A service under the pagoda in Japantown commemorated the anniversary of the earthquake.

On March 11 — the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeast Japan last year — a commemorative community event called “Our Hearts to Japan” will be held at the Peace Plaza at Post and Buchanan Streets in Japantown.

The event caps a year of local activities that have raised more than $4 million to aid the victims of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that followed. More than 20,000 people were killed and thousands more were left injured and homeless.

“The event is a way to memorialize those who have died and to honor the survivors, many of whom still need our help in rebuilding their lives,” said Dianne Fukami, president of the board of directors of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California. “When I was in Tohoku last month, I witnessed the spirit and determination of the people, but I also realized how huge their losses are and how great the need continues to be.”

An extensive program of events will be held in Japantown on March 11. “Our Hearts to Japan” will begin at 2 p.m., and those attending will observe a moment of silence at 2:46 p.m. — precisely the time the disaster struck Japan.

Crowds gather outside Delfina Pizzeria on California near Fillmore nearly every day at noon and nighttime. They’re waiting for a table, preferably one of the coveted spots out front.

Soon the waiting may be more convivial — and the odds of snagging an outside table considerably improved — when the Fillmore Stoop is completed. It’s the first parklet in the neighborhood — and one of the few with a proper name — although the take-back-the-pavement mini-parks are already a big hit in North Beach, on Divisadero and especially along Valencia Street. They transform one or two parking spots into a public space, usually with tables and chairs and a bit of greenery.

The Fillmore Stoop is the creation of Jessica Weigley and Kevin Hackett, architects whose firm, Siol Studios, is at Fillmore and Clay. Their proposal takes the parklet idea a step further by creating sculptural benches and planters in two parking spots, with room for four or five tables from Delfina. They gained the endorsement of neighboring businesses and persuaded Chase Bank — coming soon across the street — to pony up $25,000 to cover construction costs.

The city has approved the plans and issued permits. Most of the work will be done off-site, with installation in late March or early April.

At the new meters — which accept both coins and credit cards and have no time limits — compared with older meters used elsewhere in the city:
• Citations decreased by 35 percent.
• Net revenue increased by 20 percent.
• Length of stay increased slightly.

“The new meters [resulted in] greater income from payment at the meter and less from citations,” the report states. “In 2010, at the old meters, 55 percent of revenue came from payment, with 45 percent from citations. In 2011, after the new meters were installed, 70 percent of revenue was from meter payment, with 30 percent from citations.”

On Fillmore, some drivers complained they found the new meters complicated to use, but many merchants gave them positive reviews.

“I think it’s good,” said Vasilios Kiniris, owner of Zinc Details. “From a sales standpoint, people don’t say, ‘I’ve got to run out and feed my meter.’ It’s much more convenient to be able to pay with a credit card for as long as you want to park.”

At Design Within Reach, staffer Tony Sison said he rarely has to reach into his stash of quarters for customers anymore. “It’s been a positive thing,” Sison said. “People aren’t just coming to one store. With more time, they can have lunch and visit three or four shops.”

Planning Commission President Christina Olague was sworn in this morning by Mayor Ed Lee as the new member of the Board of Supervisors from District 5, which includes much of the Fillmore.

Read more: “Ed Lee’s pick“

Floyd Trammell — whose position as president of the Fillmore Community Benefit District ended when the group was defunded in mid-December — walked the blocks of Fillmore south of Geary on a recent morning and took note of the changes he was seeing in the neighborhood. The sidewalk was littered with plastic bags and other trash. Here and there were clumps of cigarette butts and piles of leaves. “This used to look spotless,” Trammell said. “Up until November, all this was spotless.”

The community benefit district (CBD) was created in 2006 amid optimism that better days were ahead for the area with the imminent opening of Yoshi’s Jazz Club, the Fillmore Heritage Center and several new restaurants. With city support and a “yes” vote from the area’s property owners, the CBD was poised to help clean up the neighborhood and promote its new attractions. The special property tax brought in annual funding of about $300,000. A board of directors made up of property owners, local residents and business owners took responsibility for using the funds to pay for cleaning, marketing and security.

Initially there was considerable infighting among business owners and local residents. But most board members said the organization had made a positive difference in an area still struggling to move past the devastation of redevelopment in the 1960s.

