Part 1 of this story covered how the city gave favorable lease terms to subsequent tenants in Rulli’s Union Square park restaurant spaces. Part 2 details Rulli’s attempts at communicating with the city about the operating challenges that forced him to vacate his restaurants.
Complacent and complicit city officials
While Phil Ginsberg and Mayor London Breed kept in constant contact with Tyler Florence, offered him cash and grants to renovate the kiosks, and eventually let him break his lease, Rulli never received a return message from either. “I sent text messages [to Breed] and contacted Ginsberg numerous times, including meetings with my team. He never responded.” Rulli also reached out to then-District 2 supervisor Catherine Stefani, with whom he had a relationship from his many years in business on Chestnut Street, to no avail. Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose District 3 included the Union Square kiosks, was also unresponsive. “After we closed, and I saw the article about the cafes reopening, I contacted his office. He told me after hearing about our situation how embarrassed he was that the city treated us in that way,” Rulli says. Peskin contacted him one other time to seek a contribution for his mayoral run.
As for Dana Ketcham, the Recreation and Park property management director who worried about “bad publicity” if the city played hardball with Florence, emails show no such benevolence toward longtime tenant Rulli and his two kiosk cafes, Emporio Rulli and Bancarella.
“The City is writing to officially notify you of the termination of your lease,” Ketcham wrote to Rulli in a Dec. 29, 2021, email.
We recognize that you may be entitled to one month’s notice before the termination can go into effect. However, in light of your failure to operate the cafe or to pay rent, we would like the termination to take effect as soon as possible …. If you are not willing to discuss an expeditious termination with us, this letter will also serve as formal notice of default. You have not kept up the cafes and they are creating an attractive nuisance.
On Dec. 31, Rulli responded to Ketcham:
Our ‘failure to operate the cafe’ has largely been dictated by both the mayor of San Francisco and governor of California. To expect any business to continue to pay employees and other operating expenses only to be told to shut down time and again is unreasonable at best. Since the beginning of the subway construction the only time either of the locations on Union Square had any chance of not losing thousands is during the summer months when tourists are in town …. Here are photos from June 2020. As you can clearly see there is no one to sell our wares to. Then of course there is the homeless problem and lack of support from San Francisco [s]upervisors, the [m]ayor, SFPD, and the [d]irector of [p]ark and [r]ecreation, Phil Ginsburg.
Rulli attached a message sent to Ginsburg in 2018:
Hi Phil, I wanted to let you know Saturday our female manager at Union Square was spit on by a female transient in our Stockton [S]treet caffe. She was treated at the scene and the homeless woman was arrested. Everyday there is some incident from theft or human excrement smeared on widows or in front of our doors. This has been an unsafe work environment for our staff and our customers. We need to have a meeting with the [m]ayor and the supervisors as well as the police about the square. It is a civic embarrassment as well as now a safety concern. Why do transients have more rights than the taxpaying residents of San Francisco? I know there is only so much Park [a]nd Rec can do and that’s why I feel it’s long past due to have a meeting with everyone concerned about this problem. It’s not only the seven-year construction that has negatively impacted the square but probably more so the homeless situation. There is a percentage of the population that is a danger to anyone trying to enjoy the surrounding area. The city has had enough bad publicity lately on the national news [and] we don’t need an incident at Union Square to become a public news story but I’m afraid something is going to happen if we don’t have a police presence on the square throughout the day.
Rulli points out to Ketcham that Ginsburg didn’t respond to that message or numerous other communication attempts.
Over the last seven or eight years we have reached out … and attempted to work with Park and Recreation and the City of San Francisco looking for some relief for the losses we sustained as a result of the ongoing subway construction and the never-ending homeless problem, the result has been nothing. Our cafes have had to deal with flooding caused by the construction, damage to our equipment, the lack of use of the elevator (adding to the hazardous work environment) because of said flooding, [and] raw sewage odors coming from underground. We believe we have been irreparably harmed by these ongoing issues and fully expect some remuneration … In March of 2019 we took out a $425,000 loan to keep our heads above water, however the homeless problem became national news, and the construction never ended. Our losses for the period of 10 /1/18 [through] 3 /20/20 are a whopping $705,000. We are including a recap of our P & L for your review. Our employees were spit on, bashed in the head, stolen from, threatened[,] and harassed on a daily basis, were required to clean up hazardous waste left by the homeless and the drug addicts, working conditions in Union Square were difficult at best and most unpleasant for our customers and visitors to San Francisco.
