It’s a sunny November day on the San Francisco waterfront, and the party’s just getting started. They’ve pulled out all the stops for the grand opening of Piers 1½, 3, and 5, a once-decrepit cluster of warehouses just north of the Ferry Building that will soon house high-end cafés, shops, and offices. Where rotten pilings used to sag into the bay, freshly painted walls now ring with cocktail party chatter and the sounds of a Latin jazz band. When the developer, a tall, urbane Australian named Simon Snellgrove, offers his thanks to those who made this $54 million historic rehabilitation possible, he has a long list: politicians, neighborhood groups, unions, local and state agencies. The first name on the list, though, is Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Snellgrove thanks Peskin before he thanks the mayor or the port director. He would thank Peskin, you get the feeling, before he thanked God almighty.

Soon it’s Peskin’s turn to speak. A 42-year-old fireplug of a man with a well-groomed salt-and-pepper beard, Peskin adjusts his tie, bounds up to the microphone, and delivers a rapid-fire speech that’s as short as it is direct. This project falls within Peskin’s district, and he has torpedoed other high-profile developments here in recent years. His audience gets the joke when he says, “See? There are projects at the port that we don’t kill.”

Truth be told, there are plenty of major projects Peskin hasn’t killed. Plenty, in fact, that he’s been instrumental in pushing through the pipeline. He’s overseeing the latest incarnation of the massive new Piers 27 through 31 project and the Exploratorium’s move to the waterfront. He helped broker one of the biggest development deals in modern San Francisco history, the Rincon Hill Plan, a key part of the city’s high-rise future. And he’s revitalizing the city’s planning department, funneling cash and personnel into an agency stunted by years of neglect. But as his comment at the podium acknowledges, the guy has an image problem.

Given his pedigree as an environmentalist, neighborhood kingpin, and historical preservationist, you might expect Peskin to attack all growth, good or bad. In some quarters, Peskin’s protectionist causes—he helped save the Colombo building, a North Beach lodestone, from the wrecker’s ball, for instance, and prevented a Rite-Aid from setting up shop on Washington Square—are held up as proof of a stridently antigrowth stance, the legacy of an activist who rode the anti–Willie Brown wave into office in 2000.

To look at Peskin and see a throwback leftist, though, is to misread him. Instead, he is a heretofore-unseen combination of neighborhood activist and master planner, an environmentalist willing to break bread with the city’s biggest developers. Indeed, Peskin is a surprising avatar of a new San Francisco, a city being born in fits and starts, one that is slowly learning to combine a strenuous emphasis on historic preservation with a pragmatic, sometimes grudging willingness to grow. We are now a city as willing to build a skyscraper in SoMa as kill a chain store in North Beach. Within a decade, whole neighborhoods will have been born, while the historic parts of the city, those most likely to draw a tourist’s gaze, will be set in amber. This is San Francisco’s 21st-century paradigm; Peskin has done as much as anyone to set the tone.

That’s not to say it’s been an easy ride. Even minor squabbles over development still take on the aspect of a steel cage match. And Peskin isn’t exactly a diplomat: he’s not afraid to square off against developers like the Mills Corporation or lob Molotovs at the city’s heaviest hitters, including Gap founder Don Fisher, with whom he’s had a nasty and long-running feud. I didn’t hear many lukewarm assessments of Peskin over the course of my reporting: his supporters say he’s just what the city needs now; his enemies paint him as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin, a NIMBY warlord who has somehow seized control of the levers of power.

Love him or hate him, though, no supervisor has ever held so much sway over the city’s development. While he is most influential on his own turf, which stretches from fisherman’s Wharf to Polk Gulch to the Financial district, almost nothing gets built in San Francisco without his support. The days when he could devote himself to his historic fiefdom and its dramas are gone; he’s the president of the board that supervises the entire city, and he knows, better than anyone, that what works for North Beach doesn’t necessarily play south of Market.


Down at the wharf, the sun is starting to warm the horizon, and Peskin, outfitted in a black Speedo, thermal cap, and goggles, is taking me swimming in the bay. The water temperature today is 58 degrees—so cold it burns. Members of the South End Rowing Club, though, don’t wear wetsuits. It’s a point of pride. This is my first encounter with Peskin, a Prius-driving hard guy, and I suspect that if I endure this ritual bit of hazing, he’ll be more willing to carve out time for me.