In mid-December the CBD was up for renewal and many of the 300 property owners in the district supported it. But the votes were weighted based on the size of each owner’s property. Representatives from two major properties — the Fillmore Center and Safeway — were against it, and renewal was defeated by 66 percent to 34 percent.

“The weight of their no vote basically killed it,” said Todd Claytor, a CBD board member and chairman of its renewal committee. It is the only one of a dozen similar benefit districts in the city that has been discontinued.

Claytor noted that Paul Hyams, the Fillmore Center manager who was formerly president of the CBD, actively supported renewal for a time and even worked to build support among other property owners. “For us to have this happen at the eleventh hour,” Claytor said of Hyams’ change of heart, “it gutted us, it just gutted us.”

Hyams refused to discuss his opposition to the group he led for four of its five years, deferring to his corporate bosses at Laramar, a property management company in Chicago, and Prudential Real Estate, which is a major investor in the 1,100 apartment complex. A spokesman for Prudential said in a statement the firm’s leaders “remain committed to the continued success and vibrancy of the Fillmore District for the benefit of our investors and the community.”

Chuck Smith, the first resident of the Fillmore Heritage Center condos and the original president of its homeowners association, expressed his concerns to Prudential when it looked as if the renewal might not go through and urged the owners of the Fillmore Center to change their minds. “I hope you will reconsider,” he wrote. “You could make a big difference for the worse here. We’ve come a long way. Let’s not go back.”

Smith received an email response from Prudential’s Todd Thakar. “Our vote is not a vote against the Fillmore neighborhood,” Thakar wrote, “but rather a vote of ‘no faith’ in the ability of the community benefit district to carry out its charge.” Thakar said “the basic governance of the CBD has proven problematic,” but gave no details. He said the Fillmore Center would “take up the slack in sidewalk cleaning” and continue to support other activities and improvements in the neighborhood.

A spokesperson from Safeway declined to comment for this story, but told the Examiner the district had “ethical issues.”

Board members acknowledged there had been challenges with the CBD, and for a time they were working without an executive director. “Lack of an executive director was definitely a hardship,” Claytor said, although he maintained that was an internal issue that didn’t interfere with actually getting the work done.

“We’ve come so far along, and for the most part we’ve been seeing progress,” added Monetta White, who served on the CBD board and owns the restaurant 1300 on Fillmore. “Why anyone would not support this is beyond me.”

Kaz Kajimura, owner of Yoshi’s jazz club and restaurant — the major engine of the area’s turnaround in recent years — also served on the CBD board. He said there was growing activity and far more people in the jazz district in recent years. “A lot of that has to do with the benefit district work,” he told the Examiner. “Now we are back at square one. It’s terrible.”

Trammell, who is head of the West Bay Conference Center, insisted that progress in the neighborhood would continue, even without funding for the activities of the CBD. “We have had to galvanize to make certain we continue to thrive despite the irresponsibility of these two corporate entities,” he said, referring to Safeway and the Fillmore Center. Trammell said he is looking into securing funding through Mayor Ed Lee’s proposals for micro financing.

The Bay Citizen: Audit of redevelopment in the Fillmore

“We are absolutely overwhelmed by the response to our fundraising campaign,” said Paul Osaki, executive director of the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California in Japantown, which organized the effort. He said that 100 percent of all donations are going to help the recovery in Japan.

Osaki moved quickly to begin organizing a relief effort after the earthquake and tsunami struck on March 11. “We really felt it was our responsibility as Japanese Americans to do this,” he said. He had experience to draw on from 1995, when his organization helped raise $600,000 to aid the victims of the Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,000 people.

“This disaster is even bigger,” Osaki said. The death toll could reach 20,000, and more than 12,000 others were evacuated after the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear meltdown that followed. The Japanese government estimates it will cost $300 billion to repair and rebuild the area.

Osaki plans to keep the Northern Japan Earthquake Relief Fund operating at least through the anniversary of the earthquake in March.

Dental school: The University of the Pacific announced on November 22 it has completed its purchase of a new facility at 155 Fifth Street and will move from its longtime home at Webster and Sacramento by 2014. Its current building will be sold, along with a dormitory for dental students the university owns on Post Street, which already has a potential buyer.

