When Rowland Weinstein, owner of the Weinstein Gallery on Union Square, purchased the 13,500-square-foot building at 2548 Mission Street, which sits between the New Mission/Alamo Drafthouse Theater and Foreign Cinema, for $3.8 million amidst much fanfare in 2014, the seller had reportedly turned down an offer for $600,000 more, “preferring to have an art gallery on the block.”
At the time, it was reported that Weinstein was planning to use the Mission Street space for a gallery featuring local artists in conjunction with “a bar concept” which was to open by the end of 2014. But neither the gallery nor bar ever materialized.
And while not accompanied by any press releases this time around, Weinstein has quietly sold the building to an LLC for $4.9 million. And behind the LLC is entrepreneur turned real estate investor, Enrique Landa.
Despite its appearance, 2548 Mission Street is not a historic resource nor protected from being torn down. And the parcel upon which the building sits is zoned for development up to 65-feet in height.
Ha, I mean at this point, I guess we can forego with the fiction that artists exist in the Mission. Bring on the condos, Im not sure if anyone that cares about the arts at this point even hangs around there?
There are plenty of artists in the Mission still Sam.
Are you forgetting the two dozen or so galleries in the neighborhood?
There are plenty of great venues / shows in the Mission and tearing down a single, dilapidated two story building isn’t going to squash “the arts”.
I’m not sure there’s any “ahhhtists” left in SF’s Mission. Real ones that is. Smart ones have decamped to the E Bay and/or bought there while it’s still low enough to do so. Or moved to Detroit / Baltimore.
It’s really crappy that he apparently used his promise of opening an art gallery to get a huge discount on the sale price, bailed on that promise, flipped the property, and pocketed the discount amount for himself.
And while the original seller would have an uphill legal battle, if these facts are true, I think this could meet the elements for a civil claim for fraudulent inducement.
Agreed. I’m an artist (and property owner) who has lived in the Mission for many years. This sort of bogus manipulation of the term “artist” is tiresome and damaging to the culture, as it remains, of our city. I would hope there might be some legal repercussion to this flip.
He lives up to his promise if this is performance art, which it kinda is. It could be called “the Art of the deal” heh heh.
LOL, yeah I sincerely doubt someone is going to take this to court. And would win LOL, nope. Just like that woman who sold her Mission condo for what, $650k? As soon as that couple she sold it to starts having more than their one kid, it will be sold and that’s it. And it will be sold for millions.
Nonsense to even suggest the “original owner” would have any legal recourse under the circumstances as we know them.
A successful fraudulent inducement claim requires a claimant to establish that it “reasonably relied” upon promises of future conduct made by another party.
Even that would be a very difficult burden to sustain.
However, more difficult would be establishing a misrepresentation underpinning the buyer’s offer to purchase. There are a multitude of rational reasons as to why Weinstein might have decided to not open a gallery and dump the property instead.
Bingo. The seller would have to prove that at the time of the sale, the buyer had no intention of opening an art gallery. That would be impossible to prove. Everything from personal health issues to the increase in construction costs to the political climate in the neighborhood or 100 other things could have caused the buyer to change his intentions after the purchase.
If the seller wanted to rely on this representation, it should have been part of the deal, e.g. if property is re-sold, initial seller to receive $600,000 from the sale if there has not been an art gallery in the space for x amount of time.
This is no different than a homeowner selling his condo to a first time buyer rather than taking more money from an investor, only to have the first time buyer trade up two years later and take the profit from the lower price with him.
Not even remotely true, logic like that is why SF is a joke.
With some careful cleaning and replacement pieces (not as difficult as you might think), that storefront could have looked good as new. I don’t think It’s a bad thing that the building might end up as apartments, but hopefully whatever ends up happening there will still be a commercial space on the ground floor.
The people who whine about the Mission not being cool are the same people who are turning it into a vertical suburb. A high end art gallery that never opened? The Elbow Room, Doc’s Clock, all the funky stores that used to be on Valencia and Mission – worry about the real problems.
The tragic loss of an art gallery that could have sold small pieces costing thousands of dollars.
I don’t think this building is particularly historic and worthy of saving, and 55 feet is seriously under building. However this is San Francisco. So in this case I would actually prefer to see the facade kept and have a setback for newer condos. We have seen this approach work well in SF. It also seems to appease a few of the not psychotic NIMBYs more (however few of them that aren’t psychotic). Also a new building from the ground up would most likely have a less interesting base.
As a policy, I think the city should instead of dumping ever more requirements on developers (impact fees! Historic preservation! Affordable units! MOAR affordable units! Less height! Community space! Etc), the city should just come up with a new scoring mechanism that takes into account all the goals they want the developer to help achieve (i.e. All the things the city wants to have but is to cheap, and dumb to build itself). The developer should be able to pick and choose buffet style as long as they meet a certain threshold by the city.
In one case it might be all the developer does is affordable housing units. In another case it might be a combo of development fees and community space (such as a new school or park).
This seems like a better approach, taking into all factors of civic goals and urban development rather than just ad hoc throwing more requirements.
Oh, NOPASF, you’re one of the rational ones! SF don’t take kindly to your type ’round here. California has created so much bureaucratic nonsense that we’ll never be able to undo or simplify, only create addenda. i dream of a day when we could go back to a simpler time, back when people built Russian Hill, but alas, we cannot.
It seems that the facade could be incorporated into a residential development, if the architect is good.
Does it really have so much value that the entire design should revolve around saving it? It isn’t even nice to start with, why pick a new shade of lipstick?
It’s fun to think about incorporating older facades, but super costly and usually renders pretty bad results. It would be interesting to see what it looked like if the existing facade went up 5 stories—esp with that brick and tile work.
Hmmm. It has some architectural interest but it is not a historic resource, but this is?
Also, cry me a river for this seller. What an impossible person to deal with.
UPDATE: Mission District “Art Gallery” Site Back on the Market for $5.5 Million