SF art world shifts south with Dogpatch complex’s opening
by Sam Whiting
To start his day at Ever Gold Projects, gallerist Andrew McClintock unlocks an iron gate, unlocks a glass door, steps inside his narrow O’Farrell Street storefront and quickly relocks the door. Once he has his 34-ounce Louisville Slugger close at hand, he is ready to greet any art curator or collector willing to brave a bad block of the Tenderloin and knock on the glass for entry.
This is what it has taken to survive seven years in the steepest San Francisco real estate run-up in modern times. But McClintock now needs more than 500 square feet of space. Last month, that would have meant looking in Oakland or beyond. This month, it means Dogpatch, where a revolutionary new gallery cluster has repurposed a 35,000-square-foot concrete warehouse into a two-story gallery building with interior I-beams, a double sawtooth roof, leaded-glass windows facing south and a sky-lit atrium 200 feet long.
When 1275 Minnesota St. opens with a public cocktail party Friday evening, you will find Ever Gold just past the receptionist desk and an all-day restaurant set to open in September by expansionary chef Daniel Patterson. McClintock will still have a glass door, but instead of being locked, it will be open wide to a communal atrium energized by a number of young dealers in contemporary art.
“I talked to a lot of collectors before I moved over there, and they were all of the opinion that if they could go to a space that had more parking and less crackheads, they would probably be happier,” says McClintock, 31. “That’s how I felt as well.”
Following Friday’s news that John Berggruen Gallery will cross Market Street after 45 years on Grant Avenue to join a new Gagosian Gallery on Howard Street, across from SFMOMA, 1275 Minnesota St. sends the strongest signal yet that the art world in San Francisco has shifted south. The 23rd Street stop on the T-Third line now marks the southern anchorage of the rising DoReMi (Dogpatch, Potrero Hill, Mission) design and arts district.
Fast-growing art district
DoReMi has 62 venues, with two more added just this week, while the district map is at the printer.
“It tells me that this is the fastest-growing art neighborhood in the history of San Francisco,” says Catharine Clark, a native San Franciscan, 25-year gallery owner and cofounder of the district.
At 1275 Minnesota St., visitors will wander among 10 permanent galleries plus three temporary galleries available by the month to art fairs, auction houses and independent curators. Christie’s will be the first tenant and will preview its spring auction in April. There will be a nonprofit educational component, the San Francisco Arts Education Project (SFArtsEd), and performance art in the atrium, with bleachers made of white oak supplying stadium seating at one end.
A Community Open House will be held there March 20 to announce that 1275 Minnesota is just the start of the larger Minnesota Street Project, which will supply more than 100,000 square feet of low rent for the arts. Opening in May is 1240 Minnesota St., a second warehouse with corrugated tin siding that is being built out to provide studio space for 30 working artists, ranging from woodworkers to abstract painters. Up a block is 1150 25th St., with offices for lease to arts organizations, with a 4,500-square-foot art gallery for massive installations.
“The Minnesota Street Project is a godsend,” says Bruce Kin Huie, president of the Dogpatch Neighborhood Association. The gallery building at 1275 Minnesota replaces a furniture workshop that was previously a scene shop for Bill Graham Presents and the Grateful Dead. The art studio building at 1240 Minnesota was vacant. The office complex at 1150 25th St. was also vacant.
Asked to describe what the strip used to look like, Huie says: “You want to talk about homeless, you want to talk about prostitution, you want to talk about drug traffic, which one? That neighborhood block has been completely transformed.”
The three buildings that comprise the Minnesota Street Project are either owned or master-leased by Andy and Deborah Rappaport, a former Woodside couple in their late 50s. Armed with the fortune Andy had made as a partner at August Capital on Sand Hill Road, they moved to Union Street a few years ago to invest in real estate and art.
Those two asset categories have pretty much merged into one as galleries and artists have been priced out of the city. After watching the exodus, the Rappaports came up with their second act.
“Before we had a building, we had five tenants,” says Deborah Rappaport.
The Rappaports are not the type to wait around to be granted nonprofit status. Their business plan is to be a for-profit but with a vow never to make one. Breaking even on Minnesota Street will be a victory, and so will losing a little.
The galleries at 1275 Minnesota were built to offer varying sizes, and the leases are of varying lengths.