And then, without further ado, he wades in, stroking off toward the Hyde Street Pier. I last about eight minutes in the water; he cuts his usual 20-minute swim short in deference to the newbie. We follow our swim with a spell in the club’s sauna, where he shoots the shit with cops, city attorneys, and developers—a roll call that is about as old-school San Francisco as it gets. They sit in the heat, a bunch of plugged-in guys talking power—“Did you see that op-ed in the Examiner today? What a fucking joke”—while the morning light spreads across the bay and the rest of the city wakes up.

It’s only natural that Peskin would feel at home here. Founded in 1873, the club is one of the cradles of the city’s history, a sort of local Olduvai Gorge. Sepia-toned photos line the walls; the locker room’s men-and-wet-towels smell is worlds away from the sleek sterility of modern gyms. It’s exactly the kind of place that Peskin has sworn to protect.

The same is true of Telegraph Hill, where Peskin lives with his wife, Nancy Shanahan, in an 1850s clapboard cottage off the Filbert steps. The home is filled with Mission-style furniture, Indian masks, South American paintings, and century-old etchings of the wharf. Up here, amid a riot of banana trees, roses, and prehis­toric-looking ferns, Telegraph Hill’s parrots screech and dive and preen. “Is this not heaven on earth?” he asks when I visit. It’s true: the view from his deck is breathtaking, encompassing the waterfront, the Bay Bridge, and the Berkeley hills. (And it must be said: if this were your view, you wouldn’t want a bunch of skyscrapers blocking it, either.) This rootedness, from his nest in the genteel wilds of North Beach, informs Peskin’s idea of what a city should be, mixing a fierce emphasis on preserving what’s already here with a careful vetting of what might come.

“In our collective imagination, San Francisco is more an assemblage of small villages than a city,” he says. “We have a parochial—and I don’t mean that negatively—love of our neighborhoods, and a fear of things that will disturb them. There’s a good reason for that fear: look at what happened to the Fillmore,” he says, referring to the midcentury urban renewal that gutted the “Harlem of the West”; erected cheap, ugly public housing blocks in its place; and scattered the city’s black population to the farthest corners of the bay. “These are the lessons that we take forward.”

The lessons started early. Born and raised in Berkeley, Peskin first tangled with development as an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, when he sued the school over an expansion of its campus that threatened hundreds of redwoods. After graduation he began work as a land- and water-rights negotiator for environmental groups, an education in the eye-glazing minutiae of land-use law that set the template for his career. Peskin’s brand of activism was less about tree sitting or marching in the streets than about environmental impact reports and policy meetings, and his early training would serve him well when he later navigated the rapids of urban planning in San Francisco.

Peskin’s route to politics, though, came through neighborhood preservation. He moved to North Beach in 1990, fell in love with it, and later joined the Telegraph Hill Dwellers, said to be the city’s oldest, richest, and most powerful neighborhood group. By the late ’90s the young firebrand was on the front lines in several of the area’s most contentious dot-com-era development skirmishes, protecting the Colombo building and opposing the replacement of an Art Deco parking garage on Vallejo with a hulking, expensive new one (a battle he lost). In 1999, he became the group’s president.

In many ways, Peskin is kin to the activists who led the freeway revolts of the ’50s and ’60s, when angry citizens beat back proposals that would have sent highways barreling down the Panhandle and cutting through North Beach and Russian Hill. It wasn’t just roads that had people up in arms, though. It was the explosion of tall buildings that, seemingly overnight, transformed the city’s northeastern quarter into a skyscraping thicket: the Fontana Towers, which blocked off parts of Russian Hill from the waterfront; the Bank of America building; the Transamerica Pyramid. These and countless nondescript office buildings sprouted up in the ’60s and ’70s before the city, worried about the “Manhattanization” of San Francisco, finally put the brakes on.

Once the tech boom of the ’90s got rolling, though, it again felt as if backroom deals were how things got done and everything in the city was for sale: a tacky faux museum of San Francisco history pitched for the waterfront, the St. John Coltrane Church on Divisadero evicted to make way for a boutique, Starbucks and live-work lofts everywhere.

To many, it seemed that things were out of control, and in large measure this fresh anxiety is what brought Peskin and his colleagues to power. In 2000, Supervisor Tom Ammiano urged him to run for the District Three seat. He beat a raft of opponents and took his place among the other newly elected anti-Willie supervisors, with a mandate to clean house. And clean house they did. In the post-Brown years, the Board of Supervisors has become a de facto planning commission, with Peskin its most knowledgeable and forceful member. He is by no means the only actor on the stage, but his fingerprints are everywhere.