Hospital: An agreement with the city on California Pacific Medical Center’s plans to rebuild the Cathedral Hill Hotel as a state of the art 555-bed $1.9 billion high-rise hospital is expected by the end of the year. Hospital officials say negotiations over the public benefits that would be required to allow the project to proceed are nearly complete. The Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors still must approve the plans.

1688 Pine: Oyster Development Corp. paid $15.5 million in mid-November for 1688 Pine Street, a 35,000-square-foot site just west of Van Ness Avenue that could house about 200 condominium units. Previous developer A.F. Evans had proposed building 283 units in two towers on the site before the firm went bankrupt in 2009.

The Kounalakises in their Steiner Street aerie.

When they’re in San Francisco, Markos and Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis can often be spotted on Fillmore Street, near their home on the ninth floor of the 2500 Steiner Street tower. But these days they’re mostly in Budapest, where she’s the U.S. ambassador to Hungary.

Among their visitors from the neighborhood: 2500 Steiner’s 12th floor resident, the staunch Democrat Susie Tompkins Buell, who arrived just in time for the unveiling outside the embassy of a larger-than-life statue of former President Ronald Reagan. “We kept our eye on Susie,” the ambassador told the Chron’s Leah Garchik.

Read more

Murals at Fillmore and Geary were overtaken by graffiti after a new bus shelter was installed.

By Kellie Ell

A once vibrant mural on the south side of the Boom Boom Room at Fillmore and Geary is now covered in gold, hot pink and white spray paint and other graffiti. Looming above, the next-door National Dollar store has painted its name and a parade of products it sells — soda, crackers, ketchup, sugar and toilet bowl cleaner — all intermixed with graffiti.

Alexander Andreas, owner of the Boom Boom Room, says the mural depicting jazz musicians on his building went undamaged for six years. But now it is “totally tagged,” he says, and vandals have also etched graffiti into the glass walls and top of the new designer bus shelter and smashed its back wall.

Andreas blames the rise in vandalism on the recent repositioning of the 38-Geary  bus shelter. Before it was at the curb. Now it is backed up against the wall of the Boom Boom Room, providing shelter for taggers to deface property out of sight.

“It’s absurd,” he says. “The city did a disservice. The move has triggered an onslaught of graffiti hitting my mural.”

A spokesman for the Municipal Transportation Agency says the shelter was moved to provide the sidewalk access required for the disabled.

The owner of the National Dollar store, who would give his name only as Freddy, says graffiti has been “a really big problem” in the five years since he opened at 1633 Fillmore. He says vandals have repeatedly climbed on the roof of the Boom Boom Room to tag his wall, so he had it partially painted with different products he sells.

“Murals are beautiful works of art, and people appreciate that,” he says.

But art is in the eye of the beholder, and some say his attempt to create a mural may actually be attracting graffiti.

“It looks like a lot of noise at that corner,” Andreas says of what he calls the dollar store’s “cheap-o job” of depicting the commercial products it sells. “The mural looks so tacky. I don’t think they care about the beautification of the Fillmore.”

Noisy or not, apparently it’s legal. According to the city’s billboard ordinance, general advertising of commercial products is allowed on billboards — or murals — on a store if the items are sold on the premises, according to John Purvis of the San Francisco Planning Department.

Above the Boom Boom Room's mural is a parade of products sold at the dollar store.

But graffiti, however artful, is not legal.

Andreas says he recently received a letter from the city directing him to clean up the side of his building or risk a fine. According to a 2004 graffiti removal measure, property owners and landlords are required to clean up graffiti within 30 days or face a penalty of up to $500. Those charged must remedy the problem or pay the city to do it.

The dollar store owner says he has repeatedly repainted the south wall of his building, only to have it “graffitied again and again and again” by people climbing onto the roof of the Boom Boom Room.

“I clean it up and two weeks later I have to climb up there again,” he says. “My job is to clean it up or I get fined by the city.”

Andreas says he has tried to collaborate with his neighbor on a more attractive mural that would cover both walls, to no avail.

