Dot-com Central returns to earthly pursuits

By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate

Friday, May 9, 2008
Original Article

Whither the development that dot-com forgot?

Only a decade ago when the new high-tech economy was pumping cash into the Bay Area, a tiny part of the Mission District near Potrero Hill became one of the staging grounds for dot-com drama. The place was filthy with startups — some of them hell-bent on selling services or products or even ideas nobody wanted or needed.

Evicted tenants were protesting loudly outside glinting aluminum-windowed offices, where digerati had migrated from around the country to make their fortunes before the age of 25. The Yuppie Eradication Project, founded and implemented by a resident radical, was happily keying SUVs and wheatpasting insults on the buildings catering to the incoming dot-com elite.

Amidst this development and displacement, the industrial neighborhood that had long been a ghostly quiet haven for artists, dancers and nonprofits — as well as old-fashioned factories — started to look different.

Live-work lofts littered the landscape like Legos in God's messy nursery. Defunct factories were retrofitted into commercial space for up startups. Circadia, a Starbucks-owned prototype for a new kind of restaurant located in the former Best Foods factory at Bryant and Mariposa, featured an interior with artfully mismatched used furniture that reportedly cost $1 million. It also included a fully-wired conference room — for the caffeinated deal-making by the little enterprises unable to secure office space.

The buildings remain

Now, the emotional fever has long since passed — along with many of the companies and people that once occupied that neighborhood. What are left are the buildings: the old, the new and the forever under construction.

Lately I've been wondering about all the development that dot-com forgot. How are these buildings now being used? What has become of the neighborhood bordered by Division, Portrero, Folsom and 20th that was a lightning rod for so much controversy?

A recent walk through the neighborhood suggests that these buildings — often created or retrofitted for an economy selling abstract notions, vague services and emerging technologies — are now centers of corporeal work. I saw not a single company that could be called a dot-com. Aside from one nonprofit video school, the Bay Area Video Coalition and the KQED headquarters, I didn't even see any businesses or nonprofits that were particularly high tech or multimedia. And Circadia, the cutting-edge restaurant, is now a humble Starbucks.

One other Internet-based organization is Kiva.org, the nonprofit that facilitates individual microfinancing of emerging-nation entrepreneurs — which now resides on 18th and Folsom, but started on Bryant and 20th. The Rosai Group, a computer repair and retailer, has moved out of the Best Foods building, leaving an empty 2,600-square-foot office with a "for lease"sign in the window.

The allure of SoMa

John-Clay Morris of Touchstone Commercial Partners, which represents the Best Foods building owners, says that although many tech businesses are moving into SOMA, the neighborhood no longer attracts those businesses that can afford to be closer to downtown. "I get a lot of calls from Web designers and other high-tech companies that would like to rent space, but they can't afford the price or can't commit to the long-term lease,"he explains. "Their business is so up and down."

He says more established high-tech ventures are moving into SoMa, where $3 per square foot is pricier than the Inner Mission's $2 or $2.50, but the location affords better access to transportation, parking and downtown businesses.

So the neighborhood has reverted to some of its earlier functions. It's a place where people make things and sell things, especially big stuff like furniture or machines. It is also a place where people make a living taking care of bodies — clothing them, feeding them, caring for their injuries and most of all housing them.

Indeed, the neighborhood mirrors some of the new anti-tech obsessions of our culture: dogs, textiles, do-it-yourself culture, food.

Here is a snapshot of what I saw:

-- A boutique doggy day care called SF Hound Lounge

-- A solo designer-owned Little Fox Wear ("clothing and accessories for your Best Friend”)

-- Several restaurants, including the rustic modern Coffee Bar, housed in an industrial loading dock

-- The design offices for Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma

-- The tiny Whizbang fabrics (whose owner explained she was just back from the Maker Faire)

-- Emiliomiti Italian Culinary Toys, BrickOvens.biz and University Games, a maker of board games.

Also leasing in the old Best Foods building is the UCSF Trauma Recovery Center, which offers services to survivors of violent crime.

Small space for artists

One gleaming new building at 18th and Treat embodies the new upscale face of these micro-merchants artists. ActivSpace opened its first building in Seattle in 1994 and now has 11 others in Oregon, Seattle, and the Bay Area. The company offers affordable, flexible stripped-down space for creative ventures, but not with the bargain basement prices of the pre-dot-com converted warehouses.

