The Gotham couldn't make it as a tourist magnet during the Depression; it served as a residential hotel nearly from the start. For years, the Gotham was home to a collection of characters who came from all walks of life to reside in one of its 114 small rooms. Some of these characters lived there a matter of months. Others stayed as long as 30 years. The legends of the Gotham are many:
A woman named Matilda who worked at the Presidio lived in the building for nearly 40 years. She loved orchids and had a piano in her room. On weekend nights, Matilda's longtime beau would pick her up to go dancing. He always brought a corsage.
A wife used to deliver her husband to the Gotham on the regular occasions when they separated. Later, she would come by and visit, and then he would move back home, and the cycle would start all over again.
For a time, the Gotham was home to a father, mother, and son. Each lived in separate rooms, creating a new form of extended family.
During down times, the Gotham had its share of prostitutes and drug dealers and ne'er-do-wells. Residents and employees remember that the hotel was particularly run-down in the early 1980s. But it cleaned up again, and the residents got younger. Over the years, the Gotham advertised itself as offering "Continental Suites," "efficiency apartments," and other types of rental opportunities, depending on what was moving in the market. But mostly, the Gotham was a way station for folks moving into or out of the city.
The hotel did not have the gritty feel of the down-and-out SROs in the Tenderloin, yet it was close enough to downtown to feel like it belonged to the city's core. Luxuries were minimal, but the hotel had an asset not visible to the naked eye: The accounting was less than formal, and rent was often paid in cash. In short, the place was convenient, cheap, comfortably stagnant.
Until about six months ago.
In February, Akihiko Ito, a middle-aged businessman of Japanese extraction, took over the Gotham and promptly set about remaking it into the image of some short-term, furnished apartments he had run in San Diego. The San Diego operation, which focused on renting to foreign students, was called Vantaggio Suites; so, now, was the Gotham.
The demand for short-term rentals is rising in San Francisco, thanks to a booming economy and a phenomenally low apartment vacancy rate, not to mention some of the highest hotel rates and taxes in America. And there is incentive to increase the supply of short-term rental stock. Rent control ordinances make it difficult for property owners to significantly increase their income from long-term rental properties; short-term residents, on the other hand, are willing to pay more than tenants with year-long leases, and nothing in the rent control ordinances outlaws rental increases on new short-term tenants. In crude real estate terms, the more rent a building generates, the higher its value. And owners tend to like higher property values.
Ito already was familiar with the foreign student housing market from his business in San Diego. Typically, these students come to the United States to improve their English and stay for less than a year; usually, the term is three to six months. And it did not take long to establish a clientele here.
"We made a business agreement with them to use them almost exclusively," says Kate Simmons at Language Resource Institute, a private language school catering to students from around the globe. The school has placed 10 to 15 students there since the Gotham became Vantaggio Suites. The Center for English Studies and the American Academy of English also have placed students at Vantaggio.
But San Francisco is not San Diego, and Ito quickly ran square into the barricade of laws that govern property rental here. Almost as quickly, he began to learn how to get around those laws.
The tenants he inherited soon cried foul, insisting that the businessman abide by the legal prohibitions against converting the residential hotel into short-term contract suites. That's when the residents learned that, through its welter of rental restrictions and regulation, San Francisco has made that sort of property conversion not just legal, but quite attractive, and almost inevitable.
What ensued has been a genuine soap opera, worthy of prime-time airplay. The plot has included reams of litigation, plagues of tenant activism, conspiracy theories, distrust, dislike, a variety of other types of dissing, and some odd business deals. Imagine Norman Lear's version of a landlord-tenant dispute. And the series has at least one more 13-week season to run.
On Feb. 5, five days after assuming operation of the Gotham Hotel, Akihiko Ito distributed 30-day notices informing tenants that they would have to move out because the building was to undergo renovation. In a city with a less than 1 percent vacancy rate, this immediately prompted something akin to mass hysteria inside the Gotham.
While a majority of the residents were short-timers, about 20 or so central characters had been around much longer. A handful had been there for decades.
This was serious business.
Leaders emerged quickly among the building's residents; Charlie Marsteller was one of them. Despite a plethora of other living options, Marsteller has remained a resident at the Gotham for 15 years because he likes being close to the center of the city.