In a series of interviews, former Rulli employees corroborated the horrific conditions, as well as the city’s refusal to help. “It was a literal shit show,” says former director of operations Adolfo Veronese.
They didn’t do anything for Gary. We had to call multiple times a week for homeless due to drugs and behavior issues. People were shooting up in the morning out front. A guy dropped his pants, laid down, and passed out inside the cafe; we called the cops. It took 40 minutes for them to arrive. Cops on Union Square didn’t want to deal with it .… I sat in on city meetings and they wouldn’t help him out, just brush him off.
The situation deteriorated further when the city closed Geary Street for Central Subway construction. “Gary would spend all this money on signs to get some business and the [c]ity would take the signs down.”
Another former worker, who asked to remain anonymous as he still does work with the city, says his car was broken into three times near the office.
The homeless problem was really bad — there were needles and people shooting up. During construction of the subway, raw sewage was coming down the walls of the office. One day I walked into my home and my wife almost puked because she said I smelled like s[—] — I was just used to it. I grew up on a construction zone and the engineer was agreeing that I was right that they weren’t doing things correctly. The elevator and the dumbwaiter were locked for a year because there was sewage coming off the shaft and affecting the downstairs.
Yes, the same dumbwaiter that caused Florence to close his Miller & Lux rotisserie and request a release from his obligation to operate, which Rec and Park granted.
“At one point I stopped calling the [c]ity because nothing was getting done,” the former employee continued. “I told them they were doing a very poor job of protecting their tenants. They [would] just come out with their big suits and nothing [would get] resolved. We were not a priority. But I had an employee who wouldn’t come into the storage without a mask.”
Thomas Bunker was vice president of operations for Rulli’s company, but he says Union Square needed all of his time “like the Dutch parable about putting your finger in the dam.” The city and the subway construction crew proved a powerful combination for incompetence. “It was cause and effect. The subway work displaced vermin, then when the ice rink was up for the holidays, the [c]ity used rice to absorb the water and that just set up a buffet for the vermin,” Bunker says. The dumbwaiter — a consistent theme in all of the interviews — also had water in it along with the elevator. “The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing, it seemed,” Bunker says of the city. Because the cafes had “young people, 18 to 20 years old” working there who were nervous about the conditions in Union Square, Bunker would arrive early to open up.
You would have to step over people who had [overdosed]. There were three types of homeless: catastrophic event — they weren’t around long — mental incapacitation, and the ones with drug, alcohol, and mental issues. They would grab the food off customers’ tables. They’d steal the sugar packets. They’d pass bad money. De-escalation is something I learned. We had a security guard who was ex-Army — he asked a guy to get off the property and the guy came back later with a steel pipe and clobbered him over the head. He was out for six months.
And how did the city respond? “We would go to all of these meetings, and they would talk about roses or the tulip festival but not about facilities or the problems. I marvel at some of the things that should have been done but didn’t get done. Gary is a reputable businessman — he really cares about what he does. It was hard on him.”
Rulli agrees that homelessness, crime, the pandemic, and the Central Subway created a potent cocktail of negativity not only for him and his employees, but also for customers.
Homeless predators spit in the faces of two different managers; one manager had his car broken into and his grandfather’s briefcase with really personal stuff was stolen; we had human feces smeared across our doors for our staff to clean up; syringes and condoms being left in the bushes outside of the store; the stairwell and hallway to the garage where our office was located were constantly occupied at all hours with sleeping vagrants on drugs which my female staff had to walk by with cash deposits — we used to send deposits down in the dumbwaiter, but since it wasn’t operational they had to go through the garage, and the garage refused to have security cameras due to privacy issues for its staff. We had to call the police constantly — they were compassionate but said their hands were tied by the Board of Supervisors and District Attorney [Chesa Boudin]. We had many meetings with the [c]ity with my attorney Joe Veronese. Rec and Park was completely nonresponsive and in denial about the unsafe work environment city politics had created for San Francisco citizens, my employees, and our customers.
Belinda Leong’s b. Patisserie will continue to occupy the Powell Street-side cafe in Union Square for the free one-year trial run, filling the space left vacant by Tyler Florence’s cafe. The Stockton Street kiosk where Florence planned to run his rotisserie remains vacant.