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Political Campaign To Falsify History Of 1934 SF ILA Strike Headquarters
There is a political campaign to falsify the history of the 1934 ILA Strike Headquarters and destroy facade of the Embarcadero side of the building. This campaign has a long history including the role of Michael Theriault who worked with developers to pretend 113 Steuart St. was was not an historic site.
Political Campaign To Falsify History Of 1934 SF ILA Strike Headquarters- Defend Our History
ETIENNE A. GARIN – ARCHITECT, DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF 113 STEUART STREET
The organized efforts in 2008-9 to conceal and falsify the significance for San Francisco of 113 Steuart Street began with the attempts to deny and suppress the historical, cultural and political importance of this site as the nerve center of the Great Maritime Strike and the General Strike of 1934. In 2015 The Commonwealth Club is seeking to conceal the association of 113 Steuart Street/110 the Embarcadero with the leaders of the 83 day Maritime Strike. But, this was the ILA Hall from which Harry Bridges, head of the Strike Committee, emerged as a labor leader of national significance who would be featured on the cover of Time Magazine.
The Commonwealth Club has used the fraudulent denial of any association of persons of significance with the building, to skirt preservation law in their proposed reconstruction of the property. They conspired with the Planning Department to utilize this stratagem to demolish the Embarcadero front and to rehabilitate the late changes to the Steuart Street front which have been made after the period of significance in 1934. The intend to add an a third floor that violates setback standards for landmarks. The falsehood that "no one of significance was associated with the building" has only been pursued to achieve an illegal exemption from required Historic Resource practices.
HANDS OFF COLLECTIVE BARGANING AND HANDS OFF THE ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY OF 1934!
True to the history of the Commonwealth Club, their opposition to the actual record of 1934, in regards to their building program, pales to their misuse of history in their recent Legacy of 1934 Forum that echoed the theme of the maritime bosses today. As the Pacific Maritime Association is turning up the pressure to force the ILWU into mandatory mediation, the Commonwealth Club's Forum on the Legacy of 1934, pushed the abstracted line that mediation was the source of the victory in 1934. But, mediation can not be considered, alone and independent from the context in which it takes place. Mediation in 1934 was only accepted by the workers after the dramatic 83-day defense of the right of collective bargaining and the winning of mass support and public opinion. In fact at the beginning of the strike mediation was rejected. In today's current setting, mediation is in the interest of the bosses as the PMA is trying to dictate. Vast pressure has been brought to force the ILWU to accept mediation now. Today it has been imposed to substitute for and to further gut collective bargaining rights. The preposterous theme of the Commonwealth Clubs December Forum on the Legacy of 1934 contributed to the strong arming of the ILWU today, as much as their gross lie about Bridges having no association with the strike Headquarters in 1934, both contributed toward destroying the legacy of 1934.
The Commonwealth Club hired Page and Turnbull in 2013 to put forward the preposterous proposition that no one of significance was associated with 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero based on one wrong 1980s newspaper article. They also claim that the owner-builders and architect are unknowable. Page and Turnbull is wrong on all of these points as they were wrong in 2008-9 when they first said the building was somewhere else, and then next that it was so changed as to be unrecognizable. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors in March 2009 rejected those falsehoods. Now, it is time for the Board to reject again the false stratagems, put forward to manipulate the planning process and fool the Planning Commission.
The importance, however, of 113 Steuart Street to the architectural history of San Francisco is, it turns out, a further important, if suppressed part of the story.
The designer and builder of 113 Steuart Street was the accomplished San Francisco architect, Etienne A. Garin, of 37 Belvedere Street. Etienne Garin first came to architectural distinction with his prominent multiple designs of churches and collateral buildings for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of the San Francisco Bay Area at the turn of the twentieth century.
GARIN ‘S SACRED HEART CHURCH ON NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES
In 1901, Garin designed the Sacred Heart Church at 40th and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Oakland. Opened in 1902, the building was considered so distinctive that it was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Church survived the 1906 earthquake, but suffered damage during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and did not survive, thus lending 113 Steuart Street even more importance as one of the few remaining designed buildings of Etienne Garin.
