Longtime Eyesore Theater Cursed by Kismet, COVID, and Now SF’s High Costs of Revival
The Alexandria, once a draw on Geary, has sat empty for years. Affordable housing is the latest idea to flop there. How does this movie end?
The curse of the pharaohs has plagued 5400 Geary Boulevard since 2004. The Alexandria Theater, once guarded by sphinxes and Ramses heads, sits abandoned along the busy commercial corridor, gathering graffiti along with garbage, cobwebs, and soot.
Behind the curtains, in the bureaucratic bowels of the city’s building and planning departments, the Alexandria tells yet another San Francisco story of inaction, corruption, blight, and the critical need for affordable housing. Bringing the Alexandria back to life would be a big boost for a neighborhood that has been burdened with an unusual amount of dead street space, even before the pandemic, but so far no one so far has been able to script a happy ending.
When it opened in 1923, the Alexandria seated 2,000 people in a grand, Egyptian-style movie house that gave San Francisco its own version of the gaudy Grauman’s theaters down in Hollywood. Its elegant interior hosted classic films like South Pacific (1958) and yes, Cleopatra (1963), before renovations turned it into a run-of-the-mill three-screen multiplex in 1976. The theater was struggling financially in 2004 when investors bought the building and shuttered the cinema.
They quickly filed a permit to revamp the theater, add a new restaurant, develop more than 6,000 square feet of street-level retail space, and turn the parking lot into housing. But it took nine years to get approval from the SF Planning Department. That this took so long “is not unheard of,” said Dan Sider, chief of staff at SF Planning. “But it’s certainly unusual.”
While the city’s permitting bureaucracy is notoriously cumbersome — a single person can stop a project through what’s called “discretionary review“ — Sider noted that generally a nine-year delay could speak to other problems, like funding or legal concerns. (The investors used the permit expediter Jimmy Jen, who was arrested and charged in 2010 with falsifying documents for more than 100 projects, including the Alexandria.)
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The original investors did manage to complete the adjacent Alexandria Residencies — 43 units, 12 percent of them below market rate — but they neglected the theater.
Neighbors took notice as the building started to decay. Since 2010, the Department of Building Inspection has handled 20 official complaints about the theater’s broken windows, trash, and precariously teetering sign and cables.
According to neighbors and Ian Fregosi, an aide to Sup. Connie Chan, the previous Richmond district supervisor Sandra Lee Fewer had pushed the YMCA branch on 18th Avenue to take over the building, but it declined. (The YMCA didn’t respond to a request for comment.) Instead, a new group, TimeSpace Alexandria LLC, purchased the ailing property and amended the original permit in 2018 to turn the building into a for-profit pool, offices, and a learning center, which would mimic the group’s projects in the South Bay.
SF Planning approved the amended permit in less than a year, which irked Jack Lum, associate pastor at the Golden Gate Christian Church across the street. “It wasn’t like a community pool,” said Lum. “You were going to have to pay membership fees, obviously.”
Still, he said “anything that brings in viable needed business to the community, I think is positive.”
That business is increasingly unlikely, though. Chan and SF Planning told The Frisc that the financial backer abandoned the project as the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered pools, classrooms, and offices — everything the site was supposed to offer. TimeSpace doesn’t have a backup plan. “We would suggest to not report any story about [the] Alexandria since we do not have [an] idea on how to move forward at this time,” TimeSpace founder and visionary Yorke Lee wrote in an email to The Frisc.
By 2020, there was a homeless encampment in front of the theater, and the city equipped the intersection with a portable toilet, a handwashing station, and an attendant to monitor. As other businesses struggled to stay afloat, the Alexandria became a touchstone for stories of blight and rising crime during the pandemic.
The intersection is cleaner now that the city has removed the encampment, but Lum was skeptical that the people who lived in front of the theater are doing better than before. Instead of the Alexandria, Lum added, people now sleep in the walkways in front of the nearby Walgreens and other stores.