A tall man with a calm voice and a kind face, Marsteller makes his living as a counselor, something easily discerned within minutes of listening to the soothing tones and careful words in which he speaks. Marsteller immediately concerned himself with quashing the panic among his neighbors.
Within days, a tenants' organization was formed. The first meeting garnered a nearly 90 percent turnout. The residents had kept pretty much to themselves. Suddenly, they were bonded by fear. Representatives from Westside Community Mental Health Center were standing by.
"A lot of people went into anxiety or depression," says Marsteller. "Losing your house is high on the hit parade of stressors."
Some people did leave, but others were nearly ready to barricade themselves in their rooms. The tenant group connected with city officials, advisers, and an attorney.
In short order, Ito came face to face with the San Francisco rent ordinances that prevent this kind of mass eviction, and the weight of the political pressure that is behind those laws. Five days after the original notice, he issued a letter rescinding it and apologizing to tenants. His letter included the following bizarre explanation for the notice:
"I must admit, that after reading the letter again, that it does sound like we were trying to evict you. Please understand that this was not our intention at all. Instead, we are cordially requesting that you vacate the building for a short time due to the much needed renovation work that we are contemplating."
Ito is a well-mannered man of impeccable dress -- the kind of guy who smiles politely while discussing eviction. And, despite a slight language barrier, he seems quite well-versed in the tenets of business. Yet nothing had prepared him for San Francisco. The group of assistant managers and transition consultants who arrived with him seemed to come and go through a revolving door during the first couple of months.
In March, Ito held meetings with the residents. Because his assistants were American and spoke better English than he, Ito thought they might make good ambassadors to explain the renovation work and answer questions. But it was too late. By this time, residents no longer trusted anything Ito, or anyone in his employ, had to say. He wanted them out, and they knew it.
"I wasn't going to talk to them," says Mary Dowd, who had lived at the Gotham for about six months before the change in management. "They were trying to get me out. I didn't trust them."
Dowd is a woman small in stature and big in persistence, with a toss of red hair, a British accent that makes nearly everything she says sound all the more formal, and a low tolerance for annoyance, regardless of how mundane. She wasn't about to take this easily. And as the crusade escalated, everything became an issue at the Gotham.
She and a small band of residents fired off complaints to the San Francisco Rent Stabilization and Arbitration Board, Supervisor Tom Ammiano, and Mayor Willie Brown. Dowd began demanding to see permits for painting and other work in the building.
But activism couldn't stop some of the things that had already begun to change at the Gotham. Robb Williamson, the hotel's resident maintenance man for more than a decade, was let go the day before the Itos came on board, causing immediate angst on several floors.
Williamson has both entertained and looked after his neighbors for years. His theatrical repartee and gossipy mannerisms are clearly performance art, while the tiny room where he's lived for the past 12 years is filled with work in other media. There's his pastel oil painting of San Francisco, part of which glows in the dark; the three-dimensional desert scene, complete with the cacti, fashioned from a shower curtain; and, of course, the diamond-shaped, plastic hotel key chains painted with minilandscapes.
Inside the guy who calls himself a "desk clerk fatale" is a truly neighborly person from the Midwest, who wouldn't think twice about helping someone in need.
In short, he'd become as much a fixture here as the gingerbread that decorated the ceilings. His dismissal (Williamson still lives in the building) was the first clue to the coming changes that these residents were not going to like.
"[The former manager] told me, 'Robb they are going to try to get everyone out of here.' And I said that well, they can try, but many have found that my butt is like a crop of corn: It's planted for spring."
Neighbors took up a collection for Williamson immediately after he was fired. And, Dowd makes a point of mentioning, "people were very generous." After all, the new managers had let go the man who knew as much about the ghost on the second floor as anyone.
Gotham legend has it that there were two gangland hits at the hotel shortly after it opened in the 1920s; the murders supposedly contributed to keeping away the tourist business. The wandering hotel ghost is assumed to be linked to one of these murders.
"He comes out of one of the rooms on the second floor, looks up and down the hallway, and leaves out the fire escape," Williamson explains matter-of-factly. "He usually comes out around 7 or 8 p.m., Thursdays or Fridays, somewhere toward the end of the week. Others have seen him. I'm not alone," Williamson muses.
"Not a very good hit man being out that early in the day, I'd guess."
Vantaggio Suites sent out a blitz of notices during February and March.
