SoundSafe History

By Paul Zollo

It was a universe of art. A galaxy of inspiration, of unity, of making the imagined real. A place for artists to come together to make art, for musicians to make music, for performers to perfect performances. It was called Downtown Rehearsal, and its history is intertwined with the history of San Francisco. It was vast — the largest rehearsal studio in all of San Francisco, and one of the largest compounds of its kind in America. A sprawling space of over 75,000 square feet, it contained within its cavernous corridors over 150 practice spaces. Famous musicians came there to rehearse, including Faith No More, Chris Isaak, the Mermen, the Fingers and Paula Frazer of Tarnation. And hundreds more who had yet to make a name for themselves were walking the walk every day and night at this space which became known to some as “rock and roll high school”. Dancers, singers, musicians, actors, engineers, producers and more all congregated here. Astoundingly, 21 separate recording studios operated here. Music was made and art created 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It never stopped. Unlike most other cave-like rehearsal spaces, many of the rooms at Downtown had big windows with expansive views, allowing bands to make magic while the sun rose and set, and the engine of the city roared. Never had there been anything like it before, and certainly never since.

When it ended, it was a dream snatched from our hearts and our souls, and where there was once magic there was now desolation. This village of souls was forever disenfranchised, and the electric spirit of the San Francisco art community was fragmented. But that spirit was not vanquished — it was born anew in SoundSafe – and here we celebrate and preserve the evolution of that spirit. We remember the past as we soar into the future.

Downtown Rehearsal was born in 1992 at Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. For eight years, it thrived. But then came the new millennium, and with it came what was first known as the dot-com boom (and later the dot-com bust), an explosion of technology fused with deep pockets and ruthless developers, and it wreaked havoc on the body and spirit of our city. Like a fire, it rose to unfathomable intensity, spreading destruction and displacement as it raged, and then ultimately burned out, leaving ashes and despair. Downtown Rehearsal was closed and all its occupants were evicted. Expected to fade or move away, many remained to fight. SoundSafe emerged from that fight.

At its inception, the boom arrived like a new gold rush; thousands of new internet-related companies moved into San Francisco, spending truckloads of money refashioning the city to fit their needs. The heady combination of new blood, rapidly rising stock prices, starry-eyed investor speculation, and readily available venture capital created a fevered financial pitch which roared like a squadron of tanks into the city, flattening everything in its way. It followed closely the template created in other technology booms which have transformed America, from the railroad boom of the early 1800s, through the automobile and radio boom of the 1920s and the transistor electronic boom of the 1950s. As was the pattern in previous booms, local merchants and residents were abruptly ousted, pushed out of buildings they had lived or worked in for decades, and unable to afford the ever rising rents being established by the new landlords and lease-holders.

But by 2000, the big dot-com bubble was fast deflating. Companies which had already burned through all their venture capital never having turned a profit went belly-up. Stocks crashed. Bankruptcy ensued. Ruined investors who once reveled in the dot-coms were now victims of ‘dot-bombs.’ The companies were acquired by others or completely liquidated. 400,000 jobs were lost. The streets that seemed paved with gold turned to gravel.

And in the midst of all this was the creative community of artists, entertainers and musicians that peopled Downtown Rehearsal. In the summer of 2000, all the tenants received a message from Greg Koch, the owner and manager of the company, Downtown Rehearsal, that leased the building. It stated that new building owners had taken over the building, but that Downtown Rehearsal would continue to operate, that all tenants could remain in perpetuity and that the sale would in no way affect the welfare of its tenants. Thus assured, many tenants invested more in their spaces. New equipment was installed in spaces and offices, and new recording studios were established.

A few months later it all changed. A new letter arrived, taped to each door, announcing that the “new owners” of the building had evicted all tenants, who had less than a month to move out. The San Francisco Chronicle recognized it as a cancerous blight on the city’s artistic community. “Call the doctor,” they wrote, “San Francisco’s ailing music scene has just taken a turn for the worse. Downtown Rehearsal is closing its doors on September 25 — it’s the single largest band displacement in the city’s history.”

Performance artist Jean Spinosa, who had rented a space almost since the day Downtown first opened its doors, remembers well the shock that reverberated through the building when the eviction was proclaimed. “I remember that day so well,” she said. “Generally this was a place of work, not a social scene. But that day everybody left their studios and were walking down the hallways, totally blown away. People were crying. Everyone was just stunned.”

But although their spirits had been broken, they were not defeated, and they decided to come together and create a resistance. “Because it was San Francisco,” said Spinosa, “nobody was ready to just give up. Instead everyone banded together to do something. Within just a couple of days there were postings on all the doors announcing tenants’ meetings. Everyone united and pooled their resources. We found out what our rights as tenants there were, and we decided to fight. Almost immediately we discovered that this was not a legal eviction notice, and amounted really to little more than a threat.”

Their first action was to post notice of their resistance by placing “Room Occupied” stickers all their doors. “The last days were grim,” said musician-photographer John Vanderslice. But despite the heartless aim of those working to derail them, this league of artists never resorted to violence to protest their eviction. “Except for graffiti and random vandalism,” wrote Vanderslice, "the building was peaceful until the last days. I waited for the building to erupt into anarchy, but it never happened. The displaced were creative souls, not destructive ones, and manifesting a respect for this space where so much art had been born they didn’t destroy that which had sustained them. Instead they decided to fight the power with a peaceful but persistent resistance.

