Back in 1995, a fire destroyed the St. Paulus Evangelical Lutheran Church that once stood at the corner of Gough and Eddy Streets where a garden now grows.
Currently home to The Free Farm, Maracor Development, the builder of The Beacon buildings on King, is proposing to build 100 condominiums over a new 9,701 square foot church, community space and a 73-car parking garage on the site at 950 Gough.
As always, we’ll keep you plugged-in and ahead of the neighborhood development curve. And yes, the designs for the new church and building are likely to be a little less ornate than the original above.
Sucks that this garden (farm??) will be taken away. Community gardening is the next big thing.
What really sucks is that the original church burned down. That was an attractive building.
I like community gardening but it doesn’t really make much sense in a dense city with expensive land costs. The Northern Europeans have a better solution: allotment gardens on the periphery of the city.
SF has a lot of flat roof space. Imagine converting all those roofs into community gardens. A real Eden this place would become. It would also clean the air.
“Imagine converting all those roofs into community gardens.”
I’m imagining detailed structural engineering all the way to the foundation to support the added load 🙂
Green roofs are a nice feature but are often practical only on new builds or as retrofits for buildings that were overengineered in the first place.
Another approach to clean the air is to reduce the stuff we dump into it.
As a neighbor, I’d rather there be housing rather than a (nice) small garden that spits out a few to stores and heads of lettuce.
This is a dense city. We need housing more than we need food production.
Sorry but NOTHING can replace the amazing wooden Gothic structure that was St. Paulus (and I’m agnostic). Ad it was burned down by the homeless it was sheltering as I recall.
Still, it’s time to rebuild something there and I hope the builders at least try to come up with graceful architecture rather than the usual stucco slop that serves as “market rate” housing in San Francisco.
Looking forward to a rendering.
Wasn’t around in the 90s, but how many churches burnt down in SF at that time? Here, 16/Noe and 15/Dolores were all within a couple years, right?
Yes I do understand the engineering involved in green roofing, I’m just living in my imagination.
It is said that this church was modeled on Chartres, but it was probably copied from another French Cathedral, or a combination.
This was an architectural masterpiece, perhaps the finest Gothic Revival wooden church in the west. It was much more than an ordinary “gift to the street.”
It also had a very fine organ.
This space needs an architect worthy of the church that was here. Let us have no ugly cheap boxes.
jd87…16th and Noe actually burned down in 1981. Fifteenth and Dolores was in 1993. Nice to see both of those sites FINALLY being filled in. But tragic that we lost both of these, in addition to St. Paulus.
I woke up and look out of my living room window and witnessed the unthinkable in the distance. First plumes of smoke coming from the windows and openings of St. Paulus. Then flames shooting out and finally … The structure collapsing. The entire event lasted about 40 minutes.
Thanks curmudgeon! Definitely sad to lose these structures.
UPDATE: Church Selling Hayes Valley “Farm” Site With Plans For Condos To Rise.