Curry Senior Center

Curry Senior Center occupies a city-owned building on Turk Street that the property register still lists under the older name North of Market Senior Services. It is run by a nonprofit — the health department's contractor list names "North of Market Senior Services DBA Curry Senior Center" — and it appears in the city's records at the seam where a public health system meets an outside operator. The Health Commission approved a retroactive renewal contract with the centre for $510,188 to provide substance abuse treatment and mental health services across 2004-05, and the department's own network map lists it among the primary care health centres alongside Castro-Mission, Chinatown and Maxine Hall. Its staff speak for the system in public: a public health nurse based at Curry told the Health Commission that without public health nurses there would be more emergency services, more hospitalisation and more institutionalisation. The building doubles as civic meeting space — the Mental Health Services Act advisory committee held community forums here, and the centre's own board publishes its meeting schedule under the Sunshine Ordinance. The city marked World TB Day here in 2011, on the birth centenary of Francis J. Curry, San Francisco's tuberculosis pioneer and the centre's namesake.