Horrific Dolores Park Bathroom Building to be Demolished
You only have a few more months to cash in your friend's $100 "standing offer" to crap in Dolores Park's notoriously-inviting powder room, because when the park renovations are all wrapped up, the clubhouse will be little more than a nice patch of grass.
From what I'm told, it was a rare moment of neighborhood consensus--80% of the park neighbors voted to level the allegedly 'historic' building. The neighbors had already approved two new bathroom buildings for the park (one by the 18th and Church Muni stop and another by the playground) and figured it wasn't worth saving the relatively useless structure and the hundred years of human shit caked to its sad walls.
Connie Chan, Rec & Park's Deputy Director of Public Affairs, sent us a one sentence statement on what's next:
The community has overwhelmingly voted to remove the clubhouse, which will be reflected in the final concept plan, and will go through an environmental review process with SF Planning Dept.
I have no idea what most of that means, but I understand that "environmental review process" is synonymous with "it takes five years to do anything, so don't count your chickens."
Anyway, I sincerely hope we get to pay our final respects to the building that has somewhat served our need for a quite place to fuck around with needle drugs in some spectacular funeral pyre. Ed Lee can hose down the building with napalm while the denizens of Dolores Park silently stand around the building, Tecates in hand, breathing the asbestos-filled smoke. And just as the building begins to smoulder, Cold Beer Cold Water will emerge from the crowd, lifting a boombox over his head, and begin playing November Rain.
It'll be sweet as hell.
Comments
Damn. I lost my virginity in that bathroom. Twice.
Adherence to historic preservation standards is evaluated during Environmental Review. The clubhouse, being old is considered historic.
A 100-year-old turd is still shit.
This ain't Penn Station...
Kev: Aesthetics are not the only, or even most important, quality used when assessing a property's historic significance.
I'm not arguing that the Dolores Park bathrooms should be preserved, I'm just saying that it ain't about what it looks like.
Agreed. For example, a lot of folks don't know an interesting piece of history about the bathroom. In 1776 when Junipero Serra first came to the area, he took a massive dump in the Dolores Park bathroom. It's been preserved since then just like it was when he found it.
Wrong. There's more to being historic than just being old. It has to be "significant" in some way. I hope a member of the Dolores Park Works knows that.
I thought sleeve tats were supposed to make you tough! Get in there and drop a bomb, girl.
the new bathrooms should be 100% concrete with candlestick piss troughs, basically a santa cruz beach bathroom, that can be easily powerwashed.....
Another historic structure destroyed. No respect for history. No excuse for not keeping it clean. This past spring, I used one of the bathrooms in NYC's Central Park. One of the cleanest public toilets I've ever used--other than those in Europe staffed by attendants.
Let's use the space instead to erect a monument to grilled cheese sandwiches, pork belly stew and nouveau cocktails.
Why is it that people only care about these 'historic' buildings once they're to be torn down? Until that point they're completely neglected, as if absolutely no fucks are given.
The Historic Resource Evaluation prepared for Dolores Park clearly indicates that the bathrooms (then called a "convenience station" were originally MUCH larger prior to alterations in 1960.
As originally built in 1913, the convenience station men's room "featured four urinals, three toilets and three sinks. The women’s restroom included five toilets and three sinks. The bathrooms featured tile floors and wainscots, and were separated from each other by a long storage corridor at the center of the building."
In 1960, the clubhouse was added to the top of the building, and the bathrooms were altered so that the men's room included only one urinal, one toilet and one sink, and the women's restroom was reduced to two toilets and one sink.
So in 1913 they had much better facilities than they do today! It seems to me that they should restore the original configuration and then actually CLEAN UP the bathrooms on a regular basis. There's no guarantee that new bathrooms--without proper maintenance--won't end up looking like old bathrooms in a short time.
Not a bad point, really. SF is woefully lacking in public toilet facilities in general these days, however. It ain't just Dolores Park.
Darn! I was really hoping they would take Chicken John's suggestion and turn it in to a McDonalds.
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