An Untold Story Alice Street Community Gardens A Secret SOMA Treasure
An Untold Story: Alice Street Community Gardens - A Secret SOMA Treasure
October 30th, 2024
In 1971 the first tenants of newly built Clementina Towers public housing found themselves in the midst of a redevelopment bulldozer wasteland, surrounded by the barren ruins of their one-time Yerba Buena home. Then, inspired by the first Earth Day in 1970, Walter Knox and his fellow residents decided to build their own community garden across Clementina Street on a 14,000 sq. ft. fenced off empty lot that had not yet been paved over by the Redevelopment Agency. So, without permission they cut a hole in the fence, scavenged wood planks, dug it up, and built makeshift planting beds. By that Fall the Towers residents’ new flowers and vegetables took root there. The Agency noticed this trespass but let it go because in 1973 they agreed anyway to commit this parcel to future affordable senior housing development as part of their federal lawsuit Settlement with TOOR (Tenants And Owners Opposed To Redevelopment, TODCO’s founders) that enabled the entire Yerba Buena project to go ahead.
Alice Street Gardens On Lapu Lapu Alley In SOMA
That era was the beginning of the community gardens movement in San Francisco, still very much alive today with dozens of beloved commons across the City. And Clementina Gardens bloomed, tended by the Towers tenants for the next ten years. Until the time came in 1985 for TODCO to at last build the promised affordable senior housing on that site, utilizing HUD financing for the future Ceatrice Polite Apartments (named after one of TOOR’s early leaders), 91 federally subsidized low-income senior apartments. But what about the community garden, would the Redevelopment Agency provide another lot nearby to build a new replacement garden for local seniors? TODCO asked. “No,” was the Agency’s typical first reply. So TODCO’s director wrote and asked the Agency why it had recently sold the prime northwest corner lot at Fourth and Howard Streets to a local builder for just $16 per sq. ft., even that long ago an astoundingly low price. That property was planned to be developed with a new very valuable 200,000 sq. ft. “United Airlines” office building (which was ultimately condemned and demolished by the City twenty years later for the Moscone West expansion project).
“I think we can find someplace for a new garden,” the Agency’s deputy director called up and told TODCO’s director the next week. Another TODCO senior housing project was also planned soon on Folsom Street nearby, the future Mendelsohn House (named after TOOR’s first Chairman), and there was a 15,000 sq. ft. Agency parking lot next to its site along Lapu Lapu alley. The former Alice Street had been renamed a few years earlier to honor the legendary Philippines tribal chieftain who first encountered and fought the Spanish conquistadors of Magellan’s fleet in 1521. So TODCO leased the lot for $1 per year from the Agency and built a new replacement community garden there that opened in 1985 when the original Clementina Street Garden site was cleared to start the Ceatrice Polite Apartments project. Renovated by TODCO several times since, this Alice Street Community Gardens has provided accessible individual planter beds for about 200 elders living in the Yerba Buena Neighborhood all these years. Open from dawn to dusk it is used as a lovely local mini park by other local residents and workers too.
Communities and community gardens are living and evolving places, not just marks on a map. The Gardens’ one-time 8 ft poplar tree saplings have since grown to be 100 ft tall, even rising above the surrounding office buildings Redevelopment fostered long ago. It’s so cherished by all, the Redevelopment Agency granted the Gardens’ ownership to TODCO in 2005, provided that it always remains a community garden. So now this October, 39 years after its birth, Alice Street Gardens and neighborhood park is being graced with a vibrant new mural, City Life Oasis, painted by Michael Rios, the renowned San Francisco Artist Emeritus muralist, on the outside of a salvaged shipping container lifted into place on the Gardens service way. Walter Knox would be proud of his legacy, a vision of community and nature combined in harmony. TODCO’s Knox SRO on Sixth Street, completed in 1994, is named after Walter to honor the beautiful energy he gave to the South of Market.
This coming Sunday, October 13, local Yerba Buena residents and the City’s Filipino-American community will gather together at Noon on Lapu Lapu Street to celebrate completion of artist Johanna Poethig’s 80 ft tall Filipino hero’s mural, Ang Lipi ni Lapu Lapu, on the adjacent San Lorenzo Ruiz Center senior apartments stair tower, across the alley opposite Michael Rios’ new Gardens mural too. Little-known out-of-the-way Lapu Lapu alley, and Alice Street Gardens are surely secret treasures of SOMA, filled with life, flowers and vegetables, with butterflies and hummingbirds, with tall trees and busy gardeners, and with the art, beauty and soul of this community’s many generations, shared too now with all of San Francisco.
City Life Oasis by Michael Rios
By John Elberling, President TODCO Group
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