“Cities evolve, and we have to grow. We’re not scared of building high-rises. Density is a good thing,” Peskin says. “But let’s be smart about it. We have to ask why. We need to preserve what’s best in the city and work with the rest.”

Not exactly what you’d expect from a guy who joined the board on an antigrowth mandate. But as Peskin says, you shouldn’t mistake caution for dogma. As he sees it, his work during the dot-com years was a kind of triage aimed at checking the seemingly unstoppable flow of shoddy developments that threatened to destroy the city’s character. But times have changed. Now that he is president of the board, tasked with a citywide instead of a neighborhood mission, the full spectrum of his views is on display. “I was never antigrowth,” he says. “I’m just a skeptic. You can’t stick a glass-and-steel monstrosity in the middle of a row of Edwardians.”

So while they have killed a number of high-profile projects in his district, Peskin and the current board have also presided over historic rehabs and lofty new constructions that wouldn’t be out of place in Vancouver, that icon of New Urbanism. In fact, Peskin’s roots are in New Urbanism: in college, he read a lot of Jane Jacobs, author of the movement’s ur-text, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and he preaches the New Urbanist gospel of density and transit-first, community-nurturing solutions to city life. He mixes these ideas freely with preservationist nostrums and “Don’t tread on me” disquisitions on the right of neighborhoods to control what’s built within their borders. You get the sense that in Peskin’s ideal world, there would be no need for skyscrapers or big new developments. But given our perpetual housing crunch and the Bay Area’s ever-increasing population, it’s a moot point. So Peskin tries to mold each new project into a shape he can live with.

About the explosion of high-rises south of Market, he says, “I have mixed feelings. Part of me is proud that we’ve made some groundbreaking decisions. Part of me worries about what San Francisco will become.” He pauses for a moment, as if collecting his thoughts. “But SoMa is an appropriate place for that kind of building. You’re not demolishing historic buildings and displacing residents there. It’s part of the evolution of the city.”

Peskin, according to Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association, typifies a new sort of progressive, one flexible enough to consider the city’s changing needs. “The debate seems to be shifting from the old pro-growth versus no-growth question to what kind of growth and where,” Metcalf says. Given that the region’s population will continue to swell, it’s a crucial shift in thinking.

Or as developer Simon Snellgrove told me, “Aaron’s not antidevelopment. He’s just got high standards.”

For an illustration of Peskin’s M.O., look at the city’s historic northern waterfront. Much of it lies within his district, and he watches over its slow-but-steady revitalization with a proprietary eye. In 2005, Peskin was instrumental in the lonesome death of the Brown-era plan for Piers 27 through 31, a long-derelict patch of waterfront near Fisherman’s Wharf. With the blessing of the former mayor, the Virginia-based Mills Corporation pitched a tone-deaf proposal that would have plopped a giant mall down on the edge of the bay. Peskin led the fight against Mills, which reacted by going after Peskin personally, running a full-page ad in the New York Times that compared him to a rat and accused him of holding “Kangaroo Court hearings.” That PR blunder sealed it. Even some of Peskin’s political opponents rallied around him; the project went down
in defeat.

The port is now in negotiations with local 800-pound gorillas Shorenstein Properties and Farallon Capital Management to develop the piers. The contours hadn’t been completely mapped out by press time, but the new proposal calls for less shopping, more office space, and acres for outdoor recreation. If it comes to pass, the $446 million project will be one of the biggest in Peskin’s district during his tenure. As it stands now, he says it’s a worthwhile deal, but he’s careful to hedge his bets, saying that if the details changed significantly he could even withdraw his support. And it faces myriad bureaucratic hurdles as well; as we sit outside in North Beach, he runs me through all the ways in which the project could go south. The waterfront is governed not just by the city but also by the state, and a host of agencies must sign off on the project before anything goes forward. It’s a maddening, labyrinthine process, and just hearing about it makes my head hurt.

Building elsewhere in the city is only slightly easier. Ask any developer, and he’ll tell you that the rules are Byzantine, the waits interminable, and a hot market might go cold by the time your project makes it through the planning process. One thing that should help is Peskin’s push to revive the city’s once-moribund planning department—perhaps his most important, albeit least sexy, contribution to the city’s future. He is also spearheading plans to codify the rules for building in the city. “The process here might be difficult and frustrating,” says one downtown developer who asked not to be named, “but we’re getting to a situation where there are rules, and people know the rules.”