The association of Garin and his architectural output with 113 Steuart Street is highlighted by the fact that Garin’s St. Andrew’s Church, built in 1908, was the Oakland Parish church designed for William J. Yore, one of the two owner-builders of 113 Steuart Street which was constructed in 1913. St. Andrews church edifice remains in Oakland today as St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church. It was moved subsequently to 19th and Market.
Garin rebuilt San Francisco’s Notre Dame des Victoires Church after 1906 and, his parish structure adjacent remains today on Bush Street in San Francisco across from the Sutter-Stockton Garage. Not long thereafter, his first St. Anne’s Church in the Richmond District was constructed on Irving Street.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ETIENNE GARIN TO SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
Garin was trained in part by his father, Paul A. Garin, who was Head of Technical Drawing at Oakland Public Schools and who taught many years first at Oakland High School and then after 1900 at Mission High School in San Francisco. Paul Garin published in 1892 a highly regarded manual on technical drawing. His students are a who's who of Bay Area architects from the era.
The young Etienne Garin honed his craft and architectural experience while a member of the firm of the noted San Francisco commercial architect, John J. Clark, beginning in 1895 when Garin turned twenty years of age.
Having made his mark, Garin started out on his own at the age of twenty-three in 1898 when he designed a series of parish buildings and churches for the Archdiocese. He went on to create varied commercial building designs, highlighted by the widely admired flats Garin prepared for Mortimer Fleishhacker – an important commercial developer of the time who donated Fleishhacker Pool to the city.
The Fleischhacker Flats were located on Broadway, east of Octavia, in Pacific Heights. Garin went on to design distinctive residences in Presidio Heights, St. Francis Wood, Jordan Park and across the city of San Francisco.
Garin would design, as well, a series of commercial strip store buildings, including one for himself that he designed ten years after he completed 113 Steuart Street. What is of note is that Garin replicated the parapet silhouette of the ILA headquarters at 113 Steuart Street – a feature he considered distinctive and in the modern mode. It wasn't the machine modern side of the modern but the arts and crafts side.
Garin built 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero in 1913 for two partners. He utilized completely different styles for each street front to take commercial advantage of the different uses that had evolved on each street. On the Embarcadero as the waterfront boulevard, it contained the potential for more "front office" and maritime business tenants. Garin allotted most of the budget on the more elaborate Embarcadero Front. On the Steuart Street Front, Garin utilized a more innovative style, rendered in a less elaborate, yet direct manner, than that on the Embarcadero. Light industrial uses and loft space were established on Steuart by 1913. Where on the Embarcadero Garin employed the formal classic vocabulary and details, he contrasted on the Steuart Street Front with the early-California inspired "Portola" Style which mixed the Arts and Crafts with an updated Mission Style, that looked more closely at Spanish prototypes. The distinctive parapet employs an Arts and Crafts motif as do the simple piers without capitals. Above the piers, stylized beam ends "protruded" through the reinforced concrete walls which were covered in stucco to suggest adobe. The popularization of the "Portola" in San Francisco is represented by the 113 Steuart Street Front. The "Portola" style is one the SF Planning Department does not even acknowledge, as it is an element of Californian Architecture, and is not well known outside the state where most of the department staff originate.
Many of Garin’s commercial buildings were exceptional, exemplified by his design for one building on Fillmore in the Pacific Heights commercial district near California Street.
Etienne Garin enjoyed an innovative career with varied output, denoting him as a distinctive figure in San Francisco architectural history.
His career was cut short tragically in 1927 when he died at the age of 52 from a skull fracture, whose cause remains unknown to this day.
113 Steuart Street is one the few remaining examples of Etienne Garin’s opus. Like his important Sacred Heart Church, which is no longer with us, 113 Steuart deserves equally to be on the National Register of Historic Places, not solely because of the great historic significance of this building and the union hall that became ground zero for seminal events in the history of labor, but also because the building itself at 113 Steuart Street, as the record shows, enjoys a distinctive place in the architectural history of San Francisco and the Bay Area. The "Portola" style which was referred to contemporarily provided the link between the Mission and the more archeological styles of Spanish Colonial, Italian villa and Mediterranean Revival of the late teens and twenties. Garin achieved with the 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero an example of a single building utilizing different fronts to connect with different commercial uses. He utilized a style that was central to modernism and connected San Francisco esthetically with European Arts and Crafts. Garin was a serious architect who contributed to the evolution of Bay Area Architecture.
