The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 61

5an jVancioro Examiner July 13, 1983 WH 1 Bruce Pettit I JBIIU UII I II II BUI IMIII.IIIII IJ i if ij wm 111 I r- i ill i 4, i i '1 I HI -II IS! What's needed is more talk BILL MAHER, six months after becoming San Francis-' co's newest member of the Board of Supervisors, is more Inclined to be a catalyst who moves people than a legislator. The root of so many problems, he says, is that The City's diverse political activists seldom make efforts to communicate and he extends that observation to his fellow supervisors as well. Maher's chief issue of the moment is protecting small businesses and their 20,000 jobs in the South of Market area from being squeezed out in the wake of an office-building boom expected to bring in 100,000 new jobs by the end of the century. "It is not in the interest of big business to lose all of those support services," he says, pointing to small printing establishments, laundries and butcher shops that supply restaurants. "What does it do to the hotel and tourist industry when every one of the cab lots has been developed, and the cabs have to dead-end in from Pacifi-ca? "The question of South of Market is: What can you save? What trends can you encourage for the future that will be productive in terms of employing San Franciscans?" Those matters must be resolved, Maher says, within two years before they reach a real crisis.

"There is no overall plan, and I don't think one is going to come from the politicians," Maher says. "What we can do is to encourage that decision to develop prod peoplo i jr Million-dollar mansions at 1950-1960 Jackson St are up for sale, and neighbors are getting nervous 'ft! -SWHWW HSJ ansiomis, it'" Lr- to sit down and talk. It will be better if they do it than if we have to pull one of those imperial fiats and decide it for them." Maher cited The City's furor over smoking as an example of an imperial fiat The Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in May to require separate smoking and non-smoking accommodations in private workplaces. Referendum signatures, however, have forced it onto the November ballot "Six years ago or so a (statewide) smoking initiative went down, and the deal was that people would work it out Weil, they didn't, and so it's back again," he said. The newest supervisor laments, "The town is so badly split" HE SEES THE Plan Initiative, if it qualifies for the November ballot, as an indecisive electoral battle over The City's development The initiative would require that specific ordinances be passed to keep The City's employment, transit, and housing balances intact despite the office-building boom.

He predicted, "The San Francisco Plan will either win by 4 or 5 percentage points or lose by 4 or 5 just as Prop did. (The City's anti-high-rise Proposition lost 544l percent in 1979.) "If the San Francisco Plan wins, there will be petitions mailed out within a month to try to modify it or repeal it. If it loses and there are no agreements and changes made within a year or two, they will be back out on the streets with a new proposition. Nothing that you do is permanent when people are that badly split. It's just a question of, 'All right, you got Round 7, sucker, but in Round 8 I'm taking your head "If you want to do something, you can't fight endless ballot initiatives.

What I'm trying to do is get some of the forces together. If labor, the business community and some of the more responsible environmental groups came up with a deal, it would get signed by 11 supervisors so quick your head would spin." Recent mood changes make the present a time to act, Maher says. "Labor is worried more than it has been in the past about the loss of jobs," he says. "The Chamber of Com status quo go ood block Neighbors say they'll fight sale to the 'wrong' buyers By Gerald Adams Examiner staff writer Back in October 1945, three of San Francisco's more prominent grandes dames confronted one another before the Planning Commission. It was a classic tussle over prime Pacific Heights property.

-Lurline Roth, daughter of the Matson Navigation Co. founder, wanted permission to rezone the site of the original Matson home at 1918 Jackson for an apartment house. Her opponents were the elite Mrs. Alma deBretteville Spreckels of the sugar clan and Mrs. Felix McGinnis, widow of the onetime Southern Pacific vice president, who vanquished Mrs.

Roth's bid. Mrs. Spreckels fought to protect the view from her pearly palazzo across the street "It doesnt seem fair to the people who built their homes in good faith to suddenly have an apartment house go up." Now, nearly 40 years later, another such conflict could erupt along the same stretch of Jackson Street There, the Matson family's later mansions at 1950 and 1960 Jackson Street have been put up for sale by their current owner, Sweden. It's moving most of its consulate staff to Los Angeles. Anytime a million-dollar house on a Pacific Heights block goes up for sale, the neighbors get nervous.

When two side-by-side million-dollar houses go on the market simultaneously and they are on the verge of Pacific Heights' condo belt the event portends more than a neighborhood squabble. There indeed "goes the neighborhood." Some conflict is inevitable. Potential mansion buyers tend to look for tax writeoffs to offset the expense. They try to turn such mansions into institutions, condominiums or offices. That leads them directly into combat with those, like the dowagers Spreckels and McGinnis, who strive to ward off anything that will change Pacific Heights' neighborhood character or, worse, bring traf fic.

Anne Bloomfield is a soft-spoken but tenacious urban guerrilla for the Pacific Heights Residents Association. She says of the Swedish Consulate's buildings, "We shall oppose any proposal that conflicts with the single-family zoning." She means that if a prospective buyer for the two mansions housing the Swedish Consulate has anything in mind but selling to a single family, the buyer must do battle with her organization. And maybe with combined forces of the Department of City Planning and the Planning Commission. So it's not surprising that in the two months since Grubb and Ellis has had the properties listed, it has sold neither. The shortage of single-family buyers is understandable.