Rent below market rates
On a recent tour, Deborah Rappaport would not reveal the rents she is charging, but she says market rate would be between $6 and $10 per square foot per month and her rents “are between one-half and one-third of the going rate for space like this.”
And as important as the price per square foot is the amount of footage that comes with each deal. What sinks many galleries is that they rent more space than they need, so as not to be caught short when they mount a major exhibition. The Minnesota Street plan is for a gallerist to lease minimal space year round, then lease more space as needed for shows. Both a 600-square-foot and a 1,300-square-foot gallery are held back for just that purpose.
With this offer, there were many more applicants for the 10 permanent spaces at 1240 Minnesota than could be accommodated. Tenants were selected to provide a mix of contemporary art styles. Half are established names: Rena Bransten, Nancy Toomey, Jack Fischer and Eleanor Harwood. The other half are names just being tacked together, like Casemore/Kirkeby, and young partnerships that have limped along in out-of-the-way locations.
Et Al has managed to survive in the basement of Union Cleaners in Chinatown. Its customers know to cross under a sign that reads, “Beyond this Line Employees Only,” and go past a rack of shirts, through a narrow door and down a rickety wooden staircase that is over the head of Et Al co-owner Aaron Harbour, sitting at his reception desk.
“In this space we only get a very specific type of ‘intentioned’ visitor who finds us,” says Harbour, who will be opening Et Al Etc. with four times the room at 1275 Minnesota. The price is comparable per square foot, “but the Minnesota Street building is much nicer and seeming like an art gallery,” Harbour says.
“We’re putting the type of work we like in front of a different audience,” says Harbour. “That building is full of all types of galleries that show wildly different types of work.”
Even within one gallery the work can be wildly different as curators partner up to share space and rent. This is the model at Bass & Reiner, where four art school graduates, all between 27 and 31, will alternate curating shows individually. They met at the San Francisco Art Institute while pursuing their MFA degrees and will rotate in 440 square feet, the smallest gallery available.
“When we came here for grad school, we realized the art scene was special and different, but also was going through a transition,” says one of the partners, Chris Grunder, 31. “It needed people willing to make it into its own thing and not L.A. and not New York, and to not let it die. So we decided to hunker down and create a space for artists.”
That’s the name of the inaugural show at Bass & Reiner, “Hunker Down,” but nobody has hunkered down as long as their downstairs neighbor McClintock, five years their senior at the SFAI. He opened his gallery on O’Farrell Street while still an undergrad, then had all three of his partners fall off one by one. But he has hung on with his baseball bat and locked door, and even prospered while his neighborhood deteriorated.
“I wanted to polish things up a little bit,” says McClintock, who last year had his own solo show called “Salt Water Battery 2.0” at Et Al in Chinatown. It drew 500 people, but if it were at the new Et Al Etc. next door to Ever Gold, “it would easily be double that,” he says, “just because of the critical mass of having so many galleries there.”
Each space has a double glass door, enabling gallerists to step out into the atrium and and mix like college kids in a dormitory hallway. They have a shared kitchen, a room for packing and shipping, even a built-in newspaper.
McClintock is owner, publisher and editor of both the San Francisco Arts Quarterly and the New York Arts Quarterly. Both papers will be produced in the back office at his gallery, second door on the right.
‘Many things going on’
“We’ll be running a national and international media company out of my gallery,” he says. “There will be many things going on there.”
Eleanor Harwood has taken an upstairs gallery, 870 square feet, but will also be the first of the permanent tenants to take advantage of temporary space when she absorbs 1,325 square feet downstairs for a one-month show of painting and ceramics by Paul Wackers.
“I’ve been on my own on a corner in the Mission for 10 years, making it work. But this will bring a whole other level of exposure,” says Harwood, 40. “I’ll take all of the youth and energy and excitement around me and suck it up.”
Even Minnesota Street Project Director Julie Casemore is getting in on it. She and partner Stefan Kirkeby have taken one of the larger spaces, 1,600 square feet to open Casemore Kirkeby, a gallery for photography and video.
“Everyone is excited and thinking big,” says Casemore, 37, stepping from her gallery through double glass doors and into the atrium.
“It’s going to be a blast. How could it not be?”