Vol. I, No. 33 · San Francisco — Friday, September 4, 2026 · Price: one percent, by law
BY EMMETT GRADY, ARCHIVES
Four works of art sit in and around 600 California Street. There is a bronze by Bruce Beasley at the top of an outdoor staircase, a steel-and-brass sculpture by Kent Roberts inside it, and a stainless-steel fountain by Bella Feldman in the bank lobby. A fourth, a pair of bronze elevator doors, is credited to Lee Lawrie, the sculptor behind the Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center. No other single address in this registry holds as many.
None of the four was a gift. Section 429 of the Planning Code, adopted with the 1985 Downtown Plan, requires any new building or 25,000-square-foot addition in downtown and the blocks around it to spend at least 1 percent of construction cost on public art. The developer pays. The city never does. The Planning Department’s own registry lists 65 such works, filed since 1982. Forty of them, 61.5 percent, stand in one neighborhood: Financial District/South Beach. The ordinance only ever applied to downtown and the blocks around it, so a downtown cluster was guaranteed. What was not guaranteed is how lopsided the split would be among the five neighborhoods eligible at all: one of them has claimed nearly two-thirds of everything the law has produced.
The rest of the collection is thin. South of Market holds 11 works, 16.9 percent, spread from Van Ness Avenue to the Mission Street corridor between Fifth and Tenth streets. Ten more, 15.4 percent, are filed under Chinatown, though almost none of them sit near Grant Avenue or the pagoda rooflines that usually come to mind first. They cluster instead along Battery, Sansome and Commercial streets, inside the southern finger of Chinatown’s official boundary map, the same file this paper has used before to explain surprising neighborhood assignments. Hayes Valley and the Tenderloin hold two works each. That is the entire geographic reach of a program now in its fifth decade: five neighborhoods, one of which holds close to two-thirds of everything it has produced.
Fifty-three of the sixty-five works carry a dated Planning case number. The other twelve predate any case number at all, filed under a note that the developer built art in “the spirit of the pending plan” before the plan existed. The earliest work in the file, a 1982 fountain sculpture at 642 Commercial Street, arrived three years before Section 429 took effect.
Among the 53 dated works, the 1980s and 1990s each hold 12. The 2000s alone hold 27, just over half. Nothing in the file is dated later than 2011. The Planning Department’s own catalog metadata, though, lists a 2024 update. This desk could not resolve the gap: whether the mandate has produced nothing new in over a decade, or whether newer work simply has not been logged.
At 222 Second Street, three separate Frank Stella paintings, “Riallaro,” “Shards” and “The Pequod Meets the Delight,” share one Planning case number and hang in a building lobby most passersby never enter. The oldest object credited in the file is a pair of bronze elevator doors at 600 California, attributed to Lee Lawrie. He died in 1963, twenty-three years before that building’s own case number was filed. The registry does not explain the gap. This desk could not resolve whether the doors were salvaged from an earlier structure or the credit is a later addition to the file.
The pattern holds up against a simple test. Even limited to the five neighborhoods the file has ever touched, the split is not close: Financial District/South Beach holds 40, and the other four combined hold 25. Confidence is high on the 65-work total and the neighborhood split, both verified live tonight against the Planning Department’s own published registry. It is lower on two points this desk could not close: the decade-dating cutoff, and the Lawrie doors. Confidence is also lower on why Financial District/South Beach outpaces its closest downtown neighbors specifically. This desk found nothing in the ordinance’s own text that favors one legal downtown neighborhood over another, only a citywide boundary that favors downtown in general.
Embraer E175 Landed at SFO 33,001 Times in 2025, More Than Any Jet
In 2017 the plane did not appear in SFO’s landing records at all. In 2025 it landed there 33,001 times, more than any single Boeing or Airbus that flies into the airport.
BY INES CALLOWAY, TRANSIT DESK
A twin-engine jet built to carry about 70 passengers landed at San Francisco International Airport 33,001 times in 2025, more than any Boeing or Airbus that flies there. It is the Embraer E175, and in 2017 it did not appear in the airport’s landing records at all.
The E175 is a regional jet, flown on short connecting routes rather than the transcontinental runs a mainline carrier flies itself. It first touched down at SFO in March 2017. By 2020 it had already passed the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320 to become the single most-landed aircraft type at the airport, and it has held that rank every year since.
But 2020 was not a growth year for anyone. E175 landings fell that year too, from 24,323 to 21,351. The pandemic had collapsed air travel across the industry, and the larger mainline jets fell faster, so the regional jet came out on top by shrinking the least. In 2025, with travel recovered, it accounted for 17.3 percent of all 190,639 landings recorded at SFO that year, more than any other single model. Total landings at the airport are close to where they stood in 2000: 194,299 then, 190,639 now. The years in between were not flat, though. The pandemic collapse sits between those two points, and what has changed permanently is the size of the plane doing the landing.
Almost all of those landings, 29,445 of the 33,001, were flown by a single operator: SkyWest Airlines. SkyWest is a regional carrier that does not sell tickets under its own name, and its E175s touched down at SFO painted in the colors of four different airlines in 2025: United, 18,843 times; Alaska, 8,215; American, 1,517; and Delta, 870. A passenger booking a “United” flight to a smaller city is, more often than not, boarding a SkyWest plane instead.
This is a landing count, not a passenger count. A single widebody jet like a 777 or 787 carries several times as many people as one 76-seat regional jet, so SFO’s passenger traffic is not dominated by the E175 the way its landing count now is.
The aircraft the E175 displaced were themselves common not long ago. In 2000, the Boeing 737 led all landings with 63,583, and the older Embraer ERJ family, the E175’s own predecessor line, ranked second with 32,123. As recently as 2019, the E175 still sat in fourth place, behind the Airbus A320 and two Boeing 737 variants. Its rank changed inside a single year, 2020, for reasons that had nothing to do with the E175 itself. It has not given up the top spot since, and the growth that followed was real: by 2023 its own landing count, 31,368, had passed its pre-pandemic 2019 total of 24,323.
The count comes from the airport’s own published landing statistics, the same register that logs every commercial touchdown by airline and aircraft type back to July 1999. Confidence is high throughout: the totals were pulled and re-summed tonight directly from that file, not estimated. The file cannot say why SkyWest’s contracts grew the way they did, or whether the same pattern holds at other Bay Area airports. It only says what touched down, and how often.
ON THE CALENDAR
Cafe Cowork: Temporal x Corgi. A coffee-and-coworking meetup at Corgi Cafe in Dogpatch, hosted by the workflow-software company Temporal alongside the insurance-tech firm Corgi, with wifi and table space offered free to anyone bringing a laptop. 543 people had registered as of the morning of September 4, a gain of 254 since the event was first logged on August 27, and the listing shows zero spots remaining. The listing carries no recurrence record, and none of its five listed hosts or its venue has shown up in the desk’s tracked window before. It is a first appearance across the board.
Friday, September 4, 9:00 a.m. · Dogpatch · free · lu.ma/cafe-cowork-temporal
From the desk’s calendar: public Luma pages, counts as of 2:08 a.m. September 4. Tell the desk about the gathering it missed.
SOURCES & RECEIPTS
1. SF Planning Department, Public Art (from the 1% Art Program), DataSF cf6e-9e4j, queried live September 4, 2026: 65 rows citywide. Program description, quoted from the dataset’s own published catalog metadata: requires new buildings or 25,000-square-foot-plus additions “in the Downtown and nearby neighborhoods” to fund public art equal to at least 1 percent of construction cost, established by the 1985 Downtown Plan, governed by Section 429 of the Planning Code; since May 2012 some projects may divert a portion to the city’s Public Art Trust instead. 600 California Street carries four listed works (the most of any address): “Guardian” by Bruce Beasley (bronze, Case No. 1986.085X), “Three Bridges” by Kent Roberts, an untitled fountain sculpture by Bella Feldman, and “Elevator Doors” credited to Lee Lawrie, all filed under the same case. 2. Same source, joined against DataSF Analysis Neighborhoods boundary polygons (j2bu-swwd), each of the 65 works’ coordinates tested against all 41 neighborhood polygons tonight: Financial District/South Beach 40 (61.5%), South of Market 11 (16.9%), Chinatown 10 (15.4%; addresses 600 California St ×4, 325 Battery St ×3, 400 Sansome, 642 Commercial St, 425 Battery St), Hayes Valley 2 (3.1%; 125 Mason, SF Conservatory of Music), Tenderloin 2 (3.1%; 157 Mason, 235 Geary). All 65 works matched to exactly one neighborhood. 3. Same source, Planning case numbers parsed from the “requiredar” field: 53 of 65 rows carry a four-digit case year; 12 carry a note that the project “preceded the adoption of the Downtown Plan” with no case number. Earliest dated case: 1982.463, 642 Commercial St, “Untitled” by Pepo Pichler. Latest: 2011.0312X (1321 Mission St, “Urban Currents”) and 2011.1043X (1400 Mission St, “Wall Drawing #1012: Isometric Form, 202”). By decade of case year: 1980s 12 (22.6%), 1990s 12 (22.6%), 2000s 27 (50.9%), 2010s 2 (3.8%). Dataset catalog metadata (data.sfgov.org/api/views/metadata/v1/cf6e-9e4j.json) lists dataUpdatedAt 2024-01-13. 4. Same source, row for 222 2nd Street (Case No. 2006.1106X): three works, artist link sfmoma.org/artist/Frank_Stella for all three. Lee Lawrie biography verified via Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Lawrie), queried September 4, 2026: born October 16, 1877, died January 23, 1963; co-created the Atlas statue at Rockefeller Center, installed 1937. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
2. SFO Air Traffic Landings Statistics, DataSF fpux-q53t, queried live September 4, 2026, monthly rows back to July 1999. E175 landings by year: 2017: 1,914; 2018: 6,479; 2019: 24,323; 2020: 21,351; 2021: 23,372; 2022: 24,392; 2023: 31,368; 2024: 28,902; 2025: 33,001. First recorded E175 landing: March 2017. Top aircraft model by total landings, by year: 2017 A320 (37,518); 2018 A320 (41,570); 2019 A320 (33,946); 2020 E175 (21,351, first year at #1); 2021–2025 E175 each year. 2. Same source: total landings, all aircraft, calendar 2000: 194,299. Total landings, calendar 2025: 190,639. E175 share of 2025 total: 33,001 / 190,639 = 17.3%. 3. Same source, filtered aircraft_model=‘E175’ and activity year 2025, grouped by operating_airline: SkyWest Airlines 29,445; Horizon Air 3,555; Envoy Air, Inc. 1. Grouped by published_airline for SkyWest-operated E175 rows: United Airlines 18,843; Alaska Airlines 8,215; American Airlines 1,517; Delta Air Lines 870. 4. Same source, calendar year 2000 top aircraft by landings: Boeing 737 63,583; Embraer ERJ family 32,123; Boeing 757 27,880; Boeing 747 13,263; Boeing 767 12,327. Calendar year 2019 top four: Airbus A320 33,946; Boeing 738 25,392; Boeing 739 25,375; Embraer E175 24,323. Full queries and raw responses in receipts.json.
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