The owner of the dollar store says he is working with Melonie Green of Infin8 Sync, a production company and art space in the Fillmore, to find the right artist to paint a bigger mural.

Green says something as simple as lettering saying “The Fillmore” could be enough to deter vandalism — and promote the neighborhood as well. Some murals created as a way to deter graffiti have worked, she says, but others have not.
Green says some taggers don’t understand the unwritten rules that say street artists shouldn’t touch murals.

Law enforcement officials are also equivocal. Officer Martin Ferreira, of the police department’s graffiti abatement program, says he has noticed a decrease in vandalism on walls with murals. He admits, however, that it’s hit and miss. “No matter how beautiful a piece of artwork may appear, if it’s unwanted, it can cause people a lot of stress,” he says. Graffiti is most effectively deterred, he says, by proper lighting, surveillance cameras and foot traffic.

One success story — at least so far — is nearby at Les Croissants Cafe, located behind the Boom Boom Room at 1840 Geary. Owner Tommy Ly says his eatery has had no tagging in the months since he hired a well-known local graffiti artist to paint a mural on the cafe.

A mural by a graffiti artist at Les Croissants Cafe has not been vandalized.

Battling what appears to be an upsurge in prostitution, officers at Northern Station have stepped up enforcement efforts in recent months, making a growing number of arrests on Van Ness Avenue.

In April, 88 people were arrested or cited on charges related to prostitution in the district — up from the usual monthly tally of 10 to 20, according to Captain Ann Mannix of Northern Station on Fillmore Street. Charges included prostitution, soliciting prostitution and related offenses such as warrant arrests and traffic violations.

The crackdown came in response to renewed complaints by area residents that the community risks being overtaken by problems related to sex for sale.

Among them is Dawn Trennert, who founded the Middle Polk Neighborhood Association five years ago after eight pimp shootings in a short time. She rallied other neighbors in the area between California Street and Broadway to stage a night watch from 1 to 5 a.m. to gather empirical evidence.

They got an eyeful.

“We saw a pimp pull into the middle of the street at Sacramento and Larkin at 3 in the morning,” says Trennert. “He drove in a circle, screaming at a woman who had just come onto her shift: ‘You’re wearing too many clothes, you crack whore bitch! This is San Francisco and you have to be naked to make money.’ ”

Captain Mannix says she and other law enforcement officers met about a year ago with residents to discuss the issue. In response, police undertook a one-month program to clamp down on prostitution in the neighborhood, largely led by plainclothes officers posing as johns or prostitutes. During the first two weeks of 2010, more than three dozen suspected prostitutes and 15 would-be customers were arrested.

Mannix says community complaints boiled up again this February — and again, Northern officers responded with a stepped-up abatement effort.

One of the highest concentrations of prostitution in the city is in an area near the neighborhood identified by police as “the track,” bounded by Van Ness, Larkin, Clay and Ellis.

“The basic principle of supply and demand is heavy in that area,” says Mannix. It is a logistically opportune spot, she says, since drivers have easy access, many businesses in the area stay open late and there are inexpensive hotels and motels nearby.

Some local residents were surprised by both the big uptick in the number charged and the area being targeted, believing the Tenderloin neighborhood to be more of a hotbed for prostitution. But investigators say the two areas attract distinctly different crowds — the Tenderloin trending to local transvestite prostitutes who generally work alone, and the Van Ness strip drawing more out-of-town straight prostitutes working for violence-prone pimps.

“Prostitution is very competitive,” Mannix says. “It begins at about 1 in the morning and continues until nearly dawn.” During intensified prostitution crackdowns, records show as many as six or seven arrests in a targeted zone between midnight and 6 a.m.

Most of those arrested for prostitution during the recent sweep are women and most are from the East Bay, although some have been from Orange County and as far away as Las Vegas and Washington state; only a few are San Francisco residents.

Mannix says that prostitution seems to “go hand in hand” with a number of other crimes including drug sales, robberies, assaults and shootings. She also cited a pimp-on-pimp shooting at Bob’s Donuts on Polk between Sacramento and Clay Streets in February.

There are also some more pragmatic concerns. “It’s just not healthy for a neighborhood to have to go out and sweep up condoms every morning before the kids see them,” says Trennert, of the Middle Polk association. “They say prostitution is a victimless crime, but it’s anything but victimless. The neighborhoods are the serious victims here — serious victims.”