There were notices about pest control spraying (something that was sorely needed). Workmen would be entering rooms to "check the window mobility." Others would come to paint the windowsills. Any residents entering unoccupied units, one slightly ominous notice vowed, would be considered trespassing.
Rent, for which everyone seemed to have a different payment arrangement, would now be due on the first of every month, and must be paid by check or money order. There would be a $25 late fee after three days and a notice to vacate served on the fourth day. These strict, if hardly extraordinary, payment rules seemed like astonishingly harsh dictates to residents accustomed to the Gotham's easygoing ways.
Cameras were installed throughout the building, which was by now accessed only by security code. The front desk, which had long been more a geographic point of reference for the lobby than a functional entity, was staffed 24 hours a day. Guests were told to sign in when they entered the building.
Two of the older tenants in the building were -- out of the blue -- visited by social workers. The social workers asked the older tenants a lot of questions:
Did they know what day it was? Did they know who the president of the United States was?
In fact, yes they did. They also knew what the questions meant -- a little official checking, just to make sure they were not so senile that they would have to leave Vantaggio for an institution -- and so did everyone else. Word of these events spread through the building like fire through a dry field. Neighbors were incensed. They saw that the seniors had help with cleaning and whatever they might need to stay in the building.
Before long, however, the tenants' organization went underground. Residents were increasingly suspicious of one another; confidential tenant strategy seemed to filter back to management. One woman reportedly announced in the midst of a meeting that she was tired of being accused of spying on her neighbors. It wasn't long before many residents had become convinced that every action, every notice, every letter at the Gotham was part of a large plot aimed at emptying the building of holdover tenants.
Panic grew as the Itos began posting three-day notices -- demands that residents pay overdue rent or leave -- on doors around the building. In fact, many of the residents of the Gotham did owe money for back rent. But it was unclear how many of them were behind, and by how much. Some had paid in cash and claimed not to have receipts. This was the way they'd always done business. And there had not been an eviction at the Gotham in more than five years.
"I was pretty lenient," says the hotel's former manager, Karla Keller. "That didn't mean that anybody who didn't pay could stay. But if I knew that someone was trying in good faith to bring in money, or they were waiting for a check that was coming, I would work with them."
Court records show that within two months of taking over the building, the Itos filed eviction proceedings against 13 residents. Some of these involved rent from six or eight months back; other eviction cases involved rent payments that were only two weeks late.
This being San Francisco, within days of the court filings residents were receiv-ing fliers from lawyers eager to defend against the evictions. Some residents took them up on it, or turned to tenant ser-vice organizations.
But most of the tenants on notice settled with the Itos and left, usually in exchange for forgiveness of back rent, a common arrangement in property management disputes.
Gotham dwellers had been paying a variety of rents, depending on when they moved in. But the average was less than $500 a month, a pittance in today's market, even for a single room. Were they to move to similar digs almost anywhere else in the city, the rent would double.
Nonetheless, by July, more than half of the 90 or so tenants residing at the Gotham in January had left, one way or another.
"We cannot afford to provide free rent," says Ito. "We took over the building in February. The evictions were simply due to their negligence."
But there are instances where this did not seem to be true.
Vivian Ferguson has called her room at the former Gotham Hotel home for more than a year now. She chose the Gotham because it was convenient to the downtown temporary jobs she took when she moved here from the Midwest to start a new life. Besides, the $600-a-month rent was all she and her two children could afford.
But in February, the Gotham became a new place, run by new managers, and she went to the office of Vantaggio Suites to ask about the timing of her rent payments. Previously, rent had been due on the 15th of the month; the new managers wanted their money on the 1st.
The answer was not anything close to what Ferguson had anticipated. Assistant Manager Brett Schlottman told Ferguson that her rent had been a month behind since December, and that she must pay up. Ferguson insists that she has receipts and canceled checks that show otherwise, but before she was able to produce them, there was a three-day notice to pay or move out posted on her door.
On March 6, Vantaggio Suites notified Ferguson that she owed $600 for the month ending March 15. On March 11, five days later, Ferguson received another notice saying she owed $755 for the same period of time.
A third notice arrived March 17, saying that Ferguson owed $1,305 (this figure included the $755 through March 15, plus another month's rent). On March 21, yet another three-day notice was posted on Ferguson's door. This one again showed the total as $1,305, but had no specific amounts attached to any dates.
