'Super pop-up' food hall feeds into plans for S.F.'s Mid-Market

Behind a 150-foot construction barricade at the vacant Hollywood Billiards on Market Street is one of the most ambitious food marketplaces the city has seen: seven new culinary venues under one roof, including an Anchor Steam bar, a fish market, a wine shop, and restaurants offering Moroccan-Peruvian fusion, Vietnamese pho, barbecue, cold-brewed coffee and pastries.
The food court will open at the end of the month, but the really remarkable thing is that it will all be torn down in less than two years.

The "super pop-up" project at 1028 Market, dubbed the Hall, is developer Tidewater Capital's effort to solve a problem vexing city officials trying to redevelop blocks of boarded-up buildings along Market Street between Fifth and 10th streets. Despite the dozen proposals in the Mid-Market area, the reality is that the city won't approve most of them until 2015 or even 2016. Add 18 months or two years of construction, and you're looking at four or five years of vacant storefronts before much of the much-hyped revival takes place.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the north side of the 1000 block of Market Street, in the vicinity of Golden Gate Avenue and Jones and McAllister streets. Here Tidewater Capital has submitted plans to build 186 housing units over 10,000 square feet of retail. Next door, Shorenstein Properties is hoping to win approvals to build 301 apartments at 1066 Market St., a site that includes a sliver of Market Street but spreads back onto a large surface parking lot along Golden Gate and Jones.
"Our block has so much potential - what we are trying to do is to unleash that and harness the power of food to get people to come enjoy the site," said Tidewater partner Craig Young. "You show up three or four years from now and there is an apartment building and you remember the great event you went to."

Hollywood Billiards has been vacant for seven years. The ground-floor space, which used to house a strip club, was in such bad shape that Tidewater had to rebuild portions of the facade and put in new ceilings, walls, windows and concrete floors.

Each food vendor will have a large stall, and a prep kitchen will serve all the restaurants. There will be communal picnic-style tables both on the sidewalk and inside.
"The Hall will help activate a key block along Central Market while longer-term development at the old Hollywood Billiards site continues," Mayor Ed Lee said.

The development of the Hall is part of a wider effort to make Mid-Market safer and more vibrant. In addition, SF Beautiful is organizing a series of evening concerts at United Nations Plaza. The Rainin Foundation recently gave $100,000 to install two illuminated benches at Sixth and Market and light up the San Cristina building at 1000 Market St.

Shorenstein Properties is also working on a plan to make better use of its 1066 Market St. property, said Meg Spriggs, managing director of the company's apartment development arm. Shorenstein is storing 12 pianos at 1066 Market that will be periodically wheeled out for public use, including at Civic Center Plaza and the Hall next door.

Just two buildings will remain on the block once the two developments are completed. One is a mosque with retail downstairs, the other the San Cristina building, a former office building that Community Housing Partnership converted into studios for the formerly homeless. The lower floors of the flatiron building lease space to Showdogs, a gourmet sausage and beer joint, and Machine, a coffee kiosk.

David Schnur, Community Housing Partnership's director of development, said tenants in the San Cristina welcome new neighbors and retailers.

"It's a troubled block, and our tenants want to live in a safe, high-quality neighborhood," he said. "Eliminating vacant buildings and vacant storefronts will benefit our tenants as much as anyone else."
But he said that the new retail coming in needs to serve everyone - low-income residents as well as the tech workers making $150,000 a year at Twitter or Zendesk. "The neighborhood needs to remain a neighborhood for people of all income levels," he said. "We have been able to develop in that part of town because nobody with deeper pockets than ourselves was interested in it. ... Right now there is plenty of low-cost food in the neighborhood - it would be a problem if it were to all go upscale."
Mid-Market is still a tough place to operate a store. The 1000 block attracts a constant group of drug dealers - mostly marijuana - and their customers.

If the Hall concept takes off, the restaurants could move into other vacant spaces in the neighborhood and eventually into the new Tidewater project, once it is built, Young said. For retailers, it's a low-risk chance to test the market without signing guarantees or taking out construction loans to build out a space.

"Folks are not going to have to wait years before they see something - it's going to be a shot of electricity back into the neighborhood," Young said. "It's a ton of work up front, and we have a relatively short period of time to recover those costs, and we are taking risk, but we all realize that it's the right thing to do."

Tidewater has hired Ilana Lipsett of Free Space, which organizes cultural events in vacant spaces, to curate cultural activities in the 1028 Market space.

"It's going to be about using food, music and art to bring people together and help them express themselves," she said. "It's not going to change the cost of housing in San Francisco, but it could change the tenor of relationships between different populations."


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How S.F.'s Mid-Mission district is transforming

Mid-Mission is giving Mid-Market a run for its money.
While the tech-fueled renaissance of central Market Street has generated headlines around the world, a block away the parallel stretch of Mission Street is undergoing its own, much quieter transformation.

