But several historic buildings sit on the same site now

Developers have various big plans in various stages for the corner of Market and Van Ness. But a shorter yet no less transformative project is in motion just down the street.

The city released its Draft Environmental Impact Report on 1629 Market Street on Wednesday. The development, if approved in its present form, will take up most of the block between 12th and 11th streets, the Brady Street alley forming its western boundary and a space for a planned park.

All told, the entire David Baker Architects and Kennerly Architecture & Planning-designed mixed-use project will spread across five buildings and at the most recent count yield “498,100 square feet of residential use that would contain up to 477 [market-rate] residential units and up to 107 affordable units.”

The proposed buildings range in height from 10 stories (Building A, at the corner of Brady and Market, and Building B, immediately next to it) to five stories (Building C, presently the Civic Center Hotel, which would be “rehabilitated” into a 65-home building absorbed into the larger cluster of new buildings).

A nearly 33,000-square-foot park would take up the corner of Brady and Colton. Since that lot now contains a ventilation structure crucial to BART, the venting “would be screened from view with a sculptural installation or landscape wall.”

There are, however, a couple of historically significant buildings in the way. The Planning Department notes that the L-shaped, red brick Civic Center Hotel was “built in 1915, designed by William H. Crim, Jr., a well-known San Francisco architect of the early 20th century.”

While the hotel would incorporated into the new building, the new construction would demolish most of the 1926 Lesser Brothers’ Building at 1629 Market.

The report calls the Lesser Brothers a “classic taxpayer block—a single-story commercial building […] to provide an income stream until property values had increased to warrant the construction of a larger building.”

While that doesn’t sound much complimentary, the building is “a rare, surviving example” of that style and the report emphasizes its architectural integrity after the fact.

The Planning Commission has scheduled a hearing about the draft report June 15.

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