"After the notice, I quit communicating with them because if I paid the $600 rent, they would say that I owed for the previous month," she says. "I just figured we'd go to court and sort it out."
Five days later, Ferguson was served with an eviction complaint. But no one from Vantaggio Suites showed up for the April 16 hearing. The matter was dismissed.
By April 22, there was another notice issued to Ferguson. This one stated that she owed $1,800. The following day, Ferguson offered to pay $1,200 for March and April, the two months for which she believed she owed rent. But Vantaggio was not willing to accept it, she says. In fact, an altercation between Assistant Manager Schlottman and Ferguson ensued. It is memorialized in a report by police called to the scene.
A new complaint is filed against Ferguson on May 9, claiming that she owes $3,775, dating all the way back to July 1996. The attorney handling the case for the Itos is David Mendez. A veteran of the cottage industry spawned by San Francisco's rental market, Mendez has long represented such downtown property owners as residential hotel king Charlie Patel in tenant removal.
In the minutes before a hearing on the eviction suit begins, Ferguson and Mendez meet. Discussion, if you can call it that, ensues. Terse voices echo all the way down the sterile government hall-way in the temporary building that houses San Francisco's Civil Court.
"I'm authorized to accept something less if you plan to leave," the lawyer says, "depending on when you vacate the premises."
The voices grow louder, enough to make heads turn from in front of the elevator. Everyone seems to recognize the unmistakable vernacular of eviction.
"I'm not going to settle with you when I don't owe this money," Ferguson fires back.
"If you plan to stay, I need to see some money," Mendez says, clearly irked by the lack of progress here.
"You don't get it," counters Ferguson, who is neatly dressed in a business suit. "I don't owe the $3,000, and I want to go to court."
Emotions escalate, and this verbal sparring match continues from the hallway into the courtroom.
"You'd better come up with something," Mendez says. "The judge is going to want to see something."
Mendez takes a seat next to a petite woman in the back of the room and begins a conversation in courtroom whispers. She is his client, Ito's wife, Clare Blouin-Ito.
Ferguson sits a few rows up, next to the neighbor she's brought along for the occasion. The looks and the whispers continue while everyone waits for the judge to arrive, for the show to begin.
The judge orders the matter to trial the following month. But, for a second time, the eviction is dismissed.
In a June 5 letter, Ito explains, "because our key witness is out of the country and cannot testify on some of our records we have no choice but to dismiss this case."
Ito also suggests "sitting with a third party" to seek an amiable way to settle the matter. But Ferguson had had enough. In late June, she filed a civil lawsuit against Ito alleging harassment and discrimination. That case is still pending.
Ito refuses to discuss the details of the Ferguson case. But he insists that the bookkeeping in the building was in such a confusing state when he took over that no one could make sense out of it, which is why the figures in Ferguson's notices kept changing.
"I don't want this to be an excuse for people not to pay rent," says Ito. "People have to take responsibility. Landlords need protection too."
Furthermore, he says, Mendez filed court papers with mistakes in them, which caused the Itos to have to dismiss the case. They have since dismissed Mendez. Schlottman also is gone.
But the soap opera continues.
Shortly after she joined her husband in the management of San Francisco's new Vantaggio Suites, Claire Blouin-Ito, a slight, unmistakably French woman with dark hair that frames a soft, round face cut in half by Yber-mod glasses, became intimately familiar with life inside 835 Turk St.
"The conditions were terrible," she says. "The units were not rentable. The outside, it was almost raw."
Blouin-Ito did not work with her husband in San Diego, staying home to raise their son. Clearly well-educated, the woman whom tenants have taken to commonly calling "The French Mrs. Ito" seems to serve as the closest thing Vantaggio Suites has to a conduit between the old tenants, the new students from around the globe, her businessman husband, and the Rent Board. It is far from an ideal situation.
"Tension was so awful. So stressful," she says of the charged air when she arrived at the Gotham. "The atmosphere became more calm [after meeting with tenants]. Of course, people were not completely happy. When you do renovation, it's not as peaceful."
But there's a little more to it than that.
The interior of the Gotham had a theme that might be described as "tired elegance"; its soft, gray-and-peach color scheme accented a decidedly art deco history. The place was generally clean, but definitely worn.
