The Defenestration Building: Part 1

Passing by Sixth Street's infamous Defenestration Building on the corner of Howard I happily noticed some artists painting the most intricate and colorful pieces that have ever graced the boarded up facade of the Hugo Hotel.

The vibrant aerosol lettering softly laced over years of other names written on the walls, other stories crafted and displayed for the sake of uplifting one of San Francisco's most disregarded and unappreciated neighborhoods. This multi layering of the graffiti, a continuous urban cycle of affirmation, neglect, and reaffirmation, reflects the very history of the Hotel and community itself.


The four-story Hugo Hotel, a mini behemoth of brick masonry, is credited as the first of its kind on Sixth Street. It has been without tenants since a fire burned out a number of the rooms in the 80's.

Inspired by the abandoned building, Brian Goggin transformed the weathered exterior into a public art installation in 1997. He suspended street ravaged furniture in mid air, whirling and shrinking out of the skinny tenement windows and from the roof.

In the staging of the opening defenestration festival, Goggin and his group of artists revealed what they hoped would be a self-determinative gesture of defenestration for the community, a reclamation that "throwing out" or abandonment take on the spiritual act of release. A breadth and an shaking off of frustration.

My eyes dart upwards to catch the bearded grandfather clock in animated suspension, trying desperately to lift up the couches and tables corkscrewing out of the boarded windows, defying gravity, and I cannot help but suspect that the future of this neighborhood no longer holds the promise that it once seemed to have ten years ago. The falling furniture appears more overwhelming than joyful.


As part of the Sixth Street Beautification Project, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) aims for an incremental approach to urban revitalization of the community. This approach includes the construction of modest income housing and commercial revitalization that turns on the ideal of retaining core affordability while encouraging development.

The SFRA admits that the new objective evolved in response to criticism of their redevelopment projects of both the Yerba Buena and Fillmore districts that displaced thousands of low-income residents with the razing of buildings and new construction of malls, condominiums, and recreation centers.

Included in the body of powers of the incremental approach is the use of eminent domain, which means, the agency can seize private property at what it deems to be fair market value if the property is seen as a blight to the community.

After years of disagreement with the owner of the Hugo Hotel, Varsha Patel, who has been asking for a selling price of four million dollars, the SFRA initiated in January the process of seizing the property by eminent domain. Considering that Patel has refused to compromise for the past twenty years with interested buyers as well as the agency, allowing the burnt out building to deteriorate further, it surely seems that the SFRA fairly employed eminent domain.

We can add on top of Patel's refusal to sell her outspoken contempt for the community "They can put the low-income people somewhere. . . you can be homeless somewhere in Idaho."

Despite the redefined objectives of the SFRA, what lies in the future for the Hugo Hotel and for Sixth Street? Will they raze the building completely and construct an affordable income housing unit with benefits for the locals? Or will it be a high density condominium unity that marks a new era of displacement for Sixth Street?

Lowering my eyes to the bright, twisting colors of the murals on the ground level, the furiously beautiful letters that slowly emerge from the boarded walls, reclaiming the dilapidated behemoth for ourselves, I realize that at least a sliver of that future is up to us.