Despite the crackdown, some residents say police efforts to stop prostitution are sporadic and mostly ineffectual. Mannix says it’s a matter of priorities.

“We could do 88 every month,” she says. “But in the scale of crime on Friday and Saturday nights, we have lots of other things to respond to — and they often must take precedence.”

According to California law, anyone found guilty of prostitution or soliciting prostitution may be jailed up to six months, fined $1,000, or both. Both prostitutes and their customers, often called johns, can face the same sentence. Repeat offenders face stiffer penalties, including up to six years of jail time. Another possible charge, “agreeing to engage in prostitution,” illegal since 1986, makes it more difficult for all engaged in prostitution to claim they were entrapped or ensnared; that charge, however, does not lead to an increased sentence for repeat offenders.

Because of a lack of specific evidence and other legal complexities, many prostitution-related charges are reduced to lesser offenses such as disturbing the peace, trespassing or committing lewd conduct; all carry more lenient punishment and less personal stigma for those convicted.

State laws also specify that the necessary finding of the intent to engage in prostitution may be inferred from actions, such as beckoning to or stopping and talking with passersby or beckoning to drivers — especially in areas known for prostitution activity. Once investigating officers stop a suspected prostitute, evidence such as possessing a number of condoms, a large amount of cash or cellphone records tracking customers may also be considered as strengthening the charge.

“To get a john is more labor-intensive and time-intensive,” says Mannix.

Says Sgt. Michael Andraychak, an officer who has worked such arrests: “When there are female undercover decoy officers working the streets, they want the john to approach them and start talking, to make some offer or agreement that there will be sex for money.”

Without evidence of the conversation, it can be challenging to prove that a john solicited an illegal act. For charges of prostitution, it can be hard to prove another required element: that money or something else of value such as drugs changed hands. And if investigating officers conclude that a person will not likely reoffend — as is often the case with johns — they are cited and released.

The most serious offenses — pimping and pandering — are felonies punishable by three to six years in prison. “We really like to arrest pimps because they’re the most violence-prone,” Mannix says.

But that presents the biggest challenge of all: tracking individuals who often have enough street smarts to stay off the street, then linking them to the specific acts charged. To make the charges stick, a prostitute usually must be willing to testify against a pimp, which is rare.

In spotting those who may be soliciting prostitution, officers look most obviously at those wearing clothing that seems jarring or out of place, especially in the city’s generally cool climes.

“You just can’t believe it,” says Mannix. “Sometimes they wear almost nothing at all.”

Officers stop scantily clad women who seem to be loitering, often on corners, along curbs or at bus stops, and ask to see their identification. Computer checks often show a prior charge such as “loitering” or “commercialized sex.” Most of these are deemed warrant arrests, where a suspect has already been arrested on the charge but did not show up as required for an arraignment. Those suspects are required to return to the jurisdiction where the warrant is pending.

But mode of dress and demeanor aren’t always dependable indicators. One neighborhood regular, age 88, says he was propositioned while waiting for a bus at the corner of Van Ness and Union.

“A woman approached and asked what time the bus was coming,” he says. “Then she asked a more personal question — whether I was going to lunch — and asked whether she could come along.” That was followed by a more overt suggestion involving sex.

“I would have never, ever in a hundred years picked her as a hooker,” he says. “She was dressed conservatively. Looked like she was 35 or 40 years old — an ordinary, attractive lady.”

But no deal: “I told her I’m gay.”

Mannix says that while prostitution in the track area is no longer being pursued as vigorously as during the April crackdown, there is still a persistent police presence in the area. “We continue steady enforcement,” she says. “Now we’re doing heavy traffic enforcement — motorcycle cops pulling people over who are impeding the flow of traffic.”

But Trennert says this leaves her and other neighbors concerned.

“As soon as the patrols are done and the heat is off, they’re back,” she says. “We want to see arrests really matter. Currently a prostitute is arrested and barely even taken out of a business cycle. We need to interrupt their business cycles in a more serious way — and make johns realize they’re taking risks, not only with their own health, but with the safety of the whole neighborhood.”