Construction workers connect rebar at a 126-unit apartment development at 1415 Mission St. at 10th Street. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Over the past five years, 1,400 new housing units have opened on Mission Street between Fifth Street and South Van Ness Avenue, including 800 studio apartments that landlord Angelo Sangiacomo built between Seventh and Eighth streets.

And there are a lot more coming.
On Mission between Eighth Street and around 10th Street, contractors are pouring floors on three mid-rise residential towers, construction that will bring an additional 500 units to the corridor by the end of 2015.
At 1400 Mission St., Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corp. is building 190 affordable family units. Across the street, at 1415 Mission St., Martin Building Co. is working on 126 apartments, while a block to the east at 1321 Mission St., Berkeley developer Patrick Kennedy is well under way on 160 micro-studios and "micro-suites," half of which will provide housing for students from the California College of the Arts.

Plans for 750 more units

In the past two weeks alone, developers have submitted plans that would add an additional 750 units of housing to Mid-Mission. AGI Avant has proposed 200 units at 1270 Mission St., now home to a pizza place and parking lot. On the current site of Goodwill, there are plans for 550 apartments and a 460,000-square-foot city office building.
"We are hoping that part of Mission Street establishes its own identity, on a smaller scale than Market Street," Kennedy said. "Having a few thousand new residents should help generate fine-grain retail. ... There is nothing now on our block but pot clubs."
Those bullish on central Mission Street say it has the potential to be a more intimate alternative to Market Street. While Market has a few big housing projects in the pipeline, the street is dominated by block-long buildings home to big tech companies like Dolby, Twitter, Uber and Square.
In contrast, central Mission will be mostly residential. The street has split zoning: The north side is zoned for 140-foot mid-rise buildings and the south side for buildings 65 feet or less. Eric Tao of AGI Avant said the zoning will help protect the row of former garment sweatshops that line the south side of Mission.

Workers snap grid lines in chalk to help guide construction of the next level of the Panoramic building in Mid-Mission. Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

Unique character

"Even as the high-rises get developed on the north side, the south side is always going to retain that unique Mission Street character with smaller, interesting buildings," Tao said.
Tao was an early believer in Mid-Mission. A decade ago the block of Mission between Seventh and Eighth streets was an abandoned Greyhound station and surface parking lots. There was a methadone clinic in the alley and homeless encampments.
"It was pretty God-awful," Tao said.
But when the federal government built its office building on the corner of Seventh Street - an attention-getting structure designed by well-known architect Thom Mayne of Los Angeles firm Morphosis - Tao saw potential. His group joined forces with TMG Partners to build the 260-unit SoMa Grand condominium project.
"We made the probably foolish decision to roll everything we had into that site," he said. "In retrospect, we were a little early."
While that stretch of Mission Street still has its share of boarded-up storefronts, low costs have caught the attention of restaurateurs and their investors.

Places to eat, drink

In 2011, Matt Semmelhack opened AQ Restaurant & Bar at 1085 Mission St. and last year followed up with TBD at 1077 Mission St. The cocktail bar OddJob has opened at 1337 Mission St. Focaccia, part of the San Francisco group of downtown lunch spots, is opening at 1198 Mission St., according to Sangiacomo, the 89-year-old developer and landlord who has been trying to develop the neighborhood since the 1970s.


"They are spending a fortune," Sangiacomo said. "I wanted something really good in there, with sandwiches and salads. This is going to be the best one they've got."
Semmelhack said he was drawn to Mission Street because it offered a combination of low overhead and high potential. "Permits were pulled and there were cranes in the air, but the rent was still cheap," he said.
While AQ started as a destination restaurant, it's now drawing residents from buildings like Nema at 8 10th St. and Ava at 55 Ninth St. "There has been an obvious shift in terms of people being more local," Semmelhack said.
As Mission Street becomes denser, some question whether the city is paying enough attention to its public realm. The street is clogged with buses - the 14, 14L and SamTrans lines - with little space for cyclists. And the intersection of Mission and South Van Ness can be harrowing to cross on foot or bike.
Semmelhack recently joined the board of the Mid-Market Central Business District and has to remind other board members that Mission Street exists.
"Market Street is the No. 1 point of conversation in all the meetings, but I'm always outspoken about Mission Street," he said. "It's an important part of the Mid-Market district and at times it tends to get overlooked."
"Mission Street has been ignored forever," said John Elberling, executive director of Todco, which owns and manages about 1,000 units of affordable housing South of Market.

Gentrification concerns

His group owns residential hotels along Mission Street and is concerned about gentrification, particularly on the blocks on either side of Sixth Street, which has one of the city's biggest concentrations of residential hotels in San Francisco. He said the city needs to look at a Mid-Market development fee that would be invested back into neighborhood improvements.
Neil Hrushowy, general manager of the San Francisco Planning Department's City Design Group, which works to "balance all the functions of a street," agreed that Mission Street has played second fiddle to Market Street.

"After two rounds of community outreach," he said, "we heard strong feedback that we needed a more coherent plan for Mission Street."


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