By Carol Lloyd, Special to SF Gate Friday, September 21, 2007

In San Francisco the concept of change carries great currency when it comes to food, technology, family and politics, but utter the word in the context of a peeling Victorian facade or a distressed brick warehouse, and people will begin muttering about “neighborhood character” and “the way it’s always been.”

Sure, we have the Federal Building and the de Young Museum expressing San Francisco’s newfound willingness to tiptoe into the 21st century, but these buildings ain’t where folks sleep. Over the years I’ve heard too many rants from architects to forget that getting permits for an innovative design can be an uphill battle — especially if the property lies in a “well-established” neighborhood (a.k.a. somewhere with historic homes occupied by middle-class home owners with time to organize neighborhood groups). When it comes to residential architecture, our fair city gives new meaning to the phrase “arch conservative.”

So when I saw that the American Institute of Architects’ San Francisco chapter was offering a weekend of home tours “showcasing modernism at its finest,” I was curious about how a new generation of residential buildings was fitting into our well-loved urban landscape.

What did these esteemed “state of the art” single-family homes and architect/developer multi-family buildings say about the place of modern architecture in San Francisco’s infamously protective neighborhoods? Which neighborhoods were more open to innovation amidst all the vintage Victorian, Edwardian, Mediterranean and mid-century? And while we’re at it, how had these architects managed to get permits for homes without bay windows?

The first thing I noticed is that the heart of modernism beats (if it beats anywhere) on the east side of the city. With the exception of one house in the outer Richmond, every showcased building was located in the South of Market or in easterly ‘hoods like Potrero Hill, Noe Valley, the Mission and Bernal Heights. The reasons for this are many: Bernal, for instance, though infamous for its neighborhood design groups, also has the most empty lots, which have attracted a generation of designers and architects. But all of these neighborhoods have areas with a surprising diversity of housing stock all cheek- and-jowl next to one another.

“It often depends how much diversity there is in the existing context,” says Neal Schwartz of Schwartz and Architecture, whose Potrero three-level home plus office was featured in the tour. “In Potrero, for instance, there’s an amazing diversity of styles, so it’s easier to do contemporary architecture in that context.”

Schwartz’s renovation embodies the other evident fact about these “new modernist buildings.” All but one of the single-family homes on the tour were not technically new construction but “additions,” “revitalizations” or “expansions.” In the logic of the city’s planning codes, it’s far easier to gut a home and add two extra floors than get permits to demolish an existing home and build something new. (Demolitions are possible, but the home must be sufficiently dilapidated to qualify.)

“The limitations against demolishing are a good thing in the sense that they prevent developers from mowing down a block and destroying the existing fabric,” says Andrew Sparks, an associate with Levy Art and Architecture, a firm that showcased a total renovation in Diamond Heights. “But when it’s applied to a single owner it’s very difficult. Getting a demolition permit can take two years alone. And though sometimes it’s cheaper and better to demolish the home, instead they have to renovate what they already have.”

“This is a renovation with a large extension,” Owen Kennerly of Kennerly Architecture and Planning told me from the rooftop deck of an extravagant stone and steel modernist dream house on 27th Street in Noe Valley. “We kept the front room, which was the living room.” Yet looking at the open spaces, massive staircases, and floor-to-ceiling windows of the three-floor home, it’s difficult to imagine where a single scrap of the old structure might have been. Kennerly says that this home — despite its larger- than-life modernist presence — got virtually no resistance from the neighbors.

So does this mean it’s actually easier to get approval for contemporary designs? It depends on who you ask.

“San Francisco prides itself on being the most liberal city on the planet,” says Ross Levy, founder of Levy Art and Architecture. “But until recently we’ve had a relatively homogeneous building stock. Other cities — like Barcelona, London, Madrid, which are more secure in their history, have embraced modern architecture. But it is getting easier and more acceptable. It’s also more in demand. People are realizing that these are fantastic places to live. Even here, when people buy Victorian homes, we gut them — because no one wants to live in those rooms.”

“It’s still a struggle,” says Sparks. “But it probably will always be a struggle to some extent. Because in doing contemporary architecture, you’re trying to do something new, you’re exploring new materials and exploring space, you’re trying to respond to people’s contemporary lifestyles.”

Other architects suggest that things are finally changing as the populace realizes modernism doesn’t mean cheapo boxes on the hill. “You have to make a good case for change with the planning department,” says Kennerly. “But they understand that with good use of materials, good design actually contributes to the neighborhood.”

David Baker, founder of David Baker + Partners, contends that even the neighborhood groups have changed: “If there’s a meeting and someone asks why the building doesn’t look like the Victorians next to it, then some other neighbor will stand up and say, ‘Because we’re not living in the 19th century.’”

Yet there are still institutional and community obstacles — obstacles which effect designs, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Currently all buildings over 50 years old can be subject to an historic designation which in turn triggers certain guidelines limiting any alteration of the facade. “Typically the facades of buildings with historical designations can’t be changed more than 25 percent,” explains Sparks, “So we have to work very strategically.”

Sometimes, altering a facade can actually help to unify the look of the neighborhood. Schwartz says that since his home remodel began as an “ugly” 1950s home which was far smaller than existing homes surrounding it, creating a larger facade was actually “healing the disruption.”

The outcome may be a taller profile — more or less equal to the buildings around it. But it’s also far from ostentatious: a simple stucco front with moderately sized windows in low-key earth tones. With a couple of exceptions, almost all the buildings on the tour — be they warehouses in SOMA or single family homes in residential neighborhoods — are so inconspicuous that they act as camouflage for the extravagance within.

This of course can be a sly design strategy: “I designed the facade so that someone not interested in design might walk by and not notice it,” says Schwartz, “But for someone into contemporary architecture, they might notice the mahogany windows or the bamboo on the third floor deck and think: Hey, something’s going on in there.”

But the low-key exterior functions as a survival strategy for concealing the secret and sometimes extravagant) modern design within. One warehouse on a scrappy street in the Mission which harbors 10,000 feet of ultra modern grooviness designed by Stanley Saitowitz of Natoma Architects Inc., exhibits no exterior signs of alteration, except for its flat, monochromatic black facade. Like a secret agent clad all in black, it seems to be whispering: Forget you ever saw me.