“There was—and still is, to some extent—a lack of clarity, which creates an environment for deal making,” says David Prowler, a 30-year veteran of the city’s planning wars. “There were plenty of instances where people were suspicious that maybe the fix was in, or that the playing field wasn’t level.” Over the years, Prowler has been a neighborhood activist, a city planner, a developer, and a project manager for the Mission Bay and Pac Bell Park developments. He gives Peskin points for integrity: “Aaron has a keen interest in seeing that the process is honest and fair.”

Peskin has worked to beef up the department’s staff and dramatically increase its funding, and he is leading an effort to evaluate the historical worth of every building in the city, so that developers and preservationists will know which ones are most heavily protected. Early in his tenure, Peskin introduced an ordinance that requires megaprojects to be evaluated by the board’s financial analyst before the city sinks too much money and time into them (this law contributed to the demise of the Mills proposal), and in 2002 he cosponsored a ballot measure that shifted the balance of power in the seven-member planning commission. In recent years, the mayor had appointed the panel; now, the board can choose three members and has veto power over the rest. This is no small thing: before Peskin’s push for professionalization, the commission was reliably stocked with pastors, activists, and cronies of all sorts—people who didn’t necessarily know anything about city planning.

Throughout all of this revamping, Peskin has demonstrated a grasp of detail unrivaled among city politicians. Talk to him for any length of time and he’s likely to cite, chapter and verse, from the 1,200-page city planning code. “In all my years, I’ve never seen a supervisor more informed about the code or how the department functions,” says Dean Macris, the city’s planning director, with whom Peskin meets every week to discuss strategy. Macris, who is on his third run as planning czar, says Peskin has been instrumental in rebuilding the department and streamlining the process.

Prowler says things are getting better—albeit very, very slowly. He also says that, on balance, caution might be the best course: “Any project in this town has a tremendous burden of proof, and that may be appropriate. That’s not such a bad thing.”

One that’s survived such scrutiny is the massive Rincon Hill Plan, which sat on the shelf for about a decade before the supervisors shepherded it through in 2005. During hardball negotiations, Peskin helped District Six supervisor Chris Daly squeeze an unprecedented amount of money for social services in his district from the developers. The outcry from the business community was deafening, and Gavin Newsom called it a shakedown. Peskin could have negotiated his own deal—for lower towers, say—but through it all, he stuck with Daly. “Some developers tried to go around me, to cut a better deal with Aaron that had less community benefits,” says Daly. “But he backed me up.”

The resulting project is a “planner’s dream,” according to SPUR’s Metcalf. When combined with the nearby Transbay project, the Rincon deal will create housing for up to 20,000 residents, spiced with New Urbanist appurtenances like wide, pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and ground-level storefronts to enhance street life. And while the extra money Daly extracted has provoked a raging debate, it should fulfill one of Peskin’s conditions for new development: that it do right by the existing neighborhood’s neediest residents.

“Aaron gets it—he gets how big projects fit into the landscape, physically and politically. He’s got a feel for the whole picture,” says Jeffrey Heller, president of local design behemoth Heller-Manus Architects, creator of Rincon Hill’s Infinity towers.

The 2005 Home Depot contro­versy offers another window into Peskin’s worldview. After a fiercely ideological fight that pit the Bay Guardian and Ammiano against Bayview–Hunters Point supervisor Sophie Maxwell and the business community, the board was deadlocked over whether to allow a Home Depot to open on Bayshore Boulevard. Peskin had the swing vote. Unexpectedly, he voted yes, and the progressive community’s wrath rained down upon him.

Cynics will note that it’s easy to support a big-box eyesore in a blighted part of the city far from your own home and district, but Peskin maintains that he simply deferred to the Bayview’s will and its inarguable economic need. What makes sense for North Beach, he says—where chain stores are outlawed thanks to a wildly popular 2005 measure spearheaded by Peskin—might not make sense for a neighborhood with sky-high unemployment and acres of empty lots. “The trick,” he says, “is to protect the areas of the city that are in many ways done, while allowing other parts of the city to emerge.”