The renovated Vantaggio Suites, on the other hand, is big on new, nice, and clean, and fairly intolerant of things that are not. Blouin-Ito still shudders over the cockroach carcasses stabbed with thumbtacks, found after a resident moved out. Who knows what might have happened had she been around a few years earlier, when one of the residents trashed his room because he thought the devil was speaking to him from the glassware.
By late spring, the Itos had painted the lobby and hallways stark white, and the decorative trim around the ceilings was a medley of bright blue, orange, and mustard. New royal blue carpeting had been laid in the hallways. And the doors of each floor had been painted different colors that corresponded to the medley around the lobby ceiling.
"I thought it would be fun to have each floor a different color," says Blouin-Ito. Her tenants had a different idea of fun. In fact, several regard the mustard color as a form of harassment (not to mention their feelings on the orange).
"Circus colors," comments one resident.
"If you know anything about colors," explains another, "this is designed to make people feel uncomfortable."
Williamson, the beloved former janitor, puts it a bit more colorfully:
"When all this renovation is done, one of these doors will open, and out will come the devil and say, 'Thank you Mrs. Ito, I just needed the orange door to come up from hell.' "
Following the grandiose misstep of issuing and rescinding a 30-day eviction notice, the Itos decided that if they could not remove the residents from the building, they would work around them. Or, perhaps, over and through them.
As rooms become vacant at Vantaggio Suites, they are painted and furnished with twin beds, a desk, and a minirefrigerator. The construction work brings a flurry of workmen, dust, and hammering. The disturbances were alternately used by management and residents as a motivational tool.
Dowd and some of the other residents took the matter to the Rent Board, complaining that at one point the building's heat was turned off for a three-day stretch. But the Itos were still within the law in renovating the building. And there was no proof of the kind of harassment designed to drive out tenants that has made for famous legal cases in San Francisco.
Even the most stubborn of residents can't complain about how much nicer the building exterior looks, now that it's repaired and repainted. At least, they couldn't complain until one anxious day when the old Gotham Hotel sign -- something that resembled a blue cloud, with the former neon lettering replaced with paint -- was removed and broken into pieces. It was replaced with a sleek-looking Vantaggio Suites logo on the side of the building.
Finally, in May, Mary Dowd moved out of the building. If the Itos were trying to lose their old tenants, they had just scored a major victory. If Dowd was looking for a cause to champion, she had found it. Within weeks, Dowd filed a lawsuit against the Itos charging them with harassment. The matter is pending in Superior Court.
Beginning about April, the newly vacated, renovated rooms of what had been the Gotham Hotel were filled primarily by foreign students studying English at private language schools.
"This is a back-door conversion," Marsteller, the resident counselor, says. "And the net result of what has happened here is very similar to what is happening in the city. We have 114 units that have been removed from the San Francisco market and are no longer affordable.
"It's kind of remarkable that there could be such a dramatic difference from just last February."
A new mailbox roster posted inside 835 Turk St. lists the new tenants of Vantaggio Suites separately from the old Gotham tenants. The roster tells more than mailbox assignments. It's indicative of the state of affairs at the former Gotham.
There now are two different worlds existing simultaneously inside the building. Vantaggio Suites offers full-service, furnished rooms, virtually identical to the operation in San Diego, except for the price:
A single room rents for $800 a month. Larger rooms with twin beds rent for $1,100, which is to say, $550 a person with the required double occupancy (management books roommates). Maid service and breakfast is provided for the new Vantaggio Suites residents. The phone lines in the renovated rooms are connected through a central switchboard. The former manager's apartment is now a community kitchen and computer room, for the exclusive use of the new tenants.
Meanwhile, about 40 of the original tenants of the Gotham continue to pay their old rents, occupy old rooms in an otherwise new building, and wonder what's going to happen next.
"I can't help but think that, logically speaking, the new rents would argue that we're on our way out," says Marsteller. "I'm certainly feeling like they would be happy if we left. And from their economic standpoint, I can understand why."
Indeed, were this virtually any other city on the planet, the events at the Gotham during the past six months would not have raised an eyebrow. Were the Itos still in San Diego, the conversion they have wrought would have caused no legal problems whatsoever -- that city doesn't even have an agency that oversees property management. But this is not any other city -- a fact of which the Itos are now keenly aware. In fact, it's easy to get the impression that had she known how much bureaucracy, litigation, and politics would descend on Vantaggio Suites, Claire Blouin-Ito would never have come to San Francisco.
"France, socialist country, is not like this," she says.
