Brooks Hall

Brooks Hall is the exhibition space built in 1958 beneath Civic Center Plaza, with about 100,000 net square feet of floor — a figure the 1978 Yerba Buena Center environmental report uses when arguing over San Francisco's share of the national convention market. It has spent decades being reconsidered. The Planning Department's 1987 Civic Center development programme recommended retaining Brooks Hall as a convention facility, but reconfiguring its ramp and truck staging area, which stood in the way of turning Fulton Street between Hyde and Larkin into a pedestrian mall linking the new Asian Art Museum to the new Main Library. Then the library itself looked at it: the post-occupancy evaluation of the new Main Library, carried out in 1999 and 2000, devotes a section to the potential uses of Brooks Hall and how it might supplement the library's functions, and prices a library expansion into the hall at $10,343,204. The November 2000 branch library bond proposal duly carries a $5.00 million line for Brooks Hall within its $128.55 million programme. The city's property register lists it plainly as a subsurface portion at Grove and Larkin, its land area folded into the Civic Center Plaza figure above it — and the most recent permit on the site is for a 640-square-foot café kiosk built on top of the hall's roof.