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Wednesday, September 5, 2007

 

Bruce Eisner tromped past a half-dozen geese lolling in the water, marched across the muddy shoreline and stopped on the grassy bank of the Upper Truckee River.

It was a brilliant warm day at Lake Tahoe, the forested mountains rising spectacularly all around, but Eisner was focused on a bit of scenery that few people on the bustling south shore even notice.

As the program manager for the California Tahoe Conservancy, his work and passion is the restoration of the Upper Truckee Marsh, the largest wetlands system in the Lake Tahoe Basin and the source of about a third of all the water - and most of the sediment - that flows into the famous lake.

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer Tuesday, August 28, 2007

A man built a baseball field for his 11-year-old son and his son’s Little League team, but this is not some fairy tale where the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson emerges from a cornfield to join the game.

This is Danville, not Iowa. Someone did arrive to check out the Field of Dreams, but it was a city building inspector.

The story heads into the late innings tonight, when Danville’s Planning Commission is set to weigh in on an unusual property dispute. It pits David Lowe, who built the field without permits on a picturesque ridgeline, against neighbors below who say the field’s 14-foot-high fence screams prison wall and obscures million-dollar views.

Lowe, a private equity investor, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the field, which has artificial turf, an enclosed batting cage with a motorized pitching machine, and hookups for electricity and water.

The views give San Francisco’s AT&T Park a run for its money - Mount Diablo to the east, Las Trampas Regional Park to the west, old oaks all around.

Lowe calls it a “place for neighborhood children to play baseball.” His son, Greg, calls it “really cool.”

Opponents call it “Guantanamo Bay” because of its fences. The neighbors - many of whom are wealthy, though not build-your-own-ball-field wealthy - want it removed as soon as possible, rejecting Lowe’s proposal to hide it by planting tall trees.

Danville planners agree. Citing local rules preserving “major ridgelines,” they recommend that the commission turn down a permit application that Lowe belatedly filed. The squabble could end up before the Town Council, and in the courts after that. In theory, the town could force the field’s dismantling.

“Is the next guy going to put a football field on the ridgeline?” neighbor Teri Rousseau asked while pointing to the black fence from her backyard.

In places like Danville, every plan to build on a ridge is controversial and tightly regulated. Planners are used to dealing with monster homes being plopped on once-pristine hills, but say this is their first time dealing with a ball field on a ridge.

The Lowes’ neighbors “spent a lot of money on their houses and were counting on having a rural feel,” Vice Mayor Candace Andersen said. “My first thought when I saw (the fence) was, ‘What were they thinking?’ It’s a really nice thing to do for your kids, but you have to follow the rules.”

As Lowe and his wife, Connie, tell the story, they bought a pair of choice properties on a semirural road called El Alamo 12 years ago. They built a home on one parcel and left the adjacent 2.3-acre property alone, until this January.

That’s when young Greg Lowe and the Little League A’s needed a coach. Dad wanted the job but couldn’t make the practice times that were available at a town park. He phoned a contractor, and earth began to move.

The town posted its first stop-work order Jan. 30, then rescinded it after a meeting with Lowe’s contractor. David Crompton, the principal planner handling the matter, said the grading work being done at the time did not, in fact, require a permit. However, Crompton said, the contractor did not mention plans for a field with 14-foot fences.

The second stop-work order was posted March 15. Among other problems, Crompton said, the fence was too tall and the neighborhood wasn’t an appropriate place for a baseball field.

By then, though, the fence was up, the neighbors were up in arms, and the A’s had begun practicing on the field once or twice a week at 5 p.m.

The field is roughly 60 feet long and shaped almost like a ship. With portable bases and a pitcher’s mound, it’s outfitted for training, but not a full-on game. Home runs and foul balls alike would shoot over the fence. Hitting is done in the enclosed batting cage.

The Lowes say they invited their neighbors up to talk about their project. Some were friends whose children went to school with the Lowes’ son and two daughters. But just three people showed up.

“We didn’t know how upset people would be,” said Connie Lowe, who is PTA president at the local elementary school.

Her husband said he hoped that after he plants trees around the fence, neighbors would prefer it to the alternative - a large home on the ridge. But neighbors and city leaders say such a home would go through a strict review process that attempts to blend it with its surroundings, taking into account stature, color and landscaping.

“I’m not putting an oil well or a nuclear plant here,” said David Lowe.

But he also says he doesn’t want a “war with our neighbors.” At tonight’s Planning Commission meeting, he says, he’ll propose lowering the fences to 6 feet, though that means some balls will go bounding down the hill.

Rousseau, for one, isn’t satisfied.

“I want the fence removed - it’s really that simple,” she said. “If you want to build a field, build a field for the town. I’m sure they’d name it after him.”

E-mail Demian Bulwa at dbulwa@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/28/BAOERQ800.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer; Sunday, August 19, 2007

Thanks to strict zoning laws, West Berkeley is like a bug trapped in amber. The outside world keeps changing, but West Berkeley is encased in a timeless golden bubble.

Potters coexist happily with biotech researchers. Architects and steel workers mingle over the tofu scramble at the Westside Cafe. No one fights over parking, and the bougainvillea is always blooming.

But change is looming, and not even Berkeley’s stringent industrial and multi-use zoning laws - which have kept gentrification mostly at bay - can protect a neighborhood forever.

West Berkeley’s convenient location, undeveloped land and funky character are proving too tempting for developers. And some local politicians, property owners and business operators agree that it’s time to open the area to some growth.

“There hasn’t been this much pressure on artists and industry in the 30 years I’ve been here,” said Rick Auerbach of the West Berkeley Artisans and Industrial Companies, a nonprofit trade organization. “There’s tremendous fear they will be priced out of Berkeley.”

In December, the City Council is expected to consider forming a special assessment district, called a Community Benefits District, that would tax local property owners for such things as street improvements, security and a BART shuttle.

And there is talk of modifying and updating the city’s 1995 West Berkeley Plan, a blueprint intended to keep rents low for artists and industries by excluding most housing and retail uses.

Several recent projects have crept past the West Berkeley Plan through zoning variances, including West Berkeley Bowl, slated to be the biggest grocery store in Berkeley. It recently broke ground on Ninth Street. The former Drayage building, an artists’ compound, was demolished to make way for condominiums and retail on Third Street, and more housing and retail is slated for the site now occupied by Brennan’s and Celia’s restaurants, adjacent to the trendy Fourth Street shopping area.

