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  • From: internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org (Thomas Beckett)
  • Subject: [internetworkers] boho resurgence
  • Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 09:49:07 -0500 (EST)

This article indicates that the freaks and artists are returning
to the spaces that the tech boom displaced them from in San Francisco.
I wonder if we'll see a similar phenomenon here. Not only artists
and oddball businesses returning to Carrboro and such, but perhaps
invading all of the new-built office space that's sitting empty now.

TaB
----------------------
Bohemian Rhapsody Returns To Offices of Dead Dot-Coms
Artists, Activists Invade Spaces in San Francisco That Dot-Com Boom
Once Evicted Them From
By NICK WINGFIELD, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
http://online.wsj.com/article/
0,,SB1044396041283669813,00.html?mod=home%5Fpage%5Fone%5Fus

SAN FRANCISCO -- In the South of Market district here, the two-story
building at 690 Fifth St. is packed with quirky fixtures of the old
dot-com workplace. A fountain trickles in the lofty atrium. Hip-hop
music pulses from glass-walled offices as people peck at computers.
Rice-paper screens obscure an elegant conference room.

These were once the offices of Netcentives Inc., an Internet flop that
marketed worker-incentive and loyalty programs. But look who's here
now: a Tibetan rug maker, an Irish arts foundation and an
Asian-American theater company. There are also filmmakers, a record
label, fiction writers and a couple of dozen nonprofits and artistic
groups.

"This will be the beginning of the biggest renaissance in creativity in

San Francisco history," says David Latimer, who manages the building.
He's encouraged because these are the very folks the dot-coms began
squeezing out of the prime real estate just a few years ago. Their
displacement sparked street protests, antigrowth measures and fears
about the loss of this liberal city's cultural life and its historical
soul.

But they're back, the artists and the activists, reclaiming the
neighborhood that once was the epicenter of the thriving Internet
scene. The city rode the dot-com boom as startups piled into town,
bringing with them lavish launch parties, jobs and prosperity. Now,
amid the bust, the rental market has cooled, allowing the dislocated to

reclaim turf they were priced out of just a few years ago.

Here in San Francisco, one of the cradles of bohemian culture, artists
and gold-diggers have alternately reshaped neighborhoods like no other
city in the country. In the 19th century, poets and writers were drawn
by the natural beauty, raucous saloons and free-wheeling culture. The
Beat movement attracted artists of all stripes to the coffee houses and

jazz clubs in the 1950s. In the 1960s, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood
was the prime urban stomping ground for the nation's counterculture
movement. And the city has long had a thriving gay community
contributing to the cultural milieu.

"People come here looking to find themselves," says Larry Harvey, the
founder of Burning Man, a San Francisco organization that holds a
popular arts festival in the Nevada desert. "If they're sincere in that

pursuit they tend to stay."

But the city has also been a center of manic capitalism. The gold rush
of 1849 established San Francisco as a hub of finance. By the end of
that century, the city's bohemian community had settled into cheap
studios in the Montgomery Block building -- also known as Monkey Block
-- downtown. It was one of the city's first major office buildings,
abandoned when San Francisco's mining and banking interests moved to
other parts of the city. Almost a century later, the pyramid-shaped
Transamerica building was erected on the site, a distinctive icon on
the San Francisco skyline.

In recent decades, nearby Silicon Valley brought an influx of
technology, banking and other businesses, but San Francisco retained
its reputation as a bulwark of liberal politics. And a unique mix of
businesses and bohemians crammed into a city less than a sixth the size

of New York City.

That precarious balance between the two groups, for a time, seemed
threatened as never before by the Internet frenzy. And South of Market,

or Soma, as locals affectionately call it, is something of an
archaeological record of that boom and bust. Long home to light
manufacturing, Soma was also a favorite of dance clubs, museums and
artists. The roomy lofts and warehouses appealed to the irreverent
sensibilities of Internet companies more than the pricier offices of
the nearby financial district. In the late 1990s, Soma came to be known

as Multimedia Gulch.

Much of that bustle is gone now. San Francisco and two nearby counties,

Marin and San Mateo, have lost more than 73,000 jobs since late 2000.
While less than 1% of offices South of Market were vacant three years
ago, almost half sit empty now, by far the highest vacancy rate
downtown. "It's as if a neutron bomb went off -- the people are gone
but everything else is here," says Daniel Ben-Horin, executive director

of CompuMentor, a nonprofit that supplies technology products and
services to other nonprofits.

While Soma's economic frenzy may be gone, in its place are survivors
such as the businessman on nearby Bluxome Street who calls himself
Tardon Feathered. Sitting in a 7,200-square-foot loft cluttered with
microphones, drum kits and speakers, Mr. Feathered (the name he has
gone by for decades) considers the change in fortunes of his business,
Mr. Toad's, a recording and video-production studio.

During the boom, many of his aspiring-musician clients disappeared,
nabbing steady paychecks instead from Internet companies. Adding to Mr.

Feathered's strain two years ago: a threatened tripling in his rent.
After the real-estate bust, that never materialized. In Soma, in fact,
average annual rents for a common class of offices South of Market run
only $17.08 a square foot, roughly a quarter the price several years
ago, according to real-estate-brokerage firm Grubb & Ellis Co.

Mr. Feathered's business has since picked up. Artists and musicians are

"society's economic equivalent of cockroaches," he says, able to
survive during meltdowns.

The bust "has lit a fire under people to be expressive," adds Austin
Lewis, a former tech worker, now a clown with Xeno, a circus group in
San Francisco.

In many cases, nonprofits are capitalizing on the amenities Internet
companies left behind. After cramming its 70 employees into converted
apartments in two buildings, CompuMentor now occupies a spacious,
21,000-square-foot place that started out as a Soma warehouse. Later it

housed Pets.com Inc. and, when that Internet retailer folded,
Netcentives. The previous tenants left behind row after row of
expensive cubicles and fancy office chairs. "They're better than what
our butts are accustomed to," says Mr. Ben-Horin, CompuMentor's
executive director.

At 690 Fifth St., Netcentives left loads of gear at its former
building, including cubicles, office chairs and $100,000 of computer
servers, estimates Mr. Latimer, the building manager. He stores beer
for office parties in a server room where a thermostat keeps the brew,
and the computers, cool. "You still need five levels of security to get

to your beer," he jokes, fumbling with an access card at the door of
the server room.

For Mr. Latimer, finding an eclectic set of tenants has become a
mission. He has run an assortment of magazines, including one about
psychedelic drugs called "High Frontiers." A longtime San Francisco
resident, Mr. Latimer, 48, moved to New York during the Internet boom,
after selling "Res," a film festival and publication, to an Internet
venture there.

By the time he returned to San Francisco last summer, many of his
friends had left. "I said, 'What is gone from the city? All the cool
people who had to leave because they couldn't afford it anymore,' " Mr.

Latimer says. So he set out to change that. He persuaded real-estate
developer Merritt Sher, an investor in one of Mr. Latimer's magazines,
to put him in charge of renting Mr. Sher's empty Netcentives offices.
Mr. Latimer charges about $250 a month for a large cubicle, Internet
access and shared use of the building's conference room.

Tenants here say they like the communal atmosphere of the place, which
Mr. Latimer calls Space 690. Before moving in, Nicole Avril, regional
director of GenArt, a nonprofit arts group, says she couldn't find an
affordable office with open, airy spaces, perks she had grown
accustomed to at a dot-com called I-Drive. She left there early last
year to return to nonprofit arts administration. That's the field she
was headed to, she says, before getting "sucked into the dot-com thing."






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