View Goes Over the Hill - Special 40th Anniversary Issue
August 2010
Serving the Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Mission Bay and SOMA Neighborhoods Since 1970
FREE
August 1970 View Covers Assaults, Drugs & Religion By Judy Baston
The Polaroid photograph (top) of the building at Third and 19th streets ran above the fold on page one of the View’s first issue. The candy factory was long gone, and the building was being proposed as the site of a new clinic to serve the Hill, a plan that never came to pass. However in 1976 the Caleb G. Clark Potrero Hill Health Center opened at 1050 Wisconsin Street on the Hill’s southern slope. The Third Street Light Rail began rolling down Third in 2007. The old candy factory building sports For Lease signs to this day. More Then & Now photographs on pages 8 and 9.
Library Reopening Prompts Increase in Business on 20th Street Corridor By Sarah Mcdonald The 20th Street commercial strip has experienced an increase in traffic since the San Francisco Public Library’s Potrero Hill branch reopened last March. Businesses located on the street had suffered a sales decline as a result of several factors, including the loss of a popular deli in 2006, the closure of the library for renovations in 2008, street repairs that disrupted parking last summer, and the Great Recession. The newly renovated library is drawing a larger crowd than before its closure, or at least a more active one. According to Michelle Jeffers, the library’s public relations officer, circulation has roughly tripled from 2008, with almost 18,500 items being borrowed monthly during the summer. “It’s very good that the library is back open,” said Lester Zeidman, co-owner of The Good Life Grocery. According to Zeidman, although business isn’t as good as it once was,
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he’s seen a modest sales increase since March. Sal Saleh, owner of Dave’s Food Store, and Kal Ghanma, at All States Best Food, agreed that the library’s re-opening has see 20th street page 21
see 1970 page 17
Patri’s Masthead a Reminder of Potrero’s Labor History By Peter Linenthal
Giacomo Patri at 77, courtesy of the Patri family.
Rip Van Winkle 2 p. 7 p. 4
“Mobile Drug Clinic for Hill Rejected,” “Assault Wave Hits Elders,” “Community Tree Planting Program Gets Underway,” “St. Teresa Welcomes New Pastor,” and “Drug Figures Meaningless.” With these stories The Potrero View’s first issue was born 40 years ago this month. In 1970, there was barely a glimmer of the building boom that would affect the neighborhood in ensuing years. A request in the View’s January 1972 classified advertisement column speaks to the area’s past affordability: “I want to live on the Hill. One bedroom to $100.” A May 1978 ad – “2 BR Victorian Flat, $385 per month” – would today belong in the “Read it and Weep” column. In its early years the View reflected the sense that Potrero Hill was a sleepy village on San Francisco’s east side. The Hill was, and still is, surrounded by freeways and belts of light industry, but, more to the point, the community was on the “other side of the tracks.” In the 1970s, Hillers pointed to the big Pacific Gas and Electric Company gas tank – since removed – or the water tower as notable neighborhood landmarks. The De Haro Street house in which Karl Malden’s Streets of San Francisco character Mike Stone lived was a point of pride. Ironically, the elements that for
many years kept the neighborhood a sleepy backwater – reasonable rents, empty lots, light industry, freeways – became major factors in making the Hill ground zero for massive changes, bringing development, congestion and spiraling home prices and rents. The View reflected this evolution, but also expressed an almost eerie sense of continuity. During the View’s years of cutand-paste production, the volunteer staff would often be forced to turn to a box of previously used headlines becau se of f requent head l i ner machine breakdowns. The headline “New Threat to Open Space Meets Opposition” might have been used for a controversy 20 years ago about the construction of live-work spaces at 18th and Arkansas streets, but was originally deployed in 1985 in a story about Starr King Openspace on the Hill’s southern slope, near Parkview Heights. “No New Stadium, View Readers Say” could have been used for the 1987 effort against the Seventh and Townsend Ballpark proposal, or for a poll the paper had conducted five years before that. The stories in the View’s early decades frequently reflected the active role Potrero Hill residents and their organizations played in civic
In 1973, Potrero View publisher Ruth Passen decided that her newspaper needed what every paper had, a distinctive front page nameplate displaying the paper’s title. And she knew who to call, her old friend Giacomo Patri. Ruth and husband Joe knew a wide circle of artists that included Giacomo in North Beach in the 1960s. Rents there rose. The Patris and many of these artists found better deals in homes and apartments on then quiet Potrero Hill, the Patris at 21st
Street History p. 11 p. 8
p.14
and Arkansas. It was one reason the Passens moved to the Hill in 1969. Patri was well known for his dynamic illustrations for labor movement booklets advocating racial integration in trade unions. Ruth and Joe Passen shared his commitment to social justice. Giacomo Guiseppe Patri was born in a village north of Genoa in 1898. He emigrated to the United States with his father in 1916. At the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, he studied with Spencer Macky, Ralph see patri page 29
Calendar p. 19 p. 25