Brennan’s, a favorite watering hole since the 1950s, plans to move to the old Berkeley train station across the parking lot. A group of regulars are throwing a reunion Sept. 29 to celebrate the tavern’s longevity.

But plenty of other sites in West Berkeley remain stagnant, ensnared by municipal zoning restrictions. The former Peerless Lighting factory, which occupies two square blocks on Fifth Street, sits vacant because the owner can’t find a tenant. Like elsewhere in the U.S., industry is fleeing for Mexico, China and other countries with cheaper labor.

“Given we are a college town, land use is very constrained in West Berkeley,” said Michael Caplan, the city’s economic development director.

The city staff, some property owners and businesses would like to see the West Berkeley Plan updated to allow higher-density housing, more research-and-development offices, and more retail to expand on the success of Fourth Street.

“It’s in a time of flux,” said City Councilman Darryl Moore, who represents the neighborhood. “The West Berkeley Plan is very restrictive. We need to try to accommodate all the groups in the community.”

Moore would like to see the zoning laws loosened, but with steps to protect the 400 or so artists who live and work in the area. Moore suggested creating a zone for artists or forcing developers to set aside a certain amount of space for affordable live-work studios.

Changing the West Berkeley Plan would not be easy. The plan took eight years to write, involved hundreds of people, and was vetted at dozens of community meetings and hearings.

But the city is taking a few steps to make the area more business-friendly without major alterations of the plan. An auto row is proposed for Ashby Avenue near Interstate 80, and the zoning would get a few tweaks.

Artists and industrial companies, such as Urban Ore, have been fighting the changes, but the idea that by far has generated the most outrage is a proposed community benefits district.

If it passes, the district would levy a tax on property owners in West Berkeley, raising about $600,000 a year to pay for street improvements, security, maintenance and a BART shuttle.

Community benefits districts are common in San Francisco, Oakland and other large cities, but West Berkeley’s is unique because it includes housing, industry, offices and some retail, whereas most districts are strictly commercial.

“It’s really eclectic,” said Marco Li Mandri, president of New City America, the San Diego planning firm that’s organizing the district. “But this is what we’ll see more of in the 21st century as more people move into the urban cores. It’s the Europeanization of the American city and its public spaces.”

Creation of the district first requires approval from a majority of property owners based on property values. Then the City Council must approve going ahead with the district and the collection of taxes.

But many residents are opposing the district because the votes - both to create and govern the district - are weighted toward larger property owners. The 81 single-family homes in the district represent about a fifth of the total number of properties in the proposed district. Homeowners would pay much less in assessments than larger property owners, and would have less say in how the money is spent.

“Neighbors feel like we have no voice,” said Sarah Klise of the Potter Creek Neighborhood Association. “I don’t see development and change as bad - I only see it as bad when it’s not respectful of the neighborhood.”

Auerbach called it “taxation without representation.”

The City Council could vote on the community benefits district as soon as December and, if it passes, the first taxes could be collected in December 2008.

Meanwhile, Auerbach and others remain opposed to changing the neighborhood zoning.

“It’s like a beehive of incredible synergy down here.” He said. “There may be some tweaks that could be valuable, but otherwise, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Susan Fornoff, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, August 4, 2007

Take a look around their 1850s Bayview house, with its parlor stove and period furniture, staircase balusters and vintage photographs, and then go ahead and accuse Adrian Card and John Tinker of living in the past.

“Isn’t that rather obvious?” they might respond, or, more likely for two such polite gentlemen, “Thank you.”

Tinker, 48, studied 18th century British literature before he began teaching in Stanford’s writing program, and Card, 43 today, is a decorative painter whose speciality is harpsichords. Living in the past is nothing new to them - they do not even own a TV.

In 2002, after renting together for 12 years, they finally found their architectural soul mate on Oakdale Avenue - a rundown yet charming Gold Rush-era cottage a little the worse for 150 years of wear - and have spent most evenings and weekends since engaged in returning the house to its original splendor while uncovering the stories of past residents.

They used to go to movies. Now when they want a good story, they look up descendents of former owners. They used to eat out. Now they gaze at still-unfinished dining room walls and eat off plates in a china pattern they matched to the bits and pieces they dug up in the yard.

“I used to ride my bike, but I’ve replaced bicycling with gardening,” Tinker said.

But, Tinker insisted, “no regrets.” If ever a house matched its inhabitants, this is it.

Card knew it before the house went on the market. He had felt kindred to it for years just driving by the place, even with its lot untended and bargeboards broken. But when the listing appeared on the market in the fall of 2002 for $420,000, he couldn’t make it on the one night the house would be shown.

Tinker easily decided for them both. He peered through the layers of wallpaper, through the missing staircase balusters and Section 8-prompted room divisions that had accommodated nine residents with five bedrooms, and saw Jane Austen.

“It was a classic ‘two over two,’ ” he said. “Two rooms up, two rooms down. And it just felt good.”

They paid less than the asking price and moved in - without a functioning bathroom because the plumbing and part of the roof had to be replaced. Foundation work also was needed. Card quickly went to work inside after an architectural historian visited and said of the doors, “You know, when you scrape this paint off, you’re going to find golden oak wood graining under there.”

“We said, ‘Well, isn’t that cocky of him,’ ” Card said. “But he was right.”

Card’s work on the walls downstairs in the original foyer, parlor and dining room, where he already has done some decorative paint treatments and restored much of the wood on the doors, windows, casings and moldings, has obviously consumed too many hours to count. When it became tedious, he headed for the library or the computer to learn more about the house’s previous lives.

This led to the compilation of a seven-page timeline that begins with John Hittell’s arrival in San Francisco in 1849. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Natural Sciences, who Card and Tinker believe built the house, which was in a Carpenter Gothic style rarely seen in the city today.

It’s not clear whether Hittell lived in the house, but in 1868 he appears to have sold the property to John Godeus for $1,500. Godeus had lost his first wife aboard the steamboat Washoe en route to Sacramento in 1864, when the boiler exploded and killed about 100 people. (Mark Twain wrote the story for the San Francisco Morning Call.)

