gear by Mayor Ed Lee in 2011 with a plan called the Central Market Economic Strategy (the stigmatized handle “Mid-Market” was avoided).
The goal was to revitalize Market, between Fifth and Van Ness, and a key strategy, implemented under the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, was to install cultural nonprofits into commercial buildings that nobody else has wanted to be in.
This meant properties zoned as theater or retail space, not the commercial space that has since been snapped up by Twitter, Zendesk, Nerd Wallet and other social media and software firms.
A force was tasked with identifying buildings with zoning conducive to the arts. Thirty-five properties were identified, and in four years, a consortium of city agencies, loan funders and charities has completed 15 deals specifically to either place arts organizations on the strip or keep them there.
A 16th purchase was expected to close any day now, taking some of the sting out of the collapse of the 950 Center for the Arts & Education, which would have provided major space for arts groups in a mixed-use development near Fifth and Market streets.
Amy Cohen, neighborhood program director for the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, summed it up this way: “It’s a pretty rich amount of activity for a city that is struggling with the arts.”
That activity can be hard to spot because it’s mostly on the upper floors of buildings on Market, or in the first block of streets that angle off the north side of Market Street.
One of these is the Dollhouse Theater at 80 Turk St. A sometimes nightclub and before that a porn theater, the Dollhouse was matched up with CounterPULSE, a neighborhood dance company with an expiring lease. A subsidiary of the Rainin Foundation bought the building, and it is now being renovated into a 120-seat theater set to open in October. If CounterPULSE can raise $7 million in 10 years, it can buy the building.
From the Dollhouse, you can look down Taylor Street to SF Camerawork, marked at street level by a red door next to a roll-down security gate. That red door leads to an upstairs photography gallery with north light pouring through eight-foot picture windows.
The space had been vacant for 30 years before Camerawork arrived, in another match made by city agencies. A 10-year lease was negotiated, and a $100,000 loan secured to build the space out. Mayor Lee came to the opening to proclaim May 23, 2012, as “SF Camerawork Day.”
“We’re the poster child for turning this area into a cultural district,” said Heather Snider, executive director of SF Camerawork.
A poster child at the east end of the strip is SAFEhouse Arts, a venue for 80 independent dancers and dance companies. Its location sits above the Burger King at the Civic Center BART Station.
Saving the arts
SAFE stands for Saving Arts From Extinction, and you can see the arts being saved any weekend night by maneuvering through the street people at the entrance and up the stairs. In 99 red folding metal chairs, in a triangular room, is an audience as crucial to the Central Market Arts District as will be the ACT patrons in the Strand on May 14, comfortable on 283 newly manufactured, vermilion-colored cushion seats.
“The challenge is making sure that the small organizations are equally represented in the larger conversation about who gets to make art in San Francisco,” said Joe Landini, founder and executive director of SAFEhouse Arts. “A healthy cultural ecosystem requires all levels of art-making.”
At the top level of the MidMarket ecosystem is the Strand, with its $34 million capital campaign.
During the Strand’s makeover, the dead birds were removed, then the seats, then everything else. Some of the wall texture is original, but the only surviving decor are a few seats on display and the Strand marquee from 1959, which has been salvaged and hung inside the cafe.
“These are the original letters beckoning people to come in and have a cup of coffee,” Perloff said, while conducting a tour. “We’ll have great cocktails.”
A bigger come-on than the old-time lettering is the video screen in the two-story lobby, 126 panels emitting cold LED light. Perloff sees this as a 21st century ode to the Times Square news ticker.
If there is a major civic event
“The Central Market Arts District is the center of our city geographically. And it’s a place where the arts tell the stories that make up our city.” Tom DeCaigny, director of cultural affairs, S.F. Arts Commission
to celebrate, say the Warriors winning the NBA championship, it will flash on the screen. Or if an international dignitary is in town, it might display that country’s flag as a welcoming gesture.
Otherwise the screen will show curated video art commingled with a film of the Strand’s demo and construction. Breakfast and lunch will be served, and the concept is that people enjoying cafe society will be compelled to advance to the box office at the rear. But there will not be a table-to-table ticket salesperson.
“Some will feel tempted to buy a ticket and see a show,” Perloff said, “and some will not.”
In breaking the block onto Mid-Market, ACT is announcing itself as a team player, offering use of the Strand for free to qualifying arts groups. The Strand has film screening equipment. Seats can be replaced with tables, for cabaret with table service from a full bar. The black box theater on the top floor can be used as an events room by throwing open the curtains to a view of the City Hall dome, through French window panes from 1917.
“We want (the Strand) to be used all the time,” said Perloff, standing in a hardhat outside this new beacon for the Central Market Arts District.
“One of the issues we are all wrestling with is, what kind of city do we want to be?” she said, before answering her own question. “It is incumbent upon all of us to figure out how to accommodate the population explosion and still keep the arts central to our collective discourse.”