News: Clay Theater Property - sold
Andrea Jesse
While many commercial properties are seeing vacancies rise and values plummet in San Francisco following the pandemic, one deal that closed last month in Pacific Heights stood out — for its sale price, and the mystery around who paid it.
Two small, more-than-a-century-old commercial properties at 2261 and 2599 Fillmore St. that last traded hands in 2008 for just under $5 million were sold in January for more than double that price.
The $11 million pricing was achieved despite one of the buildings sitting vacant for four years. The building at 2599 Fillmore houses retailer Alice & Olivia on the corner of Fillmore and Clay streets; the other is the historic but recently shuttered Clay Theater at 2261 Fillmore.
The identity of the buyer of the properties is unknown. It’s listed in public documents only as Fillmore Reserve LLC, a limited liability company that was registered in Delaware at the start of the year.
According to available public records, Fillmore Reserve did not take out a loan to acquire the properties, suggesting that the deal was an all-cash transaction. The company, contacted through its New York-based attorney, did not respond to a message seeking comment. Real estate firm Maven brokered the sale but declined to comment, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
Balgobind Jaiswal, who had owned the Clay Theater and adjacent building since 2008, did not respond to attempts by the Chronicle for comment.
As the neighborhood transformed over decades, the Clay Theater remained a constant.
The 325-seat theater dates to around 1913, when it started as a nickelodeon — the first type of projected motion picture theater in the United States — named after its cheap price of admission.
Because of this, the Clay was opened at a “relatively modest size that fits into the fabric of the neighborhood,” said Woody LaBounty, executive director of SF Heritage, a nonprofit whose goal is to preserve the city’s architectural and cultural identity. He said that, while it was subject to modernization efforts over the years, the Clay retained much of its original design integrity.
But at the start of 2020, the Clay suddenly went dark after its operator, Landmark Theatres Los Angeles, pulled out, citing six consecutive years of revenue losses.
A few months later, Jaiswal met with city Planning Department officials to explore converting the theater into a more “economically viable” use — anything but a theater. He had leased the Clay to Landmark at a reduced rate and wasn’t truly interested in acquiring the theater in the first place — Jaiswal’s focus had been on the attached corner building, he told the Chronicle in 2020.
In 2021, “Save the Clay!” became the rallying cry of cinephiles, preservationists and sentimental community members who mobilized to prevent the city’s last single-screen theater from being transformed into a retail destination in the spirit of the many boutiques that have opened shop around it in recent years.
“The owner ripped the seats out of the theater and announced that he had these plans to turn it into a retail space. We were worried that something bad would happen to the building,” LaBounty said. “If it wasn’t going to be a theater, we wanted to preserve the elements that could make it go back to being a theater if, say, the retail plan didn’t work out.”
The neighborhood’s supervisor, Catherine Stefani, even got involved in the effort to preserve the Clay, eventually getting behind a proposal by Jaiswal to add a cafe or a wine bar to the theater, but the plan never materialized.
In 2021, Jaiswal filed an application seeking approval for a retail conversion.
Jaiswal rejected an offer by the nonprofit San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Association to buy the Clay for $3.5 million. In 2022, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to grant landmark status to the theater, an effort that Stefani initiated. The designation means that changes to the property require an extra layer of scrutiny by the city’s preservation commission. In the fall, a hearing on the retail conversion planned by Jaiswal was continued indefinitely.
But the Clay’s landmark status does not prevent its new owners from reviving the effort. Dan Sider, the Planning Department’s chief of staff, confirmed that the application is still active.
“The danger is — and why the landmark was important — now with a lot of these state bills, people could buy two lots, combine them and build a very large building,” LaBounty said. “The landmarking provides some limited protections, at least on some of these state programs.”
Reach Laura Waxmann: laura....@sfchronicle.com