Godeus, born in Holland, became a U.S. citizen later that year and remarried in 1865. John and Mary Godeus were portrait photographers whose work lives on in family albums all over the Bay Area; Card and Tinker have scoured flea markets and eBay and collected many of their portraits (sometimes for as little as $1) for display on shelves of the dining room closet.

Card’s research yielded a newspaper announcement of the couple’s 25th anniversary party - at the house on Oakdale, then known as 15th Avenue South - as well as a directory of female photographers that included Mary Godeus and a biographical sketch that outlined John Godeus’ accomplishments. Not long ago, the Godeuses’ great-granddaughter stopped by with an armful of clippings during a visit from San Diego.

The Godeuses added a kitchen in about 1870. John died in 1895, at 63, and the family began renting the house in about 1900. They sold it in 1926 to Louis and Naomi Gouygou. In 1950, Rosario and Catherine De Battista bought the house and kept it for 25 years; history blurs over the next 25 years, when there were four ownership changes before Card and Tinker bought it from Tak Tsui.

The house appears to have no damage from the 1906 earthquake - “it’s perfectly square,” Card said - although there is evidence of a fire earlier. The Gouygous’ daughter, Yvonne, shared some more history with Card - her father, it turns out, jacked the house up off the ground to put a garage and basement beneath it, and he sealed off the well in the yard because he worried about children falling in.

“Oh, are the parlor stoves still there?” she asked Card and Tinker.

There were once four, they think, but now there is one, not original but an 1856 model that Card and Tinker found online in Vermont and installed in their restored parlor. This is also one of the rooms where Card has peeled the layers down to what he believes to be the original wallpaper (DIY note from the expert: Cider vinegar works as well as the commercial stripping solutions and comes much cheaper), and now he’s debating whether to have the wallpaper re-created by an artisan or use the original as inspiration for a decorative paint treatment.

The wall dividing the other original downstairs room into two bedrooms has been removed, and it is once again a large, sunny and elegant dining room, furnished mostly of the period but with a contemporary painting by the couple’s friend Kevin Bean, and also a sarcophagus and a chandelier of 1930s table lamps made by another friend, Richard Dermody, whose grandfather was photographed by the Godeuses.

The dining room has two closets because one held the bathroom in the 1920s. Now the bathroom is at the back of the house, containing, naturally, a claw-foot tub - though sensibly bigger than the vintage one they found in the basement. Tinker and Card haven’t decided yet how to update the big kitchen beyond, but it’s working for them at the moment.

Up the stairs, which are carpeted in a period runner from a company in Pennsylvania that specializes in such work, the master bedroom has been restored; Tinker’s study, the first room in which Card refinished the floor and stripped and restored the woodwork, is in a divided room, the other half of which will be a library when Card does his thing.

“Then this floor …” Tinker said, “… will be done,” Card finished.

“It’s a word we never use,” Tinker said. “But this floor will be done.”

The inner workings of the house have been Card’s responsibility; Tinker works on the garden, where it was three months before the fish tank was uncovered. They’ve had help: Kindred spirits in period revival from Artistic License lent expertise; Card’s father, Arnold, came out from New Jersey and did the bathroom; and Tinker’s father, George, from Illinois, got his hands dirty in the garden.

There, they dug up dolls they think belonged to the Godeuses’ daughter, Clara, and the pieces of dishes they were able to find still usable companions to on eBay.

Neighbors who used to call it the witch’s house stop by to praise their work, though all seem to agree that the place is still haunted.

“Sure it is, but in a good way,” Card said. “It just has a really good feel about it. Whether that’s ghosts …”

“Or maybe people have just lived well here,” finished Tinker - though, of course, nothing is really finished.

– To see more photos of the house and its renovation, go to sfgate.com/homeandgarden.

Adrian Card and John Tinker have been researching the history of their house whenever they needed a break from the hammering and digging its restoration has required. Here are a few of their valued resources:

– The San Francisco History Center of the Main Library, where Card found guidance even though most official records were lost in the 1906 earthquake. A good starting point for researching a San Francisco building’s history is online, at sfpl.org/librarylocations/sfhistory/sfbuilding.htm, which lists and has contact information for 19 sources of records and directories.

– The online archive of California, www.oac.cdlib.org , which had a photo of original owner John Hittell among its many treasures.

– Artistic License, a group of period revival specialists, many of whom have antiquated skills - including Card, whose specialty is harpsichord decoration ( www.adriancard.com ). Matthias Gordon Murer helped replicate missing bargeboards on the porch, and wood turner Hector Bezanis restored missing pendants from the roof corners and balusters on the staircase. www.artisticlicense.org

Carolyn Jones, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, July 22, 2007

Louis Hagler, a retired physician, went years without a decent night’s sleep. The culprit? Train horns blasting at up to 120 decibels just 100 yards from his house in Richmond.

“It became a problem of monumental proportions,” he said last week. “When you’re not getting one, a good night’s sleep is worth a million bucks. Then a group of us started complaining vociferously and consistently and we got it done. We silenced the train horns.”

Richmond is one of the first cities in the U.S. to take advantage of a new federal law that allows cities to ban train horns. By installing flashing lights, extra barriers and other safety measures at train crossings, a city can order train engineers not to blast their horns as they rumble through residential neighborhoods.

Richmond likes quiet zones so much that city now has four of them. Campbell has two. San Jose has quiet zones along the light-rail tracks. Berkeley, Emeryville, Novato and other Bay Area cities now want their own train-horn-free zones.

But at what price is a good night’s sleep? The California Public Utilities Commission and other groups say the risk to public safety is too high. With rail traffic at an all-time high and urban gentrification bringing thousands more people to live, work and play near train tracks, the risk of fatalities could soar, said PUC spokeswoman Susan Carothers.

“We definitely have safety concerns when horns are silenced,” she said. “We’re not in favor of quiet zones. The PUC sees horns as a safety measure, and that becomes increasingly important as we become more and more populated in the Bay Area.”

Berkeley had a first-hand experience with rail tragedy June 19 when a popular community activist, Lucie Buchbinder, was killed by an Amtrak train she apparently did not hear while crossing the tracks at Jack London Square in Oakland. Buchbinder, 83, a founder of the Bread Project in Berkeley, was hit when she walked behind a slow-moving freight train that had just passed, not aware of the Amtrak train traveling in the opposite direction with its horn sounding.

