The class of 2026 has no mansions in it

Vol. I, No. 17 · San Francisco — Sunday, August 2, 2026 · Price: one steam-bath token

BY MAXINE DOLAN, CITY DESK

Fourteen buildings have been designated San Francisco landmarks since January, and no dated year on the city’s own register has run higher since 1981. The busiest years between then and now, 2022 and 2024, each managed twelve with all twelve months to work in. This year hit fourteen by the second of August.

The register is Article 10 of the Planning Code, opened in 1967. Its first entry, designated in 1968, was Mission Dolores; the rest of that first class reads like a Sunday procession, Old St. Mary’s and St. Patrick’s and the Bank of California. In 1969 the commission spent nearly its whole year inside three blocks of Jackson Square, listing the Hotaling whiskey buildings the 1906 fire famously spared; ten of the year’s twelve designations sit in those blocks. (“Why did He burn His churches down / And spare Hotaling’s whiskey?” asked Charles K. Field’s 1906 verse.) The first fifty numbers on the list are churches, banks, mansions, octagon houses, City Hall, and Ghirardelli Square: the city’s marble and millwork.

The busy decades were the seventies and eighties, 85 and 88 designations apiece. The peak year, 1981, listed twenty-five: the Hibernia Bank, the Mechanics’ Institute, the Westerfeld House, the Dutch Windmill, a run of bank branches and school buildings. Even the restaurants in that class were designated as architecture; the entry is the Buich Building, and Tadich Grill merely lives there. Those were the years the list worked like a defensive line, thrown around whatever looked next for the wrecking ball.

Then the city nearly stopped promising. The 1990s produced 23 designations in ten years; 1992 and 1997 produced none. The 2000s managed 37, the 2010s 27. A reader in 2019 could fairly have concluded the register was a finished book with the occasional appendix.

The 2020s have already logged fifty, and the shape of this year’s fourteen is the story. A Bank of Italy branch made the list, but it stands at 400 Castro Street, and its classmates are the Castro Rock Steam Baths two doors up and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s storefront across the way. The rest of the class: two frame Victorians, two retired firehouses, two churches, a coffeehouse on 18th Street called Full Moon, the first home of the synagogue Sha’ar Zahav on Danvers Street, the American Indian Historical Society’s house on Masonic, a house on 20th Street the record calls the Bob Ross House, and Maud’s, on Cole. The file lists no architects for these. It lists names, and the names say what the buildings held.

What changed is what the word landmark is for. The first fifty answered the question of what was too beautiful to lose. The class of 2026 answers a different one: what happened here. The register opened as a ledger of architecture and is filling, lately and quickly, as a ledger of memory, ordinary storefronts and frame houses carried onto the list by the congregations and causes and Tuesday nights they housed. Confidence is high on the counts, which are the Planning Department’s own file, with one hole declared: forty of the register’s 370 entries carry no designation year, and since several undated names look recent, the current wave is likelier undercounted than inflated. The reading — panic then, remembrance now — is the desk’s, and the Code says no such thing.

In Sunday morning’s state license file, one San Francisco bar premises in six or seven has a license application open at its own address: Specs’, El Rio, Martuni’s, the Eagle, the Gold Cane. The churn runs two to four times hotter exactly where the state caps the license count.

BY MEL ADLER, COMMERCE DESK

The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control department publishes its whole license book as a fresh file every morning, and Sunday’s edition carries 5,527 San Francisco rows: 4,440 active licenses spread over 3,342 addresses, plus 951 applications in some stage of processing. Match each application against the licenses already active at the same address and a quiet market comes into view. At 395 of those 3,342 licensed addresses, roughly one in eight, somebody has an application open for a license type the address already holds. That is the shape a change of hands makes in this file.

Among the city’s 307 premises holding a type 48 license, the hard-liquor bar license that requires no food and admits no minors, 47 have such paperwork pending. The names are not marginal rooms. Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe on Saroyan Place, El Rio on Mission, Martuni’s at Valencia and Market, the SF Eagle on 12th, Li Po Cocktail Lounge on Grant, the Gold Cane on Haight, Tradr Sam out on Geary, Moby Dick and Daddy’s on Castro, the Horseshoe Tavern on Chestnut: all show applications open at their own addresses in Sunday’s file.

The pattern across license types is the tell. California caps the number of “general” licenses, the ones that pour spirits, against county population; a new one in San Francisco comes by priority drawing or, far more often, by buying somebody’s old one. The three capped types churn hardest in the file: 18.0 percent of full-liquor restaurant premises have paper pending, 15.3 percent of bars, 11.8 percent of liquor stores. The uncapped beer-and-wine types, which the state will simply issue to a qualified applicant, sit at 9.3, 5.9, and 3.5 percent. A capped license is property; scarce paper behaves like a deed, held long and sold whole, and the file shows exactly that.

The honest caveats: an application at a licensed premises is not always a sale. It can be a partner added, an estate settled, a corporation reshuffled around the same owner; the export does not say which, so 395 is a ceiling on actual changings-of-the-guard, and some fraction of it is housekeeping. This is also one morning’s snapshot, so it measures how much paper is open, and slow escrows linger in it longer than quick ones. Confidence is high on the counts and the capped-versus-uncapped split, medium on how much of it is bars actually being bought.

The remaining 215 addresses in the application file hold no such license yet: new ground, 84 would-be beer-and-wine restaurants and 16 would-be full-liquor bars among them. The trade in what already exists runs comfortably ahead of the building of anything new.

SOURCES & RECEIPTS

1. DataSF, Landmarks listed in Article 10 of the Planning Code (SF Planning), dataset 97yj-54sx, pulled Aug. 2: 370 landmarks, 330 with a designation year, 40 undated. Dated counts: 2026 = 14 (LM 322–335); every year 1982–2025 tops out at 12 (2022, 2024); 1981 = 25; decades 1970s 85, 1980s 88, 1990s 23, 2000s 37, 2010s 27, 2020s 50 through Aug. 2. 1969: 12 designations, 10 in the Jackson Square blocks (Hotaling group). The dataset’s designation-document links for LM 322–335 returned 404 at press time, so the class is characterized by the names and addresses in the record. Article 10 adopted 1967 per SF Planning’s landmarks program. Verse: Charles K. Field, 1906, public domain. Queries in receipts.json.

2. California ABC daily licensing export (abc.ca.gov, DailyExport-CSV.zip), file header “Updated Sunday 2nd of August 2026,” 128,974 data rows statewide; Prem County = San Francisco: 5,527 rows, 4,440 active license records, 951 application records, 3,342 distinct licensed addresses, 395 addresses with a same-type application pending, 215 application addresses with no existing same-type license (84 of them type 41, 16 type 48). By type (premises / pending / share): 47: 696/125/18.0%; 48: 307/47/15.3%; 21: 553/65/11.8%; 41: 1,438/134/9.3%; 20: 119/7/5.9%; 42: 57/2/3.5%. One transaction can file multiple application rows, so premises were deduplicated by address. License caps: Bus. & Prof. Code §23816 and ABC license-type descriptions. Queries in receipts.json.

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