By Thomas K. Pendergast

Three San Francisco Supervisors are pushing to give structures with a significant past “landmark” status, to protect them from changes coming through the Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Family Zoning Plan.

District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman kicked this unofficial movement off last year when he proposed 16 properties for consideration as official landmark sites, including the old SFFD Truck Company No. 12 at 1757 Waller St.

Now, District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill is adding an additional 18 buildings to the queue, including the Mel’s Drive-In diner at 3355 Geary Blvd.

Meanwhile, District 1 Supervisor Connie Chan has proposed the Jefferson Airplane “Mansion” on Fulton Street receive landmark status.

“We know that San Francisco has relatively few local landmarks as we remove constraints on housing and upzone neighborhoods to allow more density,” Mandelman said when he first introduced a resolution proposing landmark status for the initial batch. “We need to ensure that what’s left standing still tells the story of what we’ve been.”

Preservation Tech Specialist Alex Westhoff of the San Francisco Planning Department’s preservationists team told the Land Use and Transportation Committee of the SF Board of Supervisors on March 23 that this is a piece of a larger effort to deal with the potential of developers demolishing historically significant buildings to make room for larger, more lucrative construction projects.

“This is part of an effort of the City to keep our commitment to ensuring that growth associated with ambitious housing production goals is aligned with San Francisco’s longstanding dedication to preserving historic places deeply embedded in San Francisco’s unique cultural identity,” Westhoff said. “The Planning Department has been working with a number of district supervisors on identifying and designating properties with exemplary architectural, historical and/or cultural significance as City landmarks.”

Sherrill has been part of this shift in building classification and prioritization as he proposes 18 different sites for landmark designation in his area, which includes the Presidio, Laurel Heights and Anza Vista, near the University of San Francisco campus.

“I look forward to learning more about each of these sites after the Historic Preservation Commission delivers their findings on the merits of each individual parcel,” Sherrill said in a statement released by his office. “Based on their research, my colleagues and I will use that feedback to ultimately make a determination, landmarking the sites that hold special San Franciscan history and significance.”

Stephen “Woody” LaBounty, president and CEO of San Francisco Heritage, confirmed that they are looking to streamline the process for landmarking buildings because the clock is ticking as the impacts of the Family Zoning Plan develop further.

“We have been working with the mayor’s office to make landmark designation a quicker process because in the past it would take so much work and years, at times, to get it through the bureaucracy that you need to go through to get something landmarked,” LaBounty said.

He said San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has committed to speed up the process by proposing “batches” of landmark designations instead of one each at a time.

“So that’s what part of this whole effort has been, is to go into each supervisorial district, find the cream of the crop that should really be recognized and bring them as groups through the process so the whole effort goes faster,” he said.

The Jefferson Airplane “Mansion” was designed and built in 1904 by R.A. Vance at 2400 Fulton St. and survived the 1906 earthquake. It had 17 rooms, eight fireplaces, three gardens and a fresco on the ceiling of the second-floor master bedroom that depicted a reclining, semi-nude woman, according to a 2015 article by Arnold Woods, published by the Western Neighborhoods Project.

In 1968 the house was put up for sale and Jefferson Airplane bought it for $70, 000 as tenants in common.

They built a rehearsal space and recording studio in the basement and they hired a carpenter who, conveniently enough, was also a martial arts trainer and a cocaine dealer. According to Woods, he built a device in the basement that could deliver nitrous oxide to six people at once, until the band members would pass out.

A crazed fan once broke in and trashed the place. When Grace Slick arrived at the mansion and saw the mess she retrieved a gun, thinking the intruder was still in the house. She heard footsteps and “almost blew (David Crosby’s) head off.”

After selling the mansion, the members of Jefferson Airplane memorialized it by naming their 1987 compilation album “2400 Fulton Street.”

While association with hedonism and Rock n’ Roll excess at the mansion is well known among music fans, another business proposed for landmark status is associated more with a previous era of drive-in diners, poodle skirts, sock hops and the movie “American Graffiti.”

None of that, however, is why Mel’s Drive-In at 3355 Geary Blvd. is being nominated for landmark status.

Instead, its lesser-known connection with the Civil Rights movement for racial equality in 1963 – and a series of events in the fall of that year – is why it is being protected.

“After consulting our residents and our preservation staff, I determined that Mel’s Diner on Geary would be worthwhile for consideration,” Sherrill stated. “It was at this Mel’s Diner that, in 1963, the diner became one of the first sit-ins in San Francisco – a place where civil rights activists bravely fought for equal rights for all under the law.”

In the early 1960s, Arthur Sheridan, 25, of San Francisco and Mike Myerson, 23, a University of California, Berkeley student, began recruiting activists by driving through the Fillmore District and announcing their plans by loudspeaker. They formed the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, which included members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Youth for Jobs and the W.E.B. DuBois Club of San Francisco.

On October 19, 1963, they picketed three Mel’s Drive-In restaurants, then owned by Mel Weiss and SF mayoral candidate Harold Dobbs, as well as in front of Dobbs’ home at 1601 Monterey Blvd. on Nov. 2.

In a San Francisco Chronicle article, Dobbs claimed that of the 245 people in his employment, 27 were Black. Former San Francisco National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president, Terry Francois, however, responded by saying Dobbs restricted those individuals to “more or less to menial jobs.”

Then on Nov. 3, a group of mostly students filled the restaurant starting at 4:15 p.m. and sang “We Shall Overcome” while clapping and pounding on tabletops as picketers chanted outside, according to a 2020 article by Nicole Meldahl in Outside Lands, a Western Neighborhoods Project publication.

Meldahl writes that restaurant manager Jack Everett went table-to-table asking if they wanted to order but only one group asked for a cup of tea and six straws. The rest did not, so he called the police.

The SFPD arrived with paddy wagons and arrested the protesters, who linked arms in passive resistance, taking more than a dozen officers over half-an-hour to get them all out of the diner and into the wagon.

Except for one demonstrator, whose resistance was not so passive, a 26-year-old law student named Terence Hallinan, who would later get elected as a Supervisor and then eventually become San Francisco’s District Attorney.

Prior to this incident he already had a reputation as a troublemaker who had no problem throwing down if he felt so inspired.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that scuffles broke out as officers forced demonstrators into the paddy wagons. Hallinan later said he lost his temper because the police were “unnecessarily rough,” so he had to respond in kind.

They were arrested for disturbing the peace and obstructing justice and reportedly were “singing and chanting all the way” to jail.

One participant who was there, Jo Freeman, later stated that this was the first mass sit-in of the Bay Area civil rights movement.

After another protest on Nov. 6, Weiss and Dobbs agreed to set up a training school facilitating the promotion of Black employees, paying them while they learned over a 30-day period.