113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero deserves amply to be a land-marked building of the city of San Francisco, on the National Register of Historic Places, and to be a National Landmark.
The refusal by the Commonwealth Club to landmark shows their true attitude to the legacy of 1934.
ETIENNE A. GARIN – ARCHITECT, DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF 113 STEUART STREET
BRADLEY WIEDMAIER & RALPH SCHOENMAN
535 Geary Street – Suite 912 – San Francisco, CA 94102
phone: 415.694 3605 phone: 707.552.9992
email: bradley_wiedmaier [at] yahoo.com * email: rbs1 [at] pacbell.net
ETIENNE A. GARIN – ARCHITECT, DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF 113 STEUART STREET
The organized efforts in 2008-9 to conceal and falsify the significance for San Francisco of 113 Steuart Street began with the attempts to deny and suppress the historical, cultural and political importance of this site as the nerve center of the Great Maritime Strike and the General Strike of 1934. In 2015 The Commonwealth Club is seeking to conceal the association of 113 Steuart Street/110 the Embarcadero with the leaders of the 83 day Maritime Strike. But, this was the ILA Hall from which Harry Bridges, head of the Strike Committee, emerged as a labor leader of national significance who would be featured on the cover of Time Magazine.
The Commonwealth Club has used the fraudulent denial of any association of persons of significance with the building, to skirt preservation law in their proposed reconstruction of the property. They conspired with the Planning Department to utilize this stratagem to demolish the Embarcadero front and to rehabilitate the late changes to the Steuart Street front which have been made after the period of significance in 1934. The intend to add an a third floor that violates setback standards for landmarks. The falsehood that "no one of significance was associated with the building" has only been pursued to achieve an illegal exemption from required Historic Resource practices.
HANDS OFF COLLECTIVE BARGANING AND HANDS OFF THE ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY OF 1934!
True to the history of the Commonwealth Club, their opposition to the actual record of 1934, in regards to their building program, pales to their misuse of history in their recent Legacy of 1934 Forum that echoed the theme of the maritime bosses today. As the Pacific Maritime Association is turning up the pressure to force the ILWU into mandatory mediation, the Commonwealth Club's Forum on the Legacy of 1934, pushed the abstracted line that mediation was the source of the victory in 1934. But, mediation can not be considered, alone and independent from the context in which it takes place. Mediation in 1934 was only accepted by the workers after the dramatic 83-day defense of the right of collective bargaining and the winning of mass support and public opinion. In fact at the beginning of the strike mediation was rejected. In today's current setting, mediation is in the interest of the bosses as the PMA is trying to dictate. Vast pressure has been brought to force the ILWU to accept mediation now. Today it has been imposed to substitute for and to further gut collective bargaining rights. The preposterous theme of the Commonwealth Clubs December Forum on the Legacy of 1934 contributed to the strong arming of the ILWU today, as much as their gross lie about Bridges having no association with the strike Headquarters in 1934, both contributed toward destroying the legacy of 1934.
The Commonwealth Club hired Page and Turnbull in 2013 to put forward the preposterous proposition that no one of significance was associated with 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero based on one wrong 1980s newspaper article. They also claim that the owner-builders and architect are unknowable. Page and Turnbull is wrong on all of these points as they were wrong in 2008-9 when they first said the building was somewhere else, and then next that it was so changed as to be unrecognizable. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors in March 2009 rejected those falsehoods. Now, it is time for the Board to reject again the false stratagems, put forward to manipulate the planning process and fool the Planning Commission.
The importance, however, of 113 Steuart Street to the architectural history of San Francisco is, it turns out, a further important, if suppressed part of the story.
The designer and builder of 113 Steuart Street was the accomplished San Francisco architect, Etienne A. Garin, of 37 Belvedere Street. Etienne Garin first came to architectural distinction with his prominent multiple designs of churches and collateral buildings for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of the San Francisco Bay Area at the turn of the twentieth century.