"We don't have a price per square foot but we specialize in small spaces,"says Jude Siddall, cofounder of ActivSpace with her husband Gary Romain. She says the San Francisco spaces range between 100 and 400 square feet, starting at $295 and reaching $1,100. "It's the volume that creates the affordability."

Siddall was a modern dancer living in London when she met her future husband, "an American real estate guy."She says the business grew out of the early 90s when the real estate market was terrible in Seattle. "He had this one building he didn't know what to do with. I told him, if you remodel it, I'll fill it with crazy people."

Perhaps the only sort of developments that hasn't shifted gears of late are those focussed on housing. The tale of Bryant Square, a proposed 150,000-square-foot office project designed like a suburban fortress and aimed at the high-tech industry, offers another glimpse into the changes in the neighborhood.

Back in 2000, the demolition of the old brick buildings to make way for the project displaced many residents and small businesses. The site of bitter protests, the project came to represent all that was wrong with gentrification in the neighborhood. When the project stalled in 2002, it became ground zero for the dot-bomb and for the next seven years, the site sat empty: an excavated hole the size of half a city block.

After many aborted plans, another project got under way. Now Bryant Commons — a market rate mix of "highly desirable urban family townhouses and flats"(according to the Web site of Palisades Development Group,) is under construction. Not "affordable,"but no high-tech, multimedia fortress either.

But a block away, on Florida and 19th, an entire block of mixed income housing is going up, so at least the neighborhood will have some infusion of affordable homes. If the high tech promised that the body would be rendered obsolete, this neighborhood now suggests that obsolescence was limited to those promises.

But it's not as if we can turn back time. The days of cheap ramshackle space on a shoestring are largely over. Two dollars a square foot isn't cheap no matter how you slice it.

The neighborhood has definitely had a facelift, and it will never be quite as run down or, for that matter, inexpensive. The new face of this neighborhood is the particular marriage of the old Bohemia reconfigured with an entrepreneurial eye. In describing her own business, Siddall captures more of her own personal history: "It's what happens when the dancer falls in love with the real estate guy.”

Big thanks to Raven for organizing the CELLspace booth at How Weird. Joe, Justine, Cyrille, and Russell also pitched in for the set up and tabling. Thanks to the CELL artists who threw donated work to pay the bills at CELLspace. Hope all you folks are enjoying the buttons you made!

Go here for more info, links, etc.

You can start learning double dutch this very weekend!  Classes start on Sunday and we'd like to extend some neighborly offers...

5-session packages are now good for unlimited jumpin' for 1 month!

Bring a friend and get 2-for-1 on your first time drop-in class.  Sign up on-line to reserve your space or please arrive at least 15 minutes before class to register.

Don’t miss Dandelion Dancetheater’s 2008 Home Season, May 9 - 24
Advance tickets are now on sale for

THREE WEEKS OF PHYSICALLY INTEGRATED DANCE/THEATER
from around the world

San Francisco's Dandelion Dancetheater is joined by
AXIS Dance Company (Oakland)
Compañía Y (Madrid)
Mayday Dance Company (Montreal)

for THREE distinct, provocative programs.

Choreography by
Nadia Adame
Mélanie Demers
Joe Goode
Eric Kupers
Jacques Poulin-Denis

"Bonus Map" (in SF Bay Guardian)

Although it amazed children and adults alike, the original Nintendo didn't produce games people would consider fine art. For most, hits like Mike Tyson's Punch-Out and The Legend of Zelda served merely as eye-glazing entertainment. But local artist Veronica Graham saw more. For her new exhibit "Bonus Map," Graham mimicked the pattern mapping in classic video games with traditional Japanese wood-block prints.

Veronica sent some photos our way to post on here for everyone to enjoy. Hope you can make it out to the opening night May 8!  

EarthROCK 2008 @ CELLspace

2050 Bryant Street, San Francisco

Friday May 2nd from 7pm-all night!!

Shake it to the Bay Areas up and coming finest, funkiest, grooviest, freakiest bands and musicians. Bring yo hat bring yo danci'n boots and lets get down;-)