Fewer families than ever are prepared to shell out $1.45 million or $125 million, the prices for the Jackson Street mansions. Even if they can afford the prices, they can't afford the staff necessary to maintain them Nor can many people use the space. The house at 1960 Jackson St contains 9,000 square feet four times the size of an average three-bedroom home, with 15 principal rooms, seven baths, sitting rooms, dressing rooms, servants' quarters and storage rooms and the "secret passageways" that connect it with 1950 Jackson next door. What about an Arab potentate? "I dont know of any Arabian sheiks buying in San Francisco," says Libby Lawrence, Grubb Si Ellis' saleswoman for the properties. If families arent buying these places, how are they being used? Two blocks west of the consulate, the California Historical Society occupies two mansions on another block with its museum, offices and library.

On Broadway, the Convent of the Sacred Heart runs a school out of two opulent houses; the Sarah Dix Hamlin School operates inside another one. The Planning Commission allows schools if the applicant undergoes a conditional use public hearing. Less publicly, some Pacific Heights and Presidio Heights mansion dwellers use their lavish drawing rooms to exhibit art work for sale in discreet, low-traffic unofficial galleries. One mansion on Webster Street functions alternately as a party pad and dance class studio while neighborhood association watchdogs fume. Occasionally, a rock group takes over a mansion, in spite of the planning code restrictions.

In some mansions doctors see their patients. That's legal if the patients use the same entrance as the resident, there's a non-resident staff, no sign larger than a discreet See Page 2 merce? They have more room to breathe now that there has been a slackening in the demand for office space. There is not the panic of the mid- and late-70s during the skyrocketing rents." On issues that are more yielding to governmental solution, Maher yearns for a strong Board of Supervisors that sets as many trends as it reacts to. Thus, Maher is reaching for some internal board self-discipline and that desire was a large part of his motivation for sparring with Mayor Feinstein over budget priorities three months See Page She lost both legs, but not her courage 'ft 1 i i IMf If I $1 fig At! -ytr VM f'4imritr mw, $Umrft aw wwntm Mm4 By Ken Wong Examiner staff writer Ernestina Verduzco is beautiful. At 11, she's a profile in courage The energetic 5th-grader at Sunnyside School lost her legs in a train accident when she was 4 and gets around on artificial legs.

Tm on my third she said, having outgrown two pairs. "The first ones I had were little wooden ones that didn't bend." The dark-haired, brown-eyed girl lives on 18th Street in the heart of the Mission with her aunt, Sophia. "My mother and father are in Mexico," she said. It was in Mexico, where her father has a farm in Colema, that the accident occurred. There are 11 children in the family.

"I have eight sisters and two brothers. I'm in the middle," she says. She had finished milking the cows and was riding a horse by a railroad track. "The train's horn scared the horse." The horse reared and Ernestina fell off and landed on the tracks. "I fainted.

The train tried to stop and my father tried to pull me out but not in time." She was taken to a hospital in Mexico "City and later that year she came to San Francisco. "My aunt brought me here" They could do little for her in Mexico. She went home for a visit last summer and had "a little trouble" getting back there was a problem with her visa and she was stopped at the border. "I was scared. I thought they weren't going to let me come back." She enjoyed seeing her family, but wouldn't want to stay.

The weather is too hot My legs hurt when it's hot" While her aunt works during the day, Ernestina spends her time with her "Grandma," Antonina Boehmer, who lives next door. "She's my landlady, but she's just like a grandmother to me." When "Grandma" is busy, Ernestine plays card games with the other kids in the six-unit building Monopoly, Sorry, Probe and ParchisL She has two cats, Teddy, a white and black angora, and Snoopy, who's "a little angora and something else." Snoopy was one year old last April. "We had a party for him and put up decorations," she said. "He tore them down. Bad cat.

It was OK. It was his birthday." Ernestina goes swimming once a week at Garfield Pool, which she loves. She learned to swim as part of her therapy. She enjoys school, too. "I got an 'A' in math." She's in the school's woodwind ensemble, playing a recorder.

She likes rock music, but doesnt collect records. "They ail sound alike." She hopes to become a teacher. "I want to teach handicapped children some day." What she would like to teach is recreational sports. Ernestina is the first subject in a series of six posters distributed by the National Organization on Disability to launch the Decade of Disabled Persons (1983-1992). Coming subjects include a truck driver who is a paraplegic, a tennis player with one leg.

a blind professor and a corporate executive with a hearing impediment "These posters show what disabled persons strive for independence and a place in the mainstream," said NOD Chairman Richard DeVos. "Ernestina was faced with a crisis that would have shattered many people," he said. "Instead of feeling sorry for herself, she said, 'I She rose above the barriers posed by society and with courage and 'I do have artificial legs -and I can walk, and so there's really nothing that should be a handicap' determination went on with her life." NOD is a privately funded, non-profit group based in Washington, D.C. It works with Community Partnership Committees in 1,000 communities to increase acceptance of disabled people and to further their participation in community life. In San Francisco, the partnership committee is the Mayor's Council on Disabilities, chaired by the Rev.

Dr. Norman Leach. ExaiiMMrPMl Gun Emestina Verduzco, 11, who lost her legs, is a poster child for the disabled.