The War of the Roses: The City's Future May Erase Its Past. In Which Case: Send Flowers. 

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The Flower Mart is a story. But it's also indicative of a much larger story. And that may be the only story the city is interested in telling anymore.

David Repetto's organizational system doesn't seem to be much of either, but it works for him. In lieu of a computer, a dozen stacks of carbon-copied receipts are scattered around his desk, bound by binder clips and alphabetized by customers' first names. Or nicknames.

If the Flower Mart is a throwback to another era of San Francisco, Repetto is a throwback to another era of the Flower Mart. A century ago, when pushcart-toting immigrant farmers first gathered at Lotta's Fountain on Market Street to hawk flowers to passersby, it was a self-contained operation. They grew the flowers on land in the city's outer neighborhoods or the Peninsula, hauled them downtown, and sold them. For the most part, Repetto is still doing this. But, by the time the Mart's confederated, largely Italian and Japanese vendors moved from Fifth and Howard to its present digs in 1956, that system was already growing archaic. The same local and global factors that drove industrial jobs out of this city — and, for that matter, this country — wilted the flower business.

Now, the grandchildren of the growers at Lotta's Fountain must compete against growers thousands of miles away operating at a fraction of their costs. At around 1 a.m. on most nights, heavily laden cars pull up at the Mart. The drivers have arrived from the Los Angeles area with stems fresh off the plane from Ecuador or Colombia. They do a brisk business out on the dark streets unloading their wares to the Flower Mart vendors for resale before motoring back down south.

As such, within the Mart, vendors like Repetto who grow and sell their flowers have largely given way to vendors who act as middlemen between far-off growers and San Francisco buyers. The farmers market model that once characterized the Flower Mart has been superseded by a floral Costco, stocked with wholesale wares from around the globe.

Two stalls down from Repetto, Ron Gemignani personifies this transformation. The diminutive 67-year-old wholesaler ambles across the Mart to procure an armful of flowers from another vender to fill out an order. He glances at the flamboyant displays surrounding him and shrugs, disdainfully. "I don't put on a show like this," he says.

No, he does not. Gemignani's stall is a no-nonsense place. The particleboard partition walls are slightly obscured with completed jigsaw puzzles and his limited merchandise is casually tossed into a dozen plastic buckets. You like it? You buy it. "I know what I can sell. So I buy that. And a little more."

That's how it is. But it's not how it was. If you hike up Cambridge Street into McLaren Park in the southeast of San Francisco, you'll come to an aging house obscured by parkland. "My grandmother built that house," Gemignani says wistfully. It was surrounded by the family's farmland. The city, however, had other plans; the family was rousted via eminent domain, resettling in South San Francisco. But, in 1996, Gemignani sold that South City farm, as did so many other scions of immigrant flower families, undercut by the global market and tempted by local developers' insatiable desire for land, land, and more land.

"We had $53 in the checking account. What was I supposed to do?" he says. "I could sell cosmos for a buck-fifty a bunch in 1972, and a buck seventy-five a bunch in 1996. What's wrong with this picture?"

It's hard to get rich developing flowers. But developing land? That's different. The floral satellites in San Mateo, South City, and the Excelsior that supplied the Flower Mart have, one by one, been plowed under and sold for development.

And now developers have obtained the Mother Ship.

The Flower Mart occupies just one quadrant on the chessboard of city development. The pieces in this game figure to be the tallest San Francisco has ever seen.

Not so far from here, a clutch of SOMA skyscrapers existing only as watercolors are slated to loom over this city. The sight will greet the craning necks of passengers disembarking from the long-planned Transbay Transit Center, a rail hub connecting all nine Bay Area counties and the wider world beyond. It'll be the West Coast's ambitious answer to Grand Central Station.

Or perhaps not.

A simmering dispute between the city and the would-be developers of those skyscrapers boiled over in recent months, leading to a high-stakes legal standoff.

In return for being allowed to build far higher and denser than this city has ever before allowed, those developers were offered the opportunity to vote themselves into a special tax district. The vast amount of additional tax money they'd pay would fund rich amenities for the city below, and bankroll that ambitious, multi-billion-dollar Grand Central Station-to-be.

In recent months, however, several of the major developers claimed to be jolted to learn that the tax rate they're being asked to pay was double what the city led them to believe it would be. Threats of litigation ensued, costly delays or an out-and-out derailing of the Transbay project became a possibility, and the ongoing standoff commenced.

The city has portrayed the developers as greedy opportunists angling to wiggle out of a deal. But there is another way of seeing things: The publicly administered Transbay Transit Center has stumbled into a nearly $350 million shortfall. So, just as the city determined that money was desperately needed to fund it, the developers found themselves being told they needed to pony up more. Much more.