Gas Hole

Attention everybody! This is the new funnest thing to photograph in the neighborhood! Get thee to 23rd and Valencia!

Previously:

Gas Tank

6 Responses to “Gas Hole”

  1. Concerned Guajolote says:

    Does anyone know what this is going to be? I asked the security guard and he didn’t know. I have thought for years that this is the best parcel of undeveloped land in the Mission. You have intimate streets on 2 sides, and Valencia is as nice a biggish street as you could hope for, wide and filled with light. There is something like 350 feet of street frontage. You can drive down to the Peninsula via San Jose/280, you can walk to BART, you can take one of those buses to Mission Bay or Googlebook or whatever. You can kind of track this on everyblock but the proposed use is still “service station.” (That would be a shame.) Also, in anticipation of the inevitable nimby protests, and the design input of the planning commission (motto: “status quo forever”), there should be a campaign to prevent the addition of bay windows and other design atrocities that ended up on the last such incredible parcel, ie Oakwood/19th behind Birite.

    • Amy says:

      I’ve been wondering what’s been going on here as well. I can see the construction from my bedroom window, and if they’re putting in another gas station I will be sort of upset, but if they put in something new that will block my view of Valencia, I will be super pissed.

  2. SFDoggy says:

    SF has rules against eliminating service stations so they probably aren’t able to specify a use other than service station right now. But one has to think that removing the tanks and checking the soil for contamination is a prelude to requesting a change.

    I vote for a park here, but condos are more likely.

  3. Corundum says:

    I work in the environmental field so I thought I’d throw out a website that can really help with questions like this.
    California has a site called Geotracker, maintained by the State Water Boards to track environmental cleanups.
    http://geotracker.waterboards.ca.gov/default.asp

    By typing in 23rd and Valencia, san francisco, ca
    I found out that there were 2 Site Cleanups involved at that site (may be the same one). From the last Groundwater Monitoring Report from 2009, here is this tidbit:
    “The site is currently an inactive Chevron service station awaiting demolition. The property is
    located in a densely populated, mixed commercial and residential area on the northwest corner
    of the intersection of 23rd and Valencia Streets in the Mission District of San Francisco,
    California (Figure 1). Chevron operated a service station on the site from 1946 until its closing
    in August 2007. All surface and subsurface facilities remain in place, including three empty
    10,000-gallon fiberglass underground storage tanks (USTs), five dispenser islands under a
    common canopy, associated product piping, and two small rectangular single-story buildings
    (Figure 2). The City of San Francisco requires the structures to remain in place until a
    redevelopment plan is approved.”

    So somewhere floating around is a redevelopment plan that must have been approved.

  4. bruce tomb says:

    I have been curious about what is going here for some time now, as it doesn’t look like gas station infrastructure. I just checked DBI records and it shows “ground water remediation” and “vapor control.” So it seems as though it is some sort semi-permanent environmental clean up machinery to deal with the problems left from the previous gas station. I’ve never seen anything like this before.