Is this S.F. parking garage really worthy of historic preservation? (2025)

Gather any group of reasonable people in front of an old building in San Francisco and they’re likely to disagree on whether it should be preserved.

Take, for example, the parking garage at 721 Filbert St. in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. The building, which used to be a horse stable, is made of beautiful red brick and has sweeping entrance arches. But it’s also a parking garage— not the best use of land in one of the densest and most desirable areas of San Francisco.

Is an aesthetically pleasing parking garage worthy of permanent historic preservation? Or could it be put to better use for San Francisco residents?

Last weekend, I attended back-to-back walking tours of North Beach that explored both sides of those arguments. The tours were part of an increasingly fiery fight over whether to turn a large swath of North Beach— including the parking garage— into a historic district.

The Northeast San Francisco Conservancy hosted the first tour, and its application to create a district listed on the National Register of Historic Places is set to be considered next month by California’s Historical Resources Commission, which will make recommendations to a federal official responsible for the final decision. Supporters of the historic district argue that the national listing will bring pride to the neighborhood, drive tourism and permit properties to access generous federal historic preservation tax credits.

But San Francisco YIMBY, which hosted a satirical tour of the neighborhood’s parking lots and burned-out buildings, argues that the historic district proposal is a gambit to avoid new housing, à la the city’s wealthy St. Francis Wood neighborhood— which secured a historic district designation in 2022, exempting it from new state laws allowing denser housing on most lots.

Was blocking housing also the goal of the North Beach historic district?

A historic designation would prohibit buildings from being demolished or significantly altered without a California Environmental Quality Act review. However, many of the buildings in North Beach are already considered “historic” and subject toCEQA review, according to San Francisco Planning Commission guidelines.

So was the battle over North Beach one with meaningful consequences, or was it a largely symbolic proxy war in the city’s larger ideological battle over development?

No one is questioning whether North Beach has historical significance. As author and historian Gary Kamiya— who wrote a weekly Chronicle column called “Portals of the Past”— recounted during the conservancy’s tour, North Beach was home to many key episodes in the histories of immigrant groups, from Chileans and Australians to Italians and Chinese Americans.

Nor is anyone questioning whether the neighborhood’s most famous and iconic buildings should enjoy special status— such as the Sts. Peter and Paul Church, the City Lights bookstore and Fugazi Hall.

But, the historic district nominationauthored by architectural historian Katherine Petrin identifies about 600 parcels as “contributors” to the district. California’s Historical Resources Commission was going to weigh in on the nomination in February,but Lurie asked for a delay so his administration had more time to review it. Last week, his housing chief, Ned Segal, told me that “having it be many, many hundreds of units might be too big.”

After the YIMBY tour, led by organizing director Jane Natoli, I’m inclined to agree. As Natoli led us past vacant or derelict buildings included in the proposed historic district, she argued that “neighborhood character” isn’t defined only by buildings but also by “the characters that make the neighborhood.”

San Francisco isn’t an archaeological site; it needs people living in it to thrive. And while historical preservation can lead to economic revitalization —as the city’s booming Jackson Square neighborhood demonstrates— it’s important to find balance.

“If you preserve a neighborhood physically to the point where housing is unaffordable, then you end up pushing out the people who actually make the neighborhood what it is,” state Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said in the tour’s opening remarks.

Petrin, who attended the YIMBY tour, said the historic district designation could actually enable development via federal tax credits, which could allow buildings to be repurposed into housing while simultaneously preserving their facades.

But, tour attendee Srinivasan Vijayaraghavan was skeptical of that argument.

“I feel like we care about buildings more than we care about people,” he told me.

Case in point: the Grant Avenue Garage auto repair shop at 501 Filbert St.— which, to the untrained eye, looks like pretty much any other auto repair shop. Yes, it may have a “wood truss roof” and “a Classical Revival decorative cornice,” but I’m willing to bet my salary that tourists aren’t flocking to North Beach to see the building.

Petrin disagrees. “They’re coming to see the collage of architecture in this neighborhood that is unique in the world,” she told me. “If we start picking them off one by one, you lose the integrity.”

This mindset is well-intentioned, but it’s also unrealistic. We don’t have unlimited land or unlimited money. And just because a building meets the technical definition of a historic resource doesn’t necessarily mean it should be preserved forever.

Consider the Verdi building at 659 Union St., where the YIMBY tour ended. The building, once home to apartments and ground-floor businesses including Coit Liquors, has sat empty for years after being gutted by fire, though portions of its historic facade remain. The property owner is nowracing to demolish and replace it with a mixed-use development before new layers of historic review are potentially added.

The historic district proposal has thus already had meaningful consequences for development— although maybe not in the way preservationists would have hoped.

But it’s also crystallized a key ideological question: Is it worth keeping a moderately aesthetically pleasing facade at all costs— even if doing so potentially forecloses the possibility of a vibrant new development that could become foundational to future generations’ conception of North Beach?

Absolutely not.

Taste is subjective. After all, many San Franciscans hated the Transamerica Pyramid when it was first built. Now, many of us can’t imagine the city without its characteristic silhouette— one that’s made San Francisco instantly identifiable around the world.

Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; X: @emily_hoeven