Downtown San Francisco might be dead. But this arts organization just bought a building in the cut

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CounterPulse did what almost no non-profit organization in the field of contemporary art has done: bought its building. What’s more, it happened in downtown San Francisco, the same neighborhood that companies from Meta to Container Store left to die.

CounterPulse is betting big not only on Downtown, but also on one of its toughest pockets: the Tenderloin block just north of Market Street and a stone’s throw from Union Square. Earlier this month, after a seven-year campaign and partnership with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), the organization announced that it now owns 80 Turk St., which it has been renting since 2016.

The arts story in the Bay Area is almost always about crisis and displacement, but a grassroots nonprofit dedicated to avant-garde performance art now has a forever home.

“It’s radical to survive in this city as an artist or an arts organization,” CounterPulse artistic and executive director Julie Phelps told The Standard.

While CounterPulse traces its origins to a house party art collective over 30 years ago, it has really come into its own since the noughties. Until 2016 and the hype surrounding Twitter’s entry into the mid-market, the company paid 50 cents per square foot in a building on Ninth Street and Mission Street.

This situation was unacceptable in the long run, and CounterPulse outgrew the space. An advisory group connected them with the Kenneth Reinin Foundation in Oakland, which was looking for an arts organization to support with a $5 million grant.

As Phelps puts it, the idea was, “If you want to protect art and culture during this real estate boom, buy buildings and put arts organizations in them.”

Built as a cabaret in 1905, 80 Turk Street was perfect — almost too good to be true, Phelps said. In addition, it was three times the size of CounterPulse’s previous home, with dance studio space, a lobby gallery, and a subsidized rehearsal space. Through CAST, the organization entered into a tenant buyback agreement at 0% per annum.

“We had to put in some capital to close the deal, but our initial investment was $1 million,” Phelps said. “Everything else was turned to us. They bought the building and gave us seven years to pay them back.”

The accumulation of $7 million took several stages, punctuated by the pandemic and full of what Phelps called “a kind of alchemy.” It even led to an entirely new type of partnership for the Zellerbach Foundation, which provided $500,000 to CounterPulse.

“They don’t really do it,” Phelps said. “The prototype for this loan was CounterPulse, an interdisciplinary art space that supports marginalized communities. It’s like, “Wow, that really worked.”

All of a sudden, CounterPulse started talking to foundations and grant-giving organizations that might not have cared much about contemporary dance before. Phelps says that once word gets out that you’re buying a downtown building, people who may never come to the show start to realize your importance.

It also helped that, unlike many arts organizations, the CounterPulse model doesn’t rely on ticket sales for much of its income. PianoFight, a venue a block away from CounterPulse, recently announced that it will be closing its doors next month.

Nor was CounterPulse burdened with bells and whistles it didn’t need, like a huge theater that would force it to produce off-Broadway commercial shows just to cover overhead. It can remain an incubator space, nurturing young artists who aren’t selling big venues yet.

In other words, the purchase of the building has helped CounterPulse stay true to its radical mission, both as a workspace for artists and as an informal community center for immediate neighbors.

Being half a block from Market Street – Phelps calls it the “leaf blow zone” – is part of the frustration of her depressive state. Downtown San Francisco ranks last among major North American cities in terms of coronavirus recovery, and City Hall is committed to revitalizing it.

CounterPulse is a private organization that doesn’t get a lot of money from the city other than funding small program initiatives like mural painting. Phelps doesn’t feel like a downtrodden city; the fact is that San Francisco is simply not designed to help raise capital for the arts.

“Why this is not so, I do not understand,” she said. “But it’s not. In New York, the city would buy a building and sell it to us for a dollar. They view art and culture as a sector of the economy. The City Hall’s Economics and Workforce Development Department can’t do anything to buy the buildings.”

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