Dispatch from Dogpatch

By Zannah Noe

Thinking about my patch of waterfront, in light of the disastrous Tsunami in Indonesia, gave me pause as a San Franciscan who lives on a peninsula. The communities that cloister around the inlets, bays, and deltas are vulnerable to the powers of the sea. I now look at these communities with a sense of awe and fatalism. Nature strikes, it is the price we pay for the view; a game we play with nature while nature always bats last. Yet altered skylines and altered shorelines don’t deter people from returning and rebuilding. How new people rebuild and who stays to reconstruct a waterfront community is fascinating in the complexities that challenge effective urban planning.

Dogpatch is the heart of the Third Street corridor, and Third Street is at the heart of a redevelopment that is spreading from the Ballpark. Like a tsunami, one slowly comprehends the building impact of change before it is awash. Understanding the history, discovering the businesses, and talking to the people that live and work in the area will help to understand and at best mitigate the risks that face a new emerging community. As an urban explorer with a shanghaied heart for the area, I am curious about the course and nature the development will have on the existing community of Dogpatch and the Third Street corridor.

Dogpatch is geographically bound by 280 to the waterfront and by Mariposa to 23rd Street. It is a mixed-use neighborhood with Pier 70 as a behemoth industrial complex that houses the San Francisco Shipyard and other industrial business, while west of Third Street there are some of the oldest single-family Victorians in San Francisco. It’s an old working-class neighborhood that formed around the shipyard, Bethlehem Steel, and related industries until its decline in the 1940s.

The outlying areas of South Beach, Mission Bay, Islais Creek, and Hunter’s Point Shipyard play a role in the development of Dogpatch as these areas offer dense residential communities, university research facilities, large artists colonies, active marinas, and independent merchants. A visit to these neighborhoods for the Bay Crossings Holiday shopping guide in December provided a chance to see a group of creative, innovative, and unique individuals setting up shops, studios, and homes in these urban maritime neighborhoods.

If merchants are the most visible voice to a neighborhood, then there is much to like in what is seen and heard. A design gulch is evident with artisans working in furniture, landscape design, product design, metal arts, photography, textiles, architecture, and graphic and fine arts. This could be San Francisco’s answer to Oakland’s art scene. One often hears, “When the rail goes in…this place with take off,” referring to the Third Street rail. This implies that nothing is going on now, which is quite the opposite. No, there aren’t the gee gaw shops for tourists that seem to populate the odd-numbered side of the waterfront, but here on the even side, use is ideally suited for the local urban dweller. Piers 38, 40, and 28 hold true to the Port’s Charter to rent to maritime-related business while creating public space along the waterfront.

One more “For Lease” sign has come down in South Park as the new offices of 2nd Edison have taken shape at 164 South Park. Good news for the languishing neighborhood that once was the mecca of multimedia. CEO Chris Bradley moved his product design company from Redwood City in mid-December to swank offices that include a workshop, open cubicles, conference room, and a small closet dubbed the scream room. Creative types with foresight anticipated the need for this closet. Once an office balanced with accountants and designers, 2nd Edison is making a bold move towards product design as its main focus and selling off its profit recovery division. Offering some financial services to its clients, this product design firm is poised for growth. Perhaps these folks could be redesigning the Oakland span of the Bay Bridge. WELCOME TO THE CITY! (scream)

Pier 28 is home to another product design firm, Ideo, who designed the Palm V. This innovative company, with offices at Pier 28 and in Palo Alto, had a revolution theme for a Christmas party–Cuban style, complete with mojitos, a hot Cuban samba band, squawking parrots, and swank Asian-Mexican fusion cuisine by Paula LeDuc. Little Havana came alive in the Sutter Room of The Regency Center on Sutter Street and Van Ness Avenue. A serendipitous coincidence, as I am an event manager for the building, which allows me to work during fun events like the Ideo Christmas party.

As a floor manager, I represent the building during an event. I see to it that vendors adhere to load in/out times and parking restrictions and keep them from damaging the carpet, chandeliers, and walls. While solving building-related problems and operating the backdrops for the Lodge level, I have crawled the interior of its vaulted ceilings, explored the bowels of the boiler room, and walked every inch of its marbled floors.

The Regency Center was built in 1906 by and for the Scottish Rite Masons and has nothing to do with the Regency Hotel. It has three floors of magnificent ballrooms. Its crowning gem is the Lodge on the third floor with velvet red walls, dark mahogany woodwork, eight enormous art nouveau curvaceous chandeliers, a 30-foot vaulted ceiling, and a grand stage shrouded by an elegant red-tasseled gilded curtain. On the left side of the stage is a catwalk that provides access to rope pulleys that control over 30 painted scenes for backdrops. Painted in the 1920s, the backdrops are priceless objects of art that depict scenes that dramatized the mason’s secret rituals. There are secret passageways to the organ loft, with trap doors where trust rituals were enacted. Rumor has it that a rope went around a would-be mason’s neck and he jumped through the trap door trusting that his cloaked brothers would catch him in time. A lovely bit of early hazing.

Another coincidence is that most party rentals, caterers, lighting and sound companies that service the events are based in the Third Street corridor. Taste Catering has made its home for years in Dogpatch, along with Phoebus Lighting and the offices of Burning Man. Some vendors, such as Abbey Rentals, have moved farther south to Daly City, and Hartman’s prop shop resides over in Oakland. It’s a shifting scene like the events produced at the Regency.