Though not related to the train-horn issue, her death underscored crossing dangers as the city prepared to move forward with its quiet zone plans. On Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved the first step in creating at least four quiet zones at vehicle crossings. The city will start accepting bids from consultants to upgrade the safety apparatus where Hearst Avenue, and Virginia, Cedar and Addison streets cross the train tracks near Interstate 80.

The upgrades will cost between $50,000 and $70,000 per intersection, although the city will try to pay for it with grant money, said Councilwoman Linda Maio, who is sponsoring the plan.

“Clearly, if we found we were really putting people at risk, we’d have to rethink it,” she said. “But right now, a lot of people seem to want this.”

The quiet zone law went into effect only last year, so it’s too early to compare accident rates between quiet zones and those where engineers sound horns. But in areas that adopted local quiet zones before the federal law passed, the collision rate increased 80 percent on average, said Warren Flatau, spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, noting that not all the quiet crossings were equipped with the compensating safety features required under the “quiet zones” law. In one Florida study, there was a 195 percent increase in collisions at quiet zones, he said.

California already leads the United States in pedestrian deaths along train tracks. In 2006, 91 pedestrians were killed by trains, accounting for almost a fifth of the nationwide total. California ranks third in the nation for vehicle collisions with trains, with 166 accidents in 2006.

“California has a lot of trains and a lot of people. Safety obviously has to be a major priority,” said Marmie Edwards, vice president of communications at Operation Lifesaver, a nonprofit group that advocates for rail safety. “It’s only going to be a bigger and bigger issue.”

Even without sounding their horns, trains are quieter than they used to be, Edwards said. Tracks in California are now all welded, as opposed to bolted, so trains no longer make their familiar “clickety clack” sound. As a result, it’s harder to judge how far away and how fast a train is moving.

“When the train is quieter, people think it’s further away than it really is, and think, ‘I can slip across here, no problem.’ ” she said. “Well, the average train is 12 million pounds. It’s not the kind of thing you want to get in front of, even when it’s only moving at 15 mph. It can be very messy.”

The train engineers’ union hasn’t come out against quiet zones, but they’re not thrilled with them, either.

“It’s a constant fear for engineers that they’ll be involved in a collision,” said John Bentley, spokesman for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “Being a train engineer is one of the most stressful jobs out there. Our concern is that the quiet zone crossings provide a high enough level of safety.”

Some engineers are so concerned about safety they continue to sound their horns even in quiet zones. In Richmond, quiet zone violations have been the only complaint from the public, said the city’s administrative chief, Janet Schneider.

“Our residents are thrilled with quiet zones. They’re ecstatic,” she said. “We’ve had no collisions or other safety problems at all.”

Key zoning report will outline impact on city’s eastern areas

Robert Selna, Chronicle Staff Writer; Monday, July 2, 2007

Scores of developers with residential projects pending on San Francisco’s east side will learn more this week about whether they will someday be allowed to build thousands of new apartments and condominiums.

More than a year after the Board of Supervisors and planning officials put an abrupt halt to the development plans, the city cleared for release on Saturday a draft report examining how zoning changes across 2,200 acres in four South of Market neighborhoods could affect the traffic, noise, pollution, jobs and housing supply in the area.

Together, the neighborhoods — the Mission, Showplace Square/Potrero Hill, East SoMa and Central Waterfront — represent much of the heart of San Francisco’s industrial past but also opportunities for new construction of market-rate and affordably priced condominiums and apartments.

And the 600-page draft Eastern Neighborhoods Environmental Impact Report — which developers, activists and politicians will start thumbing through this week — is expected to greatly influence the debate about how much land should be preserved for light industry and how much should be opened up for new housing development.

“Older cities like San Francisco have to decide how they will transform themselves, and this is a prime example of that,” said Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, a member of the board’s Land Use Committee. “There’s not much opportunity to build on the west side of town, and things have been changing on the east side for some time … but we have not had any comprehensive planning there.”

Neighborhood advocates, who blanched when live-work lofts replaced industrial land in the late 1990s, want zoning changes that will protect blue-collar jobs and increase the supply of affordable housing for working-class San Franciscans.

They want land dedicated exclusively for what the San Francisco Planning Department calls production, distribution and repair uses, and they argue that developers should pay more than the standard city fees for affordable housing, parks, libraries, transportation and other city services.

Developers see the neighborhoods’ potential for profitable residential construction that helps alleviate the city’s overall housing shortage. They are frustrated because they have paid taxes, mortgages and insurance on land with an uncertain economic future while waiting for proposed zoning changes from the city.

The builders expect that the draft report will tell them how the city believes their property should be zoned — whether it can be used to construct housing, or whether it must be preserved for industrial space, or a little of both.

In April 2006, when a Mission District condo development came before the board, the supervisors made a ruling that not only brought that particular project at 2660 Harrison St. to a standstill, but also put numerous other projects into bureaucratic limbo.

The supervisors called for an extensive evaluation of not only the project’s impact on traffic and the immediate physical environment, but also on blue-collar employment and affordable housing in the greater area.

City planners interpreted the order to apply to any development proposal for land in the eastern neighborhoods that might displace an existing or potential industrial use — there were about 53 projects in the pipeline at the time. Planners decided to initiate the broad environmental impact report introduced in draft form this weekend.

Builders say mounting costs associated with the delay, including the climbing price of materials and labor, mean that buyers and renters of the new housing will pay more, if the projects are ever built. Some developers said they decided to abandon projects because they became financially infeasible over time.

“All of us are dying to see this planning process complete — it’s an embarrassment and an outrage that it’s taken this long,” said Michael Yarne, development director at Martin Building Co. in San Francisco, which has seen two projects stalled by the city.

The city’s environmental report analyzes three zoning options, which vary by the amount of industrial-zoned land that could be converted for housing and mixed commercial uses.

In each option, the amount of land dedicated to light industry is expected to decrease. The middle of the three choices would see an increase of 7,385 residences and a decline of more than 2 million square feet zoned for production, distribution and repair.

However, unlike current rules, in which housing and commercial developers can obtain special permission to build on industrial land, the zoning would create areas where production, distribution and repair property would be protected and housing would be banned.

In addition to griping about the slow planning process, developers complain about additional fees that might be charged to pay for transportation, parks and other infrastructure needed to support the new development.

