>> thank you all for coming today. what is today. it's may 19, third thursdays we always do a department building inspection. brown bag. subjects brought up by you and people that come and that we

think we can help provide the information. today we are doing some thin we've done twice before. learning the history of your building. it's a popular topic in terms of doing something in a building in san francisco as far as adding a unit or selling your building that's useful to know when the building was built and how it was legally or otherwise altered without or with permits so we have with us today three people. just scratching the surface of the available resources in san francisco about persons who know about historical buildings and jeremy paul permit consul stapt that does a lot of work trying to help people try and solve permit issues, many of which relate to learning the

legal issues of their building and sorting out the records and, the survey coordinator for the planning department and historic research surveying is becoming more and more important and just recently we got a substantial cash settlement from a problem that took place at the moratorium that will be surveying and i don't think that's going through the planning department but the survey resources are so important and that's the settlement of a lawsuit is let's do more surveying. alan, right side is records management, arad yen cussad yen

manager of records the department of building commission ran out of space so we moved into offices next door as well so room 303 has files and files of microfiche, cards that have been here since after the 1906 earthquake. the regards prior to that were mostly destroyed in the fire following the earthquake. i just got a call from someone from berkley with millions of pages of copies of plans of san francisco buildings. millions of sheets that somehow got rescued in the 1906 earthquake. part of what we're doing in the building and planning department is how to assemble the records and your about to

see they're not in one place. the biggest lesson you'll find is your challenge is to go to all of these agencies and get a set of records for your building. right now your assembling a program to do a single records management program to dial up on the computer your address and get the historical data. right now we can do that for a very short timeframe so if you go to,sfgov dot org. the cities website you can go to the beldings department link, hi alice, and go to permits. it says check on-line permit status and it's a permit tracking function and you can enter your address and i think all the permits since the mid 80's now will come up with

their disposition and what happens, who reviewed them and all of that. that's the first step. that's as we were rushing headlong into the 90's and we're trying to move into the next decade and right now negotiating some vendor to scan these and put them all underseparate addresses. okay where do we go from here. >> right now you can do that yes. >> but it's not on going? >> we're going to increase it. we've initiated that about three to five months back. if you have a permit in for review you can check the status and see who has it and who is the next plan station and if it's prepared for issuing and you feel free to jump in. >> what's on-line is the same we have in our lobby the permit

tracking system. applications from about mid 80's to whatevers today issued and that's information you get. it's not the actual copies of documents but the computer indexing the central department does when they accept permits. from the same link at,sfgov, you can get to thesf viewer program that can give you assessors information about what the asses or knows and also links to map's and ariel photos which can be useful in various stages. you know i think in order to talk about these records that we're launching into, i think it's a good idea to put into perspective why we look at our

records. this is a good thing for me to go off on. that, speaking in the residential field especially, because that's where i do most of my work. the way the building department and planning departments view changes that you might propose, including legalization of existing features you take for granted as existing is all documenting how it got to be the way it is. it's important to think about these building records as being a record of actions, not necessarily of things. so, quite often the best place to start is when did the building get built and what was it when it was built? how large was it, what was it's function and different uses there? once you established

it's original use and original configuration, then you have a marker by which to track changes through the history of the building and that's where you'll find yourself going through many of the different resources that the chief inspector has laid out that we'll talk about today. >> i'm a very product oriented person. one reason i like being a building inspector unlike planning looking in the future, you look at a plan, approve it and the thing getsibility. i like things in discreet little bits. my recommendation for that concept of myself is everybody for their house should have a notebook and in this, you should start to insert the records for your building. keep them all in one place in those acid free slip cases and that

way you have a product and you can begin chronologically. when i upgrade my house i felt an electrical permit in the wall. i slid it in there it's kind of yellow, but it's useful if i ever have to say yes this work was done legally in 1932. the city does not retape that. so we want to keep hard copy. forget the electronic stuff. >> can we get those on-line? >> map's are available on-line through subscription by various libraries through the sand born map company. the san francisco library for a period of one year had a trial subscription and the use did

not justify the cost so they suspended and the public demand to return that may occur again. >> what is sand born. >> the short answer is, no. sand born was a mapping company that was part of a fire insurance program that went around cities all over the united states and maybe beyond and actually, physically, mapped by hand every building, hold that up for me -- every building and every out building and set of stairs and updated these map's on an annual basis walking around the city and unfortunately someone had the mistakes of canceling the subscription ten or twelve years back but we have these historical map's and their

fantastic in many ways. they don't give you a full history of the building but at the snapshot, i think this was in the 40s. you can look that building and actually see, if you look carefully, you can see the number of floors. two floors with an addition in the back and a bunch of an abbreviationses and the big key in front of the thing and the one with the little stairs. so how is that important to you. san francisco has amendment to the code that says if you have a stairs and a deck on your back porch and you want to replace them you can replace them in their original configuration if they were properlyibility in the first place. how can you prove they were? in many cases that's hard to prove. but here it is this shows exactly where the shaping

configuration of the stairs is. so we have a set of the most current inborn or sand born map's behind the planning department counter that will be happy to make or let you look at them and make copies of them there's a free copy machine. i've seen the old ones. not in the last year or two, do you know where they are? >> the series four books are on the sixth floor of the san francisco public library and early series are micro film also from the library. if you belong to a library in another jurisdiction like san jose or oakland they might have subscriptions for their area and that might extend -- they have maybe all california map's. >> do you know where the ariel

services are and where. >> the planning department has three that are as of yet unconserved. >> what does that mean. >> we have not had the time or resources to digitize them. they're very large. more than this book here. they're about 32 inches square and cover the whole city in 1948 to 1950, somewhere in the mid 50s or 60's. >> to go on the resources that are available to us there's aerial photography that goes back to the -- actually pre first world war and they're amazing and held by pacific ariel survey off,,hagen burger road by the airport. what they did in the early era

is they had a large format cameras that they went with the originals over the city and did long exposure photos with very high resolution lenses so when you want to find something in the archives, they'll give you aqua drant go to and a loop and you can't see much resolution but they will blow it up for you and the resolution will be so high you will be able to determine the make of many of the autos you see on the street. in the teens and 20s. >> so let's go back to learning history of your building to find out when was your buildingibility and who built it. what do you think moses? >> for the newer buildings i

believe their data base comes from building permit records. >> how do people access that. >> sfgov dot org. you're going to tell he is a historicle person. for newer buildings after the 06 earthquake. you mean the 89? >> one of the greatest faults with the assessors data base is they make up date for builds that pre existing 1906. their records are not fully accurate for buildings after that but i think their 90 percent correct for after 06 so if there was building that was surviving when i started shop again in later 06 they said it was in the 1900's.

could be from 1850s but they said 1900. so that's kind of how you know it's pre 06 and that's all you can do. >> power of bureaucrat. >> this is a remarkable thing the assessors records. first of all you can't get a copy of this unless your the owner or the owners agent. but it's remarkable because there were field inspections done of almost every building in san francisco and it contains photographs of those buildings and it's a terrific, counted sinks and rooms and bathrooms. a tremendous resource. in addition to finding out from the assessors recores probably the place i would start is an original permit building