Purchased for $1.75 million in early 2013, plans to raze Ginsberg’s Dublin Pub and develop a boutique 13-room hotel on the 400 Bay Street site were soon thereafter proposed, as we first reported at the time.
Approved by Planning in 2015, permits for the development were issued in 2016 and the pub was razed in 2017, but the approved hotel has yet to materialize and said plans have since expired.
At the same time, the boarded up and banked 400 Bay Street site, upon which the “former popular restaurant/bistro” had sat, is now back on the market with a $2.98 million price tag, positioned as a “Very Rare Profitable Investment Opportunity!” and “canvas for a profitable business.” We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in.
There should be serious financial penalties for developers who execute a demolition but don’t break ground on new construction within a reasonable timeframe — say 6 months at most. Couldn’t the city write something into the demolition permit? I get that it’s better for resale value to have a scraped lot, but it’s worse for all the surrounding owners to have the blight of a vacant lot for years and years.
I agree that there should be a heavy penalty to pay for a developer who demolishes an existing in-use building without proceeding with the approved project to replace it. They for sure shouldn’t have the ability to sell the parcel and walk away scott free.
With the 1,921-room Hilton San Francisco Union Square, the city’s largest hotel, and the 1,024 room Parc 55 San Francisco both being handed back to the lender earlier this year and now officially in receivership because the investment firm that owned both of them strategically defaulted on a $725 million loan this past Summer, the project sponsors probably decided that now isn’t the time to complete a boutique 13-room hotel in San Francisco. But they should have to pay something to the City for exercising that option.
I used to live up the street from here in the early 90’s and would frequent Ginsburg’s. It always had a really weird vibe – it was kind of barn-like, and there weren’t that many locals and only a few tourists (usually Brits) who would wander in to watch football. My old roommate used to refer to it as “San Francisco’s only Jewish Irish pub”.
Except oddly it wasn’t the only one – O’Greenburgs’s in Noe Valley (now gone).