There’s been fallout from that vote. Ammiano is said to still be angry with him. A heckler has been on Peskin’s case since then, too, stalking him from the Chinese New Year parade to Pride festivities. “There’s always this one guy in the crowd, the same guy each time, who screams out, ‘Peskin! Fuck you for Home Depot!’”  he says with a laugh. “The guy likes parades. Doesn’t like Home Depot.” A pause. “Or me.”


Most Tuesday afternoons, Peskin holds court in Room 250, the gilded City Hall chamber where the supervisors gather each week. A picture of intensity, he runs meetings sitting ramrod straight, banging the gavel, tapping his pen with impatience. Near the end of each meeting, the public comment period comes around. This egalitarian tradition—in which any regular Joe can speak on virtually any topic for up to three minutes—usually draws a parade of nut jobs. Peskin greets some of them warmly, a munificent look on his face as they exorcise their various demons. One man rails against hard-right radio stations; another charges the city with stealing his moneymaking scheme. Peskin, as far as I can tell, is all rapt attention, absorbed in the concerns of his esteemed, if highly eccentric, constituents. They, in turn, seem grateful for the chance to speak.

It’s the same in his home district on a warm morning. Birds are chirping, a breeze riffles the trash in the gutters. Peskin, in shorts, flip-flops, and a madras shirt, sits outside Caffe Trieste. One after another, people stop by to pay their respects. Peskin receives each graciously, teasing and gossiping, sprinkling his comments with snippets of Cantonese, Hebrew, and Bahasa Indonesia. He’s their guy, a local hero.

There is, however, another school of thought:

“Aaron Peskin is a ruthless little prick.”

“Aaron Peskin is terrible for San Francisco.”

“Aaron Peskin can kiss my ass in the Macy’s window.”

These critics—old-school politicos and developers who have tangled with Peskin—see the Telegraph Hill Dwellers as a planning mob, a meddling, malevolent entity that must be courted or bought off before any business can be done in District Three. There’s some truth here: the Hill Dwellers do exert a lot of influence, and Peskin, their kith and kin, has generally sided with them. Also, it has to be said, Peskin isn’t afraid to mix it up, stopping just short of actual fisticuffs.

The city’s famously fratricidal politics has always bred tough guys. It was along the Embarcadero’s concrete piers that union leader “Red” Harry Bridges organized the longshoremen in the 1930s, standing up to the shipping companies, the police, and the invective of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Peskin and Chris Daly, the city’s modern-day fighting liberals, carry on that tradition. As Joe Butler, a Telegraph Hill Dwellers member and Peskin’s locker mate at the rowing club, told me, “Aaron knows that if you’re a fighter, your idea wins.”

This combativeness has made him some powerful enemies. Perhaps the biggest gun is Gap founder Don Fisher, with whom Peskin differs on everything from schools to business taxes. Fisher wouldn’t talk for this story, but his right-hand man Wade Randlett, a political consultant and leader of SFSOS, a local business lobbying group, agreed to a sit-down. According to Randlett, Peskin’s Home Depot vote and opposition to the original deal for Piers 27 through 31 were about power and payback, not good planning or high principle. “For Aaron,” he says, “it’s all about ‘How can I get on the winning side, to increase my power, my fund-raising, my ability to crush my enemies?’ ”

Asked about Fisher and Randlett, Peskin doesn’t mince words, either: he calls Fisher a “vicious, right-wing bastard” and Randlett a “sociopath.” The feud heated up in 2005, when the board passed Peskin’s measure banning chain stores in North Beach. Fisher, not surprisingly, was no fan of this legislation, and Peskin says he got a call from him demanding that he vote against it. Peskin, naturally, refused.

I heard variations on Randlett’s charge—that Peskin is just another power-hungry politician—a number of times over the course of my reporting. As Joe O’Donoghue, former president of the Residential Builders Association, put it: “The man has no platform but self-aggrandizement.” No shrinking violet himself, O’Donoghue has reportedly called Peskin both “an angry dwarf” (Peskin is about 5 feet 5) and “Heinrich Peskin” (Peskin is Jewish).

To Peskin, drawing fire means that he’s doing his job right. He says there is a big difference between getting things done and the unvarnished pursuit of power. “I play the game hard. I can be all elbows,” he says. “A lot of elected officials just want to be liked by everybody, and that leads to nothing but trouble.” His defenders tend to see it that way, too. As longtime affordable housing advocate Calvin Welch says, “You get the most flak when you’re over the target.”

