Annie Greening | San Francisco Planning Department

I spent this summer as a City Planning Intern working remotely with the Citywide Survey team at the San Francisco Planning Department. The survey team at SF Planning is currently undertaking a multi-year effort to create a cohesive, comprehensive historical narrative for the city as well as evaluative frameworks to guide significance determinations for buildings, structures, sites, and objects. These two elements provide consistency for Planning Department staff as well as other planning and preservation professionals for future efforts to identify, interpret, evaluate, and protect the city’s historic and cultural resources. To achieve these goals, the survey team is writing over 35 thematic, cultural, and architectural Historic Context Statements, as well as smaller theme studies within the context statements, to be compiled into one Citywide Context Statement.

My task this summer was to write two architectural historic context statements: one focused on Gilded Age (Victorian Era) architecture, and the other focused on Spanish and Mediterranean Revival architecture of the early twentieth century. I worked remotely for the entirety of the summer, as did most of the 35 City Planning interns, though some California-based interns were eventually able to work in the planning office part-time. Conducting research remotely presented a few challenges, primarily the inability to go out and survey neighborhoods in person to make note of concentrations of architectural styles within the city and flag potential resources for follow-up during the official citywide survey. In lieu of in-person survey, I spent a significant amount of time “walking” around the city on Google Street View! The Planning Department, local archives, and other San Francisco-based resources have digitized much of their information over the past few years, which made my remote research much easier. My experience with both in-person and remote research during my first year at Penn also prepared me for my work this summer! In particular, I drew extensively on the information and research skills that I honed in HSPV 600 and HSPV 521.

In addition to my day-to-day research and writing for the context statements, I also attended a variety of virtual meetings and intern workshops. Weekly meetings included team meetings for preservationists in the Planning Department, brainstorming sessions for the preservation interns, and individual meetings with my internship mentors, as well as City Planning Commission meetings and Historic Preservation Commission meetings. The department also organized weekly training sessions for the planning interns to engage with staff across the entire department, including Zoning & Compliance, Environmental Planning, and Citywide Planning. Training sessions ranged from informational presentations on topics such as design guidelines to discussions of the city’s work to advance racial and social equity. This provided all of the planning interns the opportunity to network and engage with staff across the department, including the Planning Director.

I am so grateful to the SF Planning Department, especially my mentors, Frances McMillen and Susan Parks, for allowing me to have this opportunity to craft documents that will help shape the future of San Francisco’s built environment.