The Planning Department has proposed that developers pay $13 for each square foot of new residential development and $4 for each square foot of new commercial development or a conversion from industrial to commercial space. A separate departmental study, due out later this summer, will provide more detail about the fees.

In 2005, the Board of Supervisors imposed a $25 per-square-foot fee on developers of 2,200 new market-rate condominiums on Rincon Hill.

“All developers want is some certainty,” said Brett Gladstone, a lawyer who represents a developer with two projects pending in the eastern neighborhoods. “When the game changes midstream, they can lose their shirt.”

Neighborhood advocates who want to protect the land for blue-collar jobs — in industries such as auto and furniture repair, printing, storage, warehousing and shipping — say the city needs to proceed cautiously to avoid a mass socioeconomic shift in the area and maintain an important segment of the city’s economy.

They point to Planning Department estimates that 53,000 people work in production, distribution and repair facilities in San Francisco and that 70 percent of those workers live in the city.

The dot-com boom cost the neighborhoods a big chunk of industrial space, they note, with digital firms converting warehouses into office buildings and nearly 2000 live-work lofts taking over former industrial sites. Loft developers also escaped paying fees typically applied to new residential construction, because the city did not define the lofts as residential.

“We want to retain the character of those neighborhoods as mixed-use with a variety of work and activities and affordable housing for working-class people,” said community activist Calvin Welch. “When you talk about restricting production and distribution sites and expanding high-density condominiums, you’re talking about replacing one population with another.”

Welch said developers should expect to pay added fees because the cumulative impact of all the new housing will place a strain on infrastructure and police, fire and other city services.

City planners started paying attention to the eastern neighborhoods back in 2002, when it became clear that developers were gravitating to the area.

But it wasn’t until housing advocates challenged a Planning Commission decision on the 2660 Harrison St. project that the comprehensive zoning study got under way in earnest.

The supervisors voted 8-2 to require more study, and days later, the Planning Department announced the decision would be applied to all “similarly situated projects.”

Although completion of the draft report — officially released Saturday — has been much anticipated, a final draft will require public hearings and approval by both the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.

City Planning Director Dean Macris said he hopes the report will be presented to the board by January, but others — developers in particular — believe it will take much longer.

E-mail Robert Selna at rselna@sfchronicle.com.

Zahid Sardar Wednesday, June 20, 2007

The first factory-made wood-panel home has just gone up in San Francisco on a hilly lot in Glen Park.

Although it looks no different than any other made from standard wood-frame construction, this new way of building may be so cost-effective that it will change the way people design custom homes in the future.

A panelized system reduces the time it takes to frame a standard 3,000-square-foot home by half and saves more than $50,000 on that one phase of building alone.

This three-story wood-and-glass home with split-level floors and dramatic picture windows belongs to architects Jim Zack and Lise de Vito, who will live there with their two children. Many suburban homes have been built using this panel system, but none have the custom look the couple have achieved.

“My original intent was to simplify the construction of such a house in San Francisco,” Zack said. “We were very interested in mechanizing a traditional way of building,” he said, because the couple have begun to develop similar properties for sale. They considered steel construction and other panel construction companies, such as Ceres’ Metecno-API (which is supplying LEED-rated steel-covered foam panels for a loftlike San Francisco house designed by Olle Lundberg), but found what they needed on the Internet.

“Most panelized construction companies like to do 10 or 20 houses at a time, but Forma Homes in Fernley, Nev., was the only one where we could do a single custom project like ours,” said Zack.

That company’s first manufactured panel home in the Bay Area is in Danville, where Forma Chief Executive Michael Murray lives. (See “When your ship comes in, prefab house could be on it,” April 21 and “House in a box / Modular home-building goes upscale in Danville,” July 25, 2004).

An architect’s design is first translated into 3-D CAD models at Forma and then constructed on an automated assembly line by machines. Precut lumber, sized for standard walls from 8 to 12 feet high and as wide as 24 feet, is aligned, nailed, trimmed and sheathed so quickly and efficiently that Forma can construct walls for a 3,000-square-foot home in less than a day for about $12 to $16 a square foot.

The advantage for homeowners in San Francisco’s high-cost labor arena is that these panels can be quickly assembled by a handful of carpenters in six weeks — less than half the time it normally takes.

“There is also a green factor,” said Zack. “There is less waste on-site because you are not cutting lots of lumber.” The lumber is custom cut and is ready to assemble when it arrives. As much as 60 percent of Zack and de Vito’s panels use engineered lumber made of laminated wood scraps. Later he realized that every panel could have been ordered that way.

The exterior sheathing is also made of recycled wood remnants instead of plywood, which requires large-diameter trees; the use of non-off-gassing adhesives is another green quality of the panelized building system, which was first used in Sweden.

“There is always waste when you cut lumber,” said Zack. “That waste can be turned right back into engineered lumber if the waste occurs right at the mill.” At Zack’s building site, there was no waiting trash bin because there was hardly any waste.

For two weeks the interior panels, fully sheathed on one side with drywall and, for the exterior, additional waterproof Tyvek and siding (a complicated assembly Forma perfected for this, its first city job) arrived in batches on flatbed trucks just wide enough to maneuver around narrow Laidley Street. San Francisco and other tightly packed urban areas require double drywall sheathing (a layer inside and one outside) along property lines so that a house fire can be contained. The floor and windowless wall panels unceremoniously dumped onto the street were kept flat by the drywall sheathing on one side. Walls with preinstalled windows were treated with greater care, packed vertically for the long trip from factory to construction site because they are fragile and prone to warping.

“For us the time savings was the biggest plus,” said Zack. By using Forma’s panels, their typical 14-week framing project was reduced to one week of preparation time to get the base ready, three weeks installing panels and three weeks to hand-frame walls the factory could not produce.

“They could not do everything,” said Zack. “They can’t do angled walls, and they can’t do short walls (under tall windows, for instance) effectively.”

Since de Vito had designed the building for conventional wood framing, 15 percent of the structure had to be framed by hand. In the next house they design, keeping Forma’s limitations in mind, Zack and de Vito will use only pre-framed panels.

“We had bids for the construction materials from $75,000 to $85,000 roughly. Labor for us is about $8,000 a week, and we got all the panels delivered for $95,000, which is equal to the cost of materials plus one week of labor,” said Zack. Add to that the cost of renting a crane to lift the heavy panels and you still save $50,000.