Local multimillionaire investor Warren Hellman doesn’t find Peskin hard to work with, “provided you don’t mind getting your ass chewed out once in a while.” And Heller commends Peskin’s point-blank approach. He says he pitched a proposal to Peskin recently, and “he gave us the straight story about what we would and would not be able to do. That’s a good thing.”

Still, many who are critical of Peskin wouldn’t comment for this story: he is a powerful guy, and no one who has to deal with him regularly wants to cross him without a very good reason. “People are intimidated by him,” says Frank O’Neill, a former port commissioner.

Indeed, many people told me that Peskin has a volcanic temper. Those who have clashed with him tell stories of curse-filled dressings-down, public and private. When I ask him about his temper, he says, “I don’t have a violent temper, but, yeah, I can get angry. I’m a real human being.”

Keith Wilson, a residential developer who fought with Peskin and the Hill Dwellers in the 1990s over a house remodel and lost, accuses Peskin of monkeywrenching his building permit, delaying the project for years and costing him an extra million dollars. A few years ago, they ran into each other at a neighborhood meeting. Wilson says Peskin got right in his face, yelling, “You’re a fucking asshole!” As Wilson tells it, the two almost traded punches. Peskin’s memory of the event? “He started in with me, and I told him where he could stick it. So he hates me and life goes on.”

His tangles with former mayor Willie Brown also make for good watercooler talk. One of their more famous pissing matches, the culmination of years of sniping, occurred in 2003. The story, in short, goes like this: Brown, speaking at a business forum, called Peskin antibusiness. Later, Peskin encountered the mayor outside City Hall. Tough words were exchanged. Brown’s sign-off, later immortalized in a Matier & Ross column: “You don’t know me, motherfucker, you don’t know what a killer I am!” Peskin says they get along fine now; Brown won’t comment. You get the sense, though, that they view each other with a grudging respect, the way two gladiators might.

If you believe the gossip, Peskin’s relationship with the current mayor is no less fraught. Newsom has made it clear that he finds the Board of Supervisors’ influence over the planning process a “terrible thing.” Officially, though, both parties are playing nice. Peskin gives Newsom credit for not being in anyone’s pocket. “In the scheme of what you can get in elected officials, I’d be proud to send Gavin Newsom to Sacramento or Washington,” he says. But he can’t resist adding, “If I had an 80 percent approval rating, my God, I’d get some shit done. I’d use that capital, knock that approval down to 55.”


It’s not surprising that Peskin is such a polarizing figure. His leading role in the dot-com-era planning wars combined with his take-no-prisoners personality guaranteed that he would be a lightning rod. Citywide, in a David Binder Research poll last year, a substantial 21 percent of respondents rated Peskin unfavorably, versus 32 percent favorably.

It’s easy to see why his supporters love him: he speaks of the city as sacred ground, of the skyline as sacrament, along with the neighborhood park, the corner market. It’s equally easy to understand the hatred of his opponents: after helping dismantle the old regime, he is trying, bit by bit, to create a new one, and he’s stepped on plenty of toes along the way. At bottom, it’s a fight for the soul of the city, a struggle over who gets to chart our future. Peskin is right at the center of it.

As of press time, Peskin is expected to get the backing of the other members of the Board of Supervisors to continue on as president (they vote in January 2007). Regardless of his political future beyond that, Peskin vows, “I’ll always be an activist of some stripe, whether it’s with an official title or not.” He is cagey about his postboard plans; any further office, he says, would have to be local. “I see myself living here the rest of my life,” he says.

When we talk about his favorite parts of town, it’s invariably the low-slung, historic neighborhoods—the Missions and Chinatowns—that really get Peskin going. As much as he touts the towering developments rising in the gleaming southern waterfront neighborhoods, projects that he and the board have helped birth, he just can’t bring himself to love them the way he does the older, more established places. No matter how many dramatic projects come across his desk, Peskin is at heart a low-rise guy.

Just listen to him wax poetic about his beloved North Beach from a seat outside Caffe Trieste. “To me, this is urban paradise,” he says, gesturing to the crazy quilt of streets behind the café that make up the steep backside of Telegraph Hill. “Three stories of housing above ground-floor retail, building-to-building, historic fabric, sense of community, weird people—this is it. When I think about dying and going to heaven, if I could be reincarnated in North Beach I’d be quite happy.”