KEXP and Blue Bear Chosen to Remake the Haight and Ashbury Corner Building

San Francisco Heritage has picked Seattle public radio station KEXP and the Blue Bear School of Music to reimagine the Doolan-Larson Building, the corner property at Haight and Ashbury streets, as a music and cultural center with a rooftop performance space, a radio broadcast booth and a floor of music classrooms.

One thing to be clear about before anyone plans a visit: this is not a done deal. KEXP says so plainly on its own project page. The parties have signed a letter of intent, not a construction contract, and the station writes that “it’s not a sure thing yet.”

Where the Project Actually Stands

Three teams submitted proposals in June. In August the SF Heritage board selected the KEXP and Blue Bear team as the sole finalist for further consideration. The groups will spend the coming months working out an adaptive reuse plan, gathering community input, and testing whether the construction and financing are feasible. The boards of both KEXP and SF Heritage make the final call on whether it proceeds, and KEXP says it hopes to have an update in early 2027.

So the renderings circulating this week show one possible version of the building, not an approved design. KEXP describes the rooftop addition shown in them as “an intriguing possibility” rather than a settled plan.

What Is Proposed

The proposal covers the Doolan-Larson House and the three storefronts along Haight Street. Per KEXP’s published outline, it includes:

A street-level public space with coffee during the day and beer and wine in the evenings, plus retail and room for live performances, DJ nights and listening parties. A full floor of individual and group music classrooms run by Blue Bear. A radio broadcast booth on the second floor, positioned so DJs look out over Haight Street. An indoor and outdoor rooftop venue sized for roughly 100 people.

Early drawings come from the architecture firm Gensler and the preservation firm Page & Turnbull, and call for a contemporary addition above the storefronts north of the main house. SF Heritage executive director Woody LaBounty told the San Francisco Chronicle that the organization would help the existing shops relocate, and said of the site: “The thing that is important to us is that it’s on the most famous intersection in the world, so we want to do it justice.”

SF Heritage has owned the property since longtime resident Norm Larson donated it to the group, and has run an artist-in-residence program there. That program ends under the new partnership.

The Building

The Doolan-Larson House is a Colonial Revival structure on the northwest corner of Haight and Ashbury. It was raised after the 1906 earthquake so ground-floor storefronts could be added beneath it, and it housed the Haight’s first hippie boutique during the 1960s. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and SF Heritage says the project will be held to the Secretary of the Interior’s standards for rehabilitation.

Blue Bear School of Music is based at Fort Mason and provides more than 1,000 free music programs a year through San Francisco Unified School District and neighborhood partners. KEXP began Bay Area broadcasting after buying the 92.7 FM signal at a bankruptcy auction; its headquarters stay in Seattle.

Visiting the Corner Now

Nothing is under construction, and the storefronts are still trading, so the intersection looks as it does in the photograph above. The corner is at Haight and Ashbury streets in the Upper Haight, served by the 6, 7, 33 and 43 Muni lines; the 7 runs from downtown along Haight Street. The N Judah at Carl and Cole is about a ten minute walk south.

SF Heritage is publishing updates at haightandashbury.org.

Photo: Daniel Schwen, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.