It was then that the truth was revealed. Although Koch had attributed the eviction to the will of the “new owners,” the tenants discovered they were all victims of an intentional deception. There were no new owners – Koch and his father were the ones who had purchased the building. It was all a lie, turning over the property at an enormous profit, buying it for $3 million and then selling it – to JMA Properties – for $14 million. Koch had no fundamental inclination to preserve the community of artists who had rented space at Downtown; what he wanted was the $11 million he and his father could pocket from the sale. And when JMA predicated the sale on the eviction of all its tenants, Koch didn’t hesitate to agree. But he did attempt to hide the truth.

But he soon recognized that it wouldn’t be as simple as he had hoped to displace an entire village, and so attempted to reach a settlement with the tenants. He offered them $500,000 to start a non-profit organization. It was an offer that wasn’t well-received.

“Ultimately we decided this didn’t really solve our problems,” said Spinosa. “It didn’t give us any time to move, and it didn’t do anything to help all those people who had to relocate businesses. None of us felt at the time that creating a non-profit organization addressed any of the issues that mattered to us. It seemed like he was offering this to give himself a tax break, yet what good did it do us? We needed moving expenses and we needed time.”

The tenants refused the initial offer and made a counter offer, asking for one million dollars. It was rejected. Volunteer lawyers embraced their cause and offered them legal advice while informing them of their rights. Ultimately a compromise was forged that was accepted: a total of $750,000 would be paid, with $500,000 of that earmarked for the creation of a non-profit arts organization, and the remaining $250,000 to be divided among all the lease-holders to cover their moving expenses. In the end, each lease-holder received $1600.

Later it was learned that JMA Properties discovered that the retrofitting planned for the building would be prohibitively expensive, so they gutted and abandoned it. In time it was sold to the Delancey Street Mission at an $11 million loss.

Many of the tenants of Downtown Rehearsal took their pay-out and left the community and the city. But many remained and invested their time and energy into the formation of the non-profit, ultimately called SoundSafe. Following the laws that rule the operation of a non-profit organization, a Board of Directors was elected.

Anthony Bonet was elected president, Mark Gregory Vice-President, Jean Spinosa Vice-President, Rob Schenk secretary, Russell Roesner treasurer, and Mark Rennie Corporate Counsel amongst other original board members. Many of the original board members are still on the board . The board facilitated the process of ensuring the division of the settlement and pay-out to the lease-holders, and proceeded with the formation of the non-profit. Deciding on the perfect name for it took many weeks, as did the choice of a logo. After exhausting countless other possible names, the name SoundSafe was adopted, because the principal goal was to make San Francisco safe for sound again, and a safe haven in which musicians could live and work.

The original mission of SoundSafe was to support, preserve and enrich the arts in San Francisco, as well as to purchase a building in the city to recreate what existed in Downtown Rehearsal, a place that could operate in perpetuity to ensure that the heartbreak of eviction would never again occur. Some three years went into a search for an affordable building, as was an attempt to partner with the city. But eventually the sad realization came that $500,000 was not enough to purchase the kind of building they needed in the city. “The truth is you can’t even buy a house for that amount,” said Spinosa. “It was impossible. We didn’t know at the time, we were not business people, we were young musicians, so we thought we could do it. But we couldn’t. It was impossible.”

Concurrent to the ongoing building search spearheaded by Anthony Bonet, SoundSafe began producing several events; some to generate operating funds and some to just revive and heal the wounds of the artistic community. Jean Spinosa was the driving force behind many of these. “In the beginning I produced benefits and then in 2003 Anthony Bonet and I worked hard on producing the Castro Halloween live music stage,” she said. “SoundSafe also sponsored a season for the Mission Creek Music Festival, many seasons with the Art Expo, and The San Francisco International Arts Festival. We did a lot of community outreach, and aligned ourselves with many other Bay Area non-profit arts organizations, including the Eyes & Ears Foundation, California Lawyers for the Arts, and were the fiscal sponsor of Youth Movement Records.”

In 2004, Anthony Bonet, suffered a near-fatal aneurism, and all operations were suspended for more than a year. Upon his recovery, the officers and members of SoundSafe regrouped to reevaluate what was within their capacity to achieve. Wanting to create the kind of creative nucleus that Downtown Rehearsal provided for musicians, it became evident that although a physical building was impossible to acquire, a music website could also serve as a spiritual core to which musicians all over the Bay Area could connect. SoundSafe already had a fairly fundamental website, but they knew that in the right hands, channeling the creative energy from which this movement was first founded, a great new website could emerge that would serve as an informational and inspirational resource site for all Bay Area musicians.

Jean Spinosa enlisted the web firm Highly Evolved, well known as a company directed and engineered by musicians and artists, to design the new site. She became the project manager, and has been steering this new vision towards realization. “I am very excited about its potential and the future of SoundSafe,” she said. “We’re an organization borne out of destruction and abandonment, and we fought and won to turn that loss into gain, and to create something healthy and productive. Though we no longer have a physical building, we do have a permanent and meaningful place in the heart and spirit of the San Francisco music community. This new website is not the end of this story, it’s a starting point. We’re not sure where it will lead, but we know it will open myriad avenues of communication and creativity through the city. It’s well suited to the lifestyle of the modern Bay Area musician — all of whom might live great distances from each other, but who come together every day on the web. This will be their home. And it’s called SoundSafe.org.”