Heading to the office, a taxi inbound on Golden Gate Avenue brought me past St. Boniface, a 1908 church reconstructed just after the 1906 earthquake. I walked back two blocks to see it. It's a beautiful large church, filled with impressive arches, carved pulpit and turn of the century stained glass. Amazingly, it was also filled with sleeping homeless people occupying nearly all the pews.
Called the Gubbio Project (here), homeless people can sleep in the church from 6 am to 2 pm each day. Yes - that runs right across the daily 12:15 mass, too.
 |
| click to enlarge |
It was deeply affecting and moving - really, unforgettable - to see the church used this way. It almost took my breath away.
The parish dates to 1870, when a small wooden church was built for the German immigrant community as St Peter and Paul. (Growing up, my mother's German Catholic church in Iowa was also St Peter and Paul.) It was replaced once with a larger wooden church, and then a fine brick church was built in 1902 and promptly destroyed by the 1906 earthquake. Today's church was built in 1908. In recent decades, the church passed into the hands of the Franciscan order and is today called St. Boniface. It's at 133 Golden Gate Avenue, a block east of Sixth and Market.
___
WeWorks is a real estate venture valued at $20B and has over 100 locations internationally. Their second SF center, opened in 2014, renovated the L-shaped shell office building that surrounds the 1920 Golden Gate Theater at Sixth and Market in SF. It's two blocks south of the Union Square Hilton and, as mentioned, just a block or two from St. Boniface. WeWorks' business model is typically to convert three to six stories of office space into easily rented glass offices, variably for 1, 2, 4, or up to 20 people. WeWorks now has 14 centers in the Bay Area, 12 in SF itself. That suggests as much as 42 floors of executive office space rented out in small parcels in as little as a few minutes by incredibly upbeat, helpful staff.
____
For a 2002 article on the Franciscans' work in the Tenderloin, here.
