During his long career in the conventional world of banking, industry and real estate development, Mr. Furst volunteered to support a wide variety of civic organizations and may well have set a record for the number of state, county and municipal agencies on which he served.

But another aspect of his life began in 1975 when his friend, the late William K. Coblentz, a San Francisco attorney, became lawyer to rock music promoter Bill Graham after the San Francisco Police Department refused to grant Graham – in the parlance of an earlier generation – a “dance hall keeper” permit.

Coblentz helped Graham gain his license to operate a concert and dance venue on Fillmore Street, but realized that Graham’s business affairs were chaotic, if not naive, and called on Mr. Furst to instill order in his venture.

“Who’s Bill Graham?” Mr. Furst recalled asking when Coblentz recruited him. He took on the unpaid job.

Mr. Furst quickly established new accounting procedures, saw to it that the employees cleaning the dance hall were doing their jobs, and when Graham showed him a line of T-shirts emblazoned with the names of the Who and the Grateful Dead, Mr. Furst saw their commercial potential and helped Graham form a separate corporation to market the garments.

“I finally became not just his business consultant, but his personal assistant and his friend, and I remained close to Bill until his untimely death in 1991,” Mr. Furst recalled.

Graham ran the Fillmore Auditorium and Winterland Ballroom, promoting performances of many of rock music’s mainstays of the mid- and late 1960s. He died on Oct. 25, 1991, in a helicopter crash.

The music played in Graham’s auditoriums was never exactly Mr. Furst’s taste. “I had to wear earplugs at the concerts,” he said.

In his more conventional life, Mr. Furst’s list of civic positions seemed endless. They included service with California’s Little Hoover Commission, the state Senate, the California Public Utilities Commission, San Francisco’s Juvenile Court Committee, committees for Contra Costa and Placer counties, the city of El Cerrito, and the Association of Bay Area Governments.

He was also secretary of Gov. Edmund G. Brown’s Business Advisory Council from 1959 to 1966.

Mr. Furst was an officer of the Bank of America for more than 20 years before he retired as senior vice president in 1972. He then became president of Gerson Bakar Associates, a San Francisco property development and management company, serving there until 1975.

In 1992, Mr. Furst became executive vice president of Sony Corp.’s merchandise division, and retired from that job seven years later.

The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley now maintains the Harold Furst Chair in Management Philosophy and Values, and the Harold and Sheldon Furst Endowment Fund supports grant making by the East Bay Community Foundation.

Mr. Furst was born in Kalamazoo, Mich. He graduated with a degree in economics from UC Berkeley in 1939 and earned his master’s degree in business administration there in 1945. He received his doctorate in business economics at Stanford in 1954 while working as an economist at Bank of America’s world headquarters.

He is survived by his wife, Alice Coopersmith Furst; son, Dr. Sheldon Richard Furst of Salt Lake City; stepchildren, Mark Coopersmith of Tiburon, Erik Coopersmith of Hawaii, and Karen Honeywell of Tahoe City; and five grandchildren.

An informal gathering at Mr. Furst’s home in El Cerrito is planned. Donations in his memory may be made to personal charities or to the Harold Furst Student Loan Fund, Berkeley Student Cooperative, 2424 Ridge Road, Berkeley, CA 94709-1296.

E-mail David Perlman at dperlman@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C – 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/03/BA96OE1V2.DTL

She also spends time making sure other people stay out.

“We don’t have open doors, ever. They’re always locked,” said Melchor, whose Gray Area Foundation for the Arts sits at the convergence of the Tenderloin and Mid-Market, two of the city’s most downtrodden neighborhoods. “We must see 100 crimes every week out of these windows, and although the city wants it to change, it hasn’t happened.”

The foundation’s arrival in 2009 was heralded as the start of a trend that would culminate in a unique creative hub along Market Street, one of San Francisco’s busiest thoroughfares, where the wide sidewalks are packed most days with tourists, street performers and employees from the nearby financial district.

Yet the five block stretch of prime real estate known as Mid-Market remains a sea of boarded-up storefronts and “For Lease” signs, and transients are the most visible occupants. The most common crimes in the area are drug deals and muggings, according to San Francisco Police Department data.

But a new crop of potential tenants — Twitter Inc., the American Conservatory Theater and the organizers of the annual Burning Man festival — and a recently announced Mid-Market tax incentive plan are renewing hope that a transformation is finally coming.

“I think the time is now and we’re going to see some bravery,” said Marian Goodell, director of business and communications for Burning Man, which held its first gathering in San Francisco in 1986 and has based its offices there ever since. “I’m really optimistic that some magic is going to happen.”

The tax proposal announced Feb. 7 by Mayor Edwin Lee and two city supervisors is an attempt to solve two pressing problems: the general reluctance to take a chance on Mid-Market and the threatened exodus of Twitter and other prized businesses from San Francisco to parts of the Bay area where real-estate costs are significantly lower.

“Keeping companies like Twitter helps us create jobs, boost our local economy and, in this case, can be a catalyst to transform our central Market Street area,” Lee said of the plan, which would offer a six-year payroll tax exemption for companies that relocate to the area. The plan must be approved by the Board of Supervisors.

Jennifer Matz, director of the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, described Twitter as “the big fish” the city hopes to lure with the new incentive, though it would be available to any for-profit business with a payroll above $250,000.

A spokesman for Twitter, which is quickly outgrowing its current headquarters three blocks south of Market Street, declined to comment on the city’s claim that it is considering leasing the massive former San Francisco Furniture Mart. The social networking service currently employs about 350 people, but has said it expects to expand to several thousand over the next five years, Lee said.

With or without Twitter, the positive effects of a Mid-Market tax exemption would ripple throughout the city, said Jim Lazarus, senior vice president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce

“San Francisco remains a very attractive place for people to live, and yet we’re losing jobs,” he said. “This will help bring the kind of employment density into the area that it desperately needs.”

The efforts to bring new blood to Mid-Market also are eliciting praise from groups in the neighboring Tenderloin — home to the city’s highest concentration of parolees but not a single full-service grocery store.

“We need an edge, because right now we just can’t compete with other neighborhoods on an even playing field,” said Randy Shaw, executive director of the nonprofit Tