Haines His Way

Porn Maker in Historic Building Draws Protest
By JESSE McKINLEY
The New York Times

SAN FRANCISCO (Feb. 11) — It is hard to imagine a city prouder of its sexuality than San Francisco, a place with an active strip club district, a union for erotic dancers and an annual parade on Folsom Street where those not wearing leather and chaps are the odd ones out.

So it came as something of a surprise when a kerfuffle arose because of the newest addition to the city’s sexual landscape: the State Armory and Arsenal building, a 200,000-square-foot landmark in the Mission District that was just purchased by Kink.com, an online pornography company devoted to bondage and sadomasochism.
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But somewhere between his purchase and the first paddling, Mr. Acworth has run into strong opposition from a group of neighborhood activists who long feared that the armory, vacant since 1975, would be converted into something truly taboo: condominiums.

Some of the previous efforts to use the armory were derailed by anti-gentrification forces who wanted more affordable housing in the Mission, an economically and racially mixed area where hipsters and the homeless are represented in equal numbers.

But this time around, opponents insist they are not being prudish, just prudent, considering the building’s proximity to schools and families.

“Everybody thought it was going to be housing, and then mid-January, we get this bomb,” said Anita Correa, who runs an arts theater in the neighborhood. “Everybody was taken by shock.”
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Mr. Acworth said he was looking to expand his fast-growing business and fell in love with the castle-like armory the moment he laid eyes on its lower levels.

“The basement had a series of rooms that looked like dungeons,” said Mr. Acworth, who bought the building from a private developer for $14.5 million. “It just has such character.”

The Kink.com plan is the latest chapter in the long and somewhat tortured history of the armory, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. Built between 1912 and 1914, the brick-and-mortar building has long been a redevelopment challenge for San Francisco, with its landmark status and the city’s famously vociferous activist set derailing plan after plan over the last three decades.

Among the possible occupants have been a nonprofit rehabilitation clinic; a mainstream film studio and sound stage; and a gym that would have taken advantage of the building’s 70-foot ceilings to install a rock-climbing wall. In 2000, a plan for a dot-com office was derailed, as was a subsequent idea to use the armory’s enclosed drill yard — itself the size of a football field — to house computer servers.

The most recent plan before Kink.com’s purchase was for a mixed-use residential and office project that would have built luxury apartments and some lower-income housing atop and alongside the existing building.

Tim Frye, a historic preservation specialist for the San Francisco Planning Department, said the architecture of the armory — small, narrow windows; no elevator; poor insulation — meant that any major conversion would most likely have been complicated by the building’s landmark status.

“It’s not a friendly building,” Mr. Frye said. “It’s really imposing, and a lot of the preservation board thinks that housing wasn’t a really good use.”
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