“In San Francisco there is also an unquantifiable benefit,” said Zack. Instead of five construction workers with hammers and saws working for 14 weeks, neighbors can appreciate it when there are only six weeks of noise.

Could San Francisco mandate this neighborly way of building? Perhaps, said Zack, but there are often access issues — a truck may not be able to deliver panels to every location.

Architect Tom Kundig, speaking recently at the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, highlighted another drawback of prefabricated panel construction: It discourages the development of local building skills.

Zack poured a concrete foundation and laid the ground floor to provide an efficient plinth from where they were able to add the lower walls and top two stories of the structure within six weeks. But before they got started on the framing phase, “we spent 100 hours coordinating our drawings with their company, communicating information and verifying their drawings. This was extra effort we may be able to avoid next time,” said Zack.

Still, that time spent saved them money, said Murray.

“We have a framer guy who explains what the proper foundations ought to have for panelized construction. We help clients with hold-down layout, and we work with an architect for a month or two before they pour a foundation,” said Murray, because that’s where things go wrong.

Surprisingly, Zack, who thought that Forma’s panels would be unusual in some intrinsic way, found them to be the same as conventional wood walls built on-site.

“They are just put together with more machine labor,” he said. And that, Murray points out, is why they are truly straight and better made.

“We had problems with scheduling and rain,” said Zack. Mountain snows delayed a big shipment for several days. When a delivery truck is late, it means that five carpenters and an expensive crane for lifting panels are waiting, which increases costs.

Oddly, that’s not something they’d worry about normally. “In conventional construction, there is always more to do,” Zack said, not without irony.

A European-style plaza is emerging from gritty area of Old U.S. Mint

Carl Nolte, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, June 10, 2007

For years, the two alleys that border the Old U.S. Mint in downtown San Francisco were cautionary tales in urban planning as they gradually declined into seediness after the Mint museum closed its doors in 1994.

The little stub of Mint Street, and the block of Jessie Street that runs from Mint into Fifth Street near Mission Street, had nothing but potential. The reality, however, was grim. There were drugs, there were derelicts, there was public urination. The two little alleys were a big mess.

But now, the two streets are being reborn into something called Mint Plaza. Cars have been banned from a block of Jessie, and it will be transformed into a small plaza, like something in Europe, with restaurants, green trees, outdoor dining and a new atmosphere.

Mint Street, which runs off Fifth into Jessie, will get a new look, too — with new pavement, new parking arrangements, and a cafe or two.

“This is the greatest thing that ever happened around here,” said Joey Chait, managing partner of the Provident Loan Association.

Provident is kind of a San Francisco classic, housed in a building faced in white terra-cotta at the corner of Mint and Mission. It had a cameo role in “The Maltese Falcon,” Dashiell Hammett’s famed detective novel.

The little alley complex around the 1874 Old Mint was once one of the brighter corners of Hammett’s San Francisco. Hammett himself worked around the corner on Market Street and knew the little alleys well.

Up the street at the corner of Mint and Jessie was a five-story brick candy factory, and next to that, on Jessie, was the San Francisco Fire Department’s Station One, the busiest in the city. The firefighters there thought of themselves as elite. “Alley Cats,” they called themselves.

The fire station was relocated some years ago. A kind of urban bleakness gradually set in, and the two streets went downhill.

About 1997, the Martin Building Co. started managing various properties in the area — mostly along Jessie. An old department store warehouse is being converted into offices and residences, and so is the 10-story building over the old firehouse.

People started looking at urban alleys with new eyes. A block or so away, the old Emporium store was turned into a shopping and movie complex. An Intercontinental Hotel is under construction at Fifth and Howard.

The change is dramatic. One Jessie Street building that was covered with graffiti only a year or so ago has a new coat of paint, and some handsome urban apartments were built inside.

The most dramatic change is on the street, where construction on the plaza began May 16.

The idea of a new look for the alleys has been around for years. Why did it take so long?

“Money,” said Patrick McNerney, president of Martin Building, “and the political winds.”

The whole project is possible under provisions of the state Mello-Roos Act, which allows for the creation of a Community Facilities District. It is a complex undertaking — the city retains the ownership of the street, but the plaza will be operated by a nonprofit group called Friends of Mint Plaza. The nonprofit will charge fees for temporary use of the facilities.

The total cost of construction is $3.5 million, paid for by the developer.

The trade-off, of course, is that the developer’s adjacent property will see values increase because of the plaza.

All of this has gone through the mill of the San Francisco permit process, where the bureaucratic wheels grind exceedingly fine. The Mint Plaza has been approved by the Board of Supervisors and nearly every city regulatory city agency. There were 14 public hearings on the plan. “God,” McNerney said, almost to himself, “it’s tough to get anything done in this town.”

When it is done — and Labor Day is the target date — the 18,000-square-foot Mint Plaza will be turned over to the city with the proviso that the nonprofit organization pays for maintenance.

“We want to do something here that will be a part of the city for a hundred years, a special public place that will be part of San Francisco public life,” McNerney said.

The centerpiece of the whole block around the alleys is the Old Mint, which the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society hopes to turn into a museum. That project is much grander and more expansive — one that will cost at least $89 million.

Though the Mint Plaza will be open by September, the Old Mint museum’s target date is four years in the future.

“It’s a great project,” Jim Chappell, president of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, said of the Mint Plaza. “They are closing the streets and giving them back to the people.”

New director sees it as model of sustainability — planting begins on building’s living roof

Carl T. Hall, Chronicle Science Writer Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Gregory Farrington, the new executive director of the California Academy of Sciences museum being built in Golden Gate Park, is a man of no small ambition.

As workers readied the museum’s “living roof” for the first plantings last week, Farrington, a 60-year-old, Harvard-educated chemist and former president of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, outlined plans to transform the venerable academy in ways that go far beyond architecture.

“I don’t get up in the morning hoping that if I work really hard I will be mediocre by 5 o’clock,” he said. “The goal here is to make this the best natural life institution in the world.”

Completion of the $429 million museum project, including a complicated yearlong move-in starting in October, is expected by the fall of 2008. Farrington calls the building a giant exhibit, “as much about the future as it is a museum of the past.”

