Gas station’s zigzag route
Little 1930s shed with several lives uprooted again by development
This odd little structure sitting at Beale and Howard streets on the edge of downtown’s construction boom looks like a relic from another time.
It is. And from another neighborhood. With another journey on the near horizon, final destination unknown.
What we do know is this: The ornamented concrete box that until the end of August held a hot dog stand began life on the western slope of Nob Hill at the corner of Larkin and Pacific streets. It was a gas station with Jazz Age flair, a 1931 drive-thru, its stocky walls enlivened by an incongruous blend of medallions that cele-
brated an agricultural bounty and molded forms that took their cues from the telescoped skyscrapers of the day.
Classified as Zig-Zag Moderne, the gas station had enough quirky charm that preservationists rallied in the station’s defense when the longtime owner in 1989 wanted to tear it down and build housing. They lost that battle, but the Planning Commission got the owner to agree to contribute $34,000 to the moving costs if a property owner somewhere else claimed it. And so, in April of 1990, the moderne gem was put on the back of a truck and transported from Nob Hill down to what then was an empty corner next to a freeway on-ramp, kitty corner to a grim black office tower.
For years it sat in padlocked isolation, but eventually the developers of the office tower turned the corner into a small plaza with shade trees and concrete benches. The gas station shell was filled by a concession trailer holding the city’s first What’s Up Dog, a sausage purveyor and a busy lunch spot for nearby workers whose budgets didn’t allow for the rarefied fare at Town Hall a block away.
Now the stylish shed sits empty and within days it could be gone. The tiny plot it sits on across from the temporary Transbay Terminal bumps against a half-block site where a 43-story office building will rise. The Chicago developers have paid $179 million for their property, and the glass tower they bill as “a new icon on San Francisco’s skyline” apparently wouldn’t soar quite as high with a tiny neighbor down below.
So a deal was worked out where the development team of Golub & Co. and John Buck Co. will purchase the land and the snazzy shell. The 1931 structure will be stored off-site for up to five years while the developers work with the Planning Department to move the former Nob Hill resident “to another appropriate location.”
In the meantime, consider the irony. The most popular lunch spot for construction workers building towers is being moved so that yet more construction workers can break ground on yet another tower.
More irony: Park Tower is designed to include, at the very same corner of Beale and Howard, a deep notch that one rendering presents as a “dramatic 3-story open-air lobby” and in plans is described as “public open space.” Which means that, theoretically, the Zig-Zag shell could return to where it has spent the last 25 years of its life.
But don’t count on it.