‘Somehow we can’t use it’
The same graffiti that marks the Alexandria now tags the parklet next door at Joe’s Ice Cream. In the parklet mural, a young man is eating ice cream with his dog under a rain shower of colorful sprinkles. Over his smiling face are six letters in black spray paint: “OWT GDC.”
“It’s every week — sometimes every day,” said owner Sean Kim, pointing to the new round of graffiti. “If someone asks my location,” Kim said, “I always tell them, ‘Do you know the Alexandria?’” But now there’s some embarrassment: “This is kind of iconic, but somehow we can’t use it.”
The Frisc canvassed several neighboring businesspeople; all still thought the swimming pool project was happening. At the Nag’s Head bar a few doors down, owner Michelle, who declined to give her last name, wasn’t that concerned. More development, she said with a dismissive wave, meant more noise, dust, and traffic. Bartender Amanda Beadle, just checking in for her shift, said housing would be a great idea: “People need it, and so many great neighborhood spots have opened, like ramen and sushi.”
It turns out that housing was briefly on the Alexandria menu. When Sup. Chan heard that the pool plan had stalled, her staff convened city housing and planning staff for a tour last September and asked them to consider 100 percent affordable housing at the site instead. Chan’s goal, she told The Frisc, was to create family-friendly housing that would complement the 98 affordable units for low-income seniors planned for 4200 Geary Boulevard, 12 blocks away.
It’s exactly the kind of project the city’s proposed Housing Element seeks to incentivize. It’s situated along a key transit corridor in a “high resource” neighborhood, where low-income families would benefit from the surroundings.
But affordable housing isn’t cheaper to build than market-rate housing, which means yet another curse has befallen the project: financial feasibility.
The architect initially rendered the building at 100 units — what Lydia Ely, deputy director of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD), called the “sweet spot” where benefits like a front desk person or an elevator can actually pay off.
But the city’s requirements, like handicap accessibility and historic preservation details, whittled down the number of homes. It’s now between 67 and 80 units, which Ely said is below the threshold MOHCD needs to advocate for funding. “Believe it or not, a project of 67 to 80 units is too small to be economically feasible,” Ely said.
Can’t compete
A single unit of affordable housing in San Francisco can cost as much as $700,000 to build, but tax state and federal credits can cut those costs substantially. And there’s the crux of the Alexandria problem. At the state level, in particular, these credits are competitive, and there are three times as many applicants as credits available.
Ely said the Alexandria couldn’t compete for these finite funds, given its size and relative expense. Changes in federal or state policy could alter her calculus, she explained, so even though MOHCD won’t proceed now, it might do so down the road.
If the Alexandria doesn’t become housing, Golden Edge Pizza owner Firas Al-Assad has another idea that would bring him customers hungry for a late-night slice: ‘A big bar would be good.’
Starting this summer, the theater will begin incurring thousands of dollars in penalties as a result of SF’s new commercial vacancy tax, and it’s not the only such business on Geary. “For Lease” signs are scattered in between Chinese bakeries, eateries, and hair salons along 14 commercial blocks of the often-foggy neighborhood. If the tax succeeds in putting pressure on the Alexandria owners to get another plan in gear, the iconic theater could serve as a harbinger for progress in the community.
But given the plodding approval process and the status of current alternatives, it’s unlikely residents will see tangible change anytime soon. “The critical two key elements for success are funding and land, and right now I have half of that,” commented Chan. She said she is working with the owners to consider alternatives, like market-rate housing — or even going back to the original drawing board for a pool, office space, and learning center.
Across Geary, Golden Edge Pizza owner Firas Al-Assad has only been in business a year. Forty percent of his business is foot traffic, which likely would get a boost if the Alexandria came alive again. But if housing — and all those built-in customers — won’t happen, Al-Assad has another idea: “A big bar would be good.” He knows that late-night drinkers can’t resist a slice.
Adam Echelman is a staff writer for The Frisc, where he covers housing, development, and more.
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