It rates as one of the most significant undertakings of its kind, promising to bring worldwide attention to the Bay Area’s unique brand of scientific research and cultural innovation. From stem cells to green technology, it’s all part of the program Farrington is planning to put inside — or outside, as in the case of the rooftop garden for native plants — architect Renzo Piano’s glass-walled temple.

The academy, founded in 1853, is the oldest science institution in the West, set up to document with remarkable rigor some of the wonders glimpsed during the Gold Rush era.

After its first big museum in downtown San Francisco was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, the academy became a fixture in Golden Gate Park, where the major attractions included dioramas of African wildlife and extinct birds, along with an ornate alligator habitat that suggested the reptiles may have been natives of Nob Hill.

Hints of those quaint old displays will be part of the new museum, Farrington said during one of his first extended interviews since he began work in February. But the emphasis clearly has shifted away from ancient history — or even contemporary natural history.

The buzzword now is “sustainability,” and the building, packed with energy-saving materials and technologies, is the museum’s largest display.

“Part of what the Cal Academy needs to take up now is showing people what it means to make life sustainable, and to lead in that creatively and intellectually,” Farrington said. “What does sustainability mean to a normal family in a normal life in a normal home? What does it mean for public policy? What are the options? What are the questions?

“We are the natural organization to do that. We will be in a gorgeous park in a gorgeous city, in the middle of one of the greatest clusters of information technology and biotechnology anywhere in the world. If it doesn’t happen here, then where exactly is it going to happen?”

Farrington’s most recent posting was to London, where he served as an international program director and fundraiser for Lehigh, and he has a vacation home in Florida. He admits to some difficulties adjusting to Bay Area life, and at a recent Giants game against the Phillies, he still rooted for the Phillies.

“Nobody told me about the fog and the idea that summer is supposed to be cold,” he said. “I’m used to summer being warm, and winter cold. Some people around here consider high 70s to be a heat spell. I consider that just warming up, but I’m getting used to the weird weather. And I’ve become pretty proficient at the bus lines.”

He’s also joined a long tradition of San Francisco’s new arrivals proclaiming big ambitions in a setting famous for its pioneering approach and dreams of grandeur, even if they may not always be realized.

“The West is a big place — big mountains, big deserts, big ocean, big sky — in a way that the East isn’t,” he said. “Surely the most spectacular topography and natural scenery in the United States is the topography and scenery in the West, and that leads to a certain way of thinking. It’s sort of a fusion of the outdoors and the life of the mind. It’s an expansive view.

“Keep in mind of course that the people who climbed Everest came from London, and in every city in every part of the world you find people who explore,” he said. “What’s so beautiful about this part of the world is this combination of the creativity of human beings and the sheer awesome expansiveness of the outside — the mountains and the sea. It’s really a gorgeous place.”

The California Academy’s management philosophy, which is taking shape along with the building in the park, concerns how to create a museum that is forward-looking, inside and out, instead of a repository of relics and dead things pickled in formaldehyde.

There are plenty of those relics — the academy’s scientific collection includes some 20 million specimens gathered during a century of research forays. Those aren’t being thrown out. In fact, Farrington is now searching for a new research director to freshen up the academy’s historic emphasis on basic science.

As for its public face, however, the idea is to dispense with the dusty shelves and traditional cloistered ambience.

“In the past, museums were these buildings with thick walls and high columns, and they looked like new versions of Greek temples,” Farrington said. “They had lots of steps. They were dark and you went inside them, and oftentimes they were about history.

“What’s been created here in the park is almost the inversion of that. Glass walls. No steps. Light floods into it. And the main issues being addressed by the displays and research, by all the activities in the building, are about the future.”

Preserving the record of evolution, the “history of life,” Farrington said, will be part of the academy’s mission as it has been since the rush to Sutter’s Mill.

But now people in the West are learning to step more carefully, and so the California Academy is moving into its new home with plans to “demonstrate where life is going,” and how even hard-charging, techno-obsessed bipedal hominids may manage to stick around.

“That relates to all sorts of issues — climate change, global warming, survival of the species — survival of all species, but particularly survival of the human species,” Farrington said.

While the new museum and its displays would seem to be enough to draw people there, the academy should heed one lesson learned from opening of the Chabot Space and Science Center atop the Oakland hills in 2000, former Oakland City Councilman Dick Spees said.

“It’s not about a building,” said Spees, who serves on the center’s board of directors. “It’s about a program.” And marketing that program to the public is essential to making sure the people come and keep coming, Spees said.

Farrington acknowledged another one of his planning concerns: how to cope with the inevitable first rush of crowds curious to see the new museum, which is the latest creation of Piano, well-known for designing civic plazas, cultural centers and museums in cities around the world.

Stampedes, ever since the Gold Rush, have always been a part of the West, too, but Farrington promised that people won’t have to wait three hours to get inside to see the future of life on display.

Although most of the construction crews will finish their work this fall on the new home of the California Academy of Sciences, it’s expected to take a full year for all the displays, live animals and collected specimens to settle into the new location in Golden Gate Park and get ready for the first paying visitors in the fall of 2008. Here’s the move-in plan for some of the museum’s key features:

– Native California species are being planted now on the museum’s signature rooftop sustainability display.

– Living trees will be moved into a rain forest display in late November.

– Coral will be moved into a coral reef tank starting in January. That process is expected to continue until early September.

– The planetarium screen will be installed between November and January. Planetarium seating will be installed in February.

– Kimball Natural History Museum exhibits, including African Hall dioramas, will be installed between March and July.

– The Steinhart Aquarium animals will be moved into their tanks starting in February and continuing through September 2008. Stephanie Stone, a museum spokeswoman, said “the order of animal migration is still very much in flux.”

– The tentative plan is to move fish into the coral reef habitat first, followed by bats into the rain forest in April and penguins into their new home, possibly in August 2008, to allow them more time to breed in the museum’s temporary downtown site on Howard Street.

– Botany collections will be boxed by the end of November and sent to an industrial freezer in December for a debugging, then will be moved into the new building in January.

– Fish, reptile and insect collections will probably be next, starting later in January. The rest of the research departments will follow. That phase is expected to be done by the end of June 2008.

Source: California Academy of Sciences

E-mail Carl Hall at chall@sfchronicle.com.

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