Oakland's Central Station was once the western terminus of the Transcontinental Railway, and the Beaux Arts train station that still stands at the end of 16th Street near the 980 freeway has seen better days. Various plans for renovating and preserving the structure have been proposed and scrapped -- including a museum honoring the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a first of its kind African American labor union which had its start here -- and it now sits amid multiple new residential developments. Bridge Housing, a non-profit developer of affordable housing, now owns the building and the property it sits on, and they're renewing efforts to figure out a cheap way to reuse the building after HBO recently used it for a set for their film Hemingway & Gellhorn, starring Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. In order to get it ready for filming, HBO invested about $200,000 into replacing windows, patching the roof, and painting the place. more ›

Those rainbow flag banners that hang vertically off the tops of lampposts along Market Street in the Castro? They're apparently illegal according to historic preservationists, who say that nothing but temporary banners are allowed to be attached to the poles, which are themselves designated historic structures. The metal bands attaching these small banners tend to rust, and many of these banners — which have been hanging up there for about a decade and are not to be confused with the larger rainbow flags that are hung all the way down Market in honor of Pride Month in June — are looking kind of faded and tattered these days. As a Facebook Group devoted to the matter puts it, "They are now filthy and torn and no longer express the PRIDE that our community feels." UPDATE: It's looks like most of the banners, at least along Market between Castro and Sanchez, have already come down. more ›

A proposed "upscale hostel" at 7th and Market with a restaurant, basement nightclub, and two large rooftop terraces was approved by the Planning Commission last week, and once completed in 2012 it will nearly double the number of hostel beds in San Francisco from 620 to 1,106. The Grant Building at 1095 Market was originally built for office uses in 1904, and currently still has a few office and non-profit tenants who will have to vacate. The street-level facade of the building, long since altered from the original, will be restored. "This is an excellent example of adaptive re-use," said Commissioner Christina Olague. "It's always nice to see a building preserved." more ›

The fate of the Tonga Room, that beloved but not often crowded Tiki bar in the bowels of the Fairmont Hotel, is on the docket at the Historic Preservation Commission's meeting today. Though Planning has already ruled that the historic space must be preserved in some way, today the commission discusses with the developers what their actual preservation plan entails. more ›

Writing in the Chron, John King examines the current state of the Tonga Room preservation debate, in which preservation architect Chris VerPlanck is preparing a nomination package for saving the Fairmont hotel's pseudo-Polynesian paradise as a historic interior. "My preservation ethos gears me toward pop kitsch and industrial vernacular," says VerPlank, whose firm Kelley & VerPlanck is working on a 21-page report (link via Grub Street SF) to be filed with the Historic Preservation Commission. Unlike New York City, where places like Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant have been declared landmark interiors, San Francisco's preservation board doesn't yet have a protocol for preserving interiors -- only buildings, sites and landscape features. VerPlanck argues that the Tonga Room "represents a highly evolved and rare example of the so-called 'High Tiki' style," but King isn't buying it, playing devil's advocate and asking whether we should be saving anything that anyone claims a kitschy attachment to. more ›

In case you aren't tuned into City Planning and Architectural Preservation news, the SFBG has a new piece about the battle surrounding the possible demolition of 113 Steuart Street, which once housed the Longshoremen's union during a historic labor strike in 1934. It seems the developer hired preservationist architects Page & Turnbull to write up an assessment of the property which failed to mention anything about the historic strike or the events that took place there, and it was only after Supervisor Aaron Peskin and preservation activists researched the building themselves that Page & Turnbull amended their report. The Guardian asserts that this was a primary reason why the Board of Supes voted to reject Newsom's nomination of one of P&T's principals, Ruth Todd, to the city's Historic Preservation Commission. more ›

We were originally going to put a cursory summary of Partners in Preservation's program in Day Around The Bay, but after poking around on the website, it's so cool that we've elevated it to a stand-alone post. American Express, in connection with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the World Monuments Fund, will give $1 million to historic sites around the Bay Area. The way they'll determine who to give the money to and how to divide it up is by online voting. more ›