GARIN ‘S SACRED HEART CHURCH ON NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES
In 1901, Garin designed the Sacred Heart Church at 40th and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way in Oakland. Opened in 1902, the building was considered so distinctive that it was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Church survived the 1906 earthquake, but suffered damage during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and did not survive, thus lending 113 Steuart Street even more importance as one of the few remaining designed buildings of Etienne Garin.
The association of Garin and his architectural output with 113 Steuart Street is highlighted by the fact that Garin’s St. Andrew’s Church, built in 1908, was the Oakland Parish church designed for William J. Yore, one of the two owner-builders of 113 Steuart Street which was constructed in 1913. St. Andrews church edifice remains in Oakland today as St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church. It was moved subsequently to 19th and Market.
Garin rebuilt San Francisco’s Notre Dame des Victoires Church after 1906 and, his parish structure adjacent remains today on Bush Street in San Francisco across from the Sutter-Stockton Garage. Not long thereafter, his first St. Anne’s Church in the Richmond District was constructed on Irving Street.
THE IMPORTANCE OF ETIENNE GARIN TO SAN FRANCISCO ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY
Garin was trained in part by his father, Paul A. Garin, who was Head of Technical Drawing at Oakland Public Schools and who taught many years first at Oakland High School and then after 1900 at Mission High School in San Francisco. Paul Garin published in 1892 a highly regarded manual on technical drawing. His students are a who's who of Bay Area architects from the era.
The young Etienne Garin honed his craft and architectural experience while a member of the firm of the noted San Francisco commercial architect, John J. Clark, beginning in 1895 when Garin turned twenty years of age.
Having made his mark, Garin started out on his own at the age of twenty-three in 1898 when he designed a series of parish buildings and churches for the Archdiocese. He went on to create varied commercial building designs, highlighted by the widely admired flats Garin prepared for Mortimer Fleishhacker – an important commercial developer of the time who donated Fleishhacker Pool to the city.
The Fleischhacker Flats were located on Broadway, east of Octavia, in Pacific Heights. Garin went on to design distinctive residences in Presidio Heights, St. Francis Wood, Jordan Park and across the city of San Francisco.
Garin would design, as well, a series of commercial strip store buildings, including one for himself that he designed ten years after he completed 113 Steuart Street. What is of note is that Garin replicated the parapet silhouette of the ILA headquarters at 113 Steuart Street – a feature he considered distinctive and in the modern mode. It wasn't the machine modern side of the modern but the arts and crafts side.
Garin built 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero in 1913 for two partners. He utilized completely different styles for each street front to take commercial advantage of the different uses that had evolved on each street. On the Embarcadero as the waterfront boulevard, it contained the potential for more "front office" and maritime business tenants. Garin allotted most of the budget on the more elaborate Embarcadero Front. On the Steuart Street Front, Garin utilized a more innovative style, rendered in a less elaborate, yet direct manner, than that on the Embarcadero. Light industrial uses and loft space were established on Steuart by 1913. Where on the Embarcadero Garin employed the formal classic vocabulary and details, he contrasted on the Steuart Street Front with the early-California inspired "Portola" Style which mixed the Arts and Crafts with an updated Mission Style, that looked more closely at Spanish prototypes. The distinctive parapet employs an Arts and Crafts motif as do the simple piers without capitals. Above the piers, stylized beam ends "protruded" through the reinforced concrete walls which were covered in stucco to suggest adobe. The popularization of the "Portola" in San Francisco is represented by the 113 Steuart Street Front. The "Portola" style is one the SF Planning Department does not even acknowledge, as it is an element of Californian Architecture, and is not well known outside the state where most of the department staff originate.
Many of Garin’s commercial buildings were exceptional, exemplified by his design for one building on Fillmore in the Pacific Heights commercial district near California Street.
Etienne Garin enjoyed an innovative career with varied output, denoting him as a distinctive figure in San Francisco architectural history.
His career was cut short tragically in 1927 when he died at the age of 52 from a skull fracture, whose cause remains unknown to this day.
113 Steuart Street is one the few remaining examples of Etienne Garin’s opus. Like his important Sacred Heart Church, which is no longer with us, 113 Steuart deserves equally to be on the National Register of Historic Places, not solely because of the great historic significance of this building and the union hall that became ground zero for seminal events in the history of labor, but also because the building itself at 113 Steuart Street, as the record shows, enjoys a distinctive place in the architectural history of San Francisco and the Bay Area. The "Portola" style which was referred to contemporarily provided the link between the Mission and the more archeological styles of Spanish Colonial, Italian villa and Mediterranean Revival of the late teens and twenties. Garin achieved with the 113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero an example of a single building utilizing different fronts to connect with different commercial uses. He utilized a style that was central to modernism and connected San Francisco esthetically with European Arts and Crafts. Garin was a serious architect who contributed to the evolution of Bay Area Architecture.
113 Steuart/110 the Embarcadero deserves amply to be a land-marked building of the city of San Francisco, on the National Register of Historic Places, and to be a National Landmark.
The refusal by the Commonwealth Club to landmark shows their true attitude to the legacy of 1934.
ETIENNE A. GARIN – ARCHITECT, DESIGNER AND BUILDER OF 113 STEUART STREET
BRADLEY WIEDMAIER & RALPH SCHOENMAN
535 Geary Street – Suite 912 – San Francisco, CA 94102
phone: 415.694 3605 phone: 707.552.9992
email: bradley_wiedmaier [at] yahoo.com * email: rbs1 [at] pacbell.net
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The "developer" is the non-profit Commonwealth Club, whose project is supported by the Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), the San Francisco Central Labor Council and the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council. It is also supported by many groups in the local neighborhood including the YMCA and the Jewish Community Federation and by local residents.
The Commonwealth Club has already brought major new attention to the Labor history at this site by conducting monthly waterfront history walks and holding events such as the December 3rd panel discussion commemorating the 80th anniversary of Bloody Thursday, where striking dockworkers were killed in San Francisco. Listen to the podcast of the labor panel here - http://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archive/podcast/bloody-thursday-now-80-years-labor-history-san-francisco
The project is so responsible and broadly supported that it has received the approval of the San Francisco Planning Department and then two unanimous votes of support from the San Francisco Planning Commission.
Labor advocates are supporting this project as bringing new light and attention to the labor history of the 1930s.
Paste these links in your browser and read the 25 letters of community support for the Commonwealth Club, including the union supporters.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/2isz4oun0n3l9lo/AAC0RKfMaAEDOV7dzAoiEmxSa/Final%20PDF%20CWC%20Project%20Sponsor%20Packet%20for%20BOS%20Hearing_01.27.15.pdf?dl=0
and
https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=3450026&GUID=29C68E03-2D11-42C2-894E-4ED4890EDA3F
http://www.ilwu.org/san-franciscos-new-james-r-herman-cruise-ship-terminal-seeks-support-to-promote-ilwu-legacy/
http://www.bcdc.ca.gov/minutes/2011/05-05Minutes.shtml
http://www.bcdc.ca.gov/BPA/3-11and4-11Feb2012.pdf
http://www.sfbos.org/index.aspx?page=15651
http://www.rinconneighbors.com/embarc.html
Commonwealth Club has already shown their intention to manipulate history to use against labor and the ILWU as when they featured in their house magazine's coverage of the December 3 1934 Forum, which only took place because of the Appeal, the half truth that "Arbitration turned out to be very good. It gave them everything they wanted." In 1934 the stevedores rejected arbitration at the beginning and did not accept it until after the strike had won public support. That magazine coverage was right at the time last December when all the bosses organs like the SFChronicle were screaming that the ILWU should accept mandatory mediation in its contract dispute today. This shows the true loyalties of the Commonwealth Club.
Real labor policy stands simply for good planning and preservation practices. It is the labor fakers who are tied to the developer bosses and back anything anywhere for anyone at the top. The unelected Building Trades Czars are helping destroy planning and preservation practices in San Francisco, this is causing delay and lost jobs. Planning is a gain for working people. In the bad times the developers cannot provide jobs. In the good they turn to scabs. Rank and file building trades craft workers must break the cycle of supporting the useless hacks with such a strategy.
Like most project critics we worked to have the project go ahead smoothly under the provisions of planning and preservation law. Let Commonwealth Club build, but without exemption from the preservation laws that really do protect the history, and provide for the community interest. Those who call for total exemption from planning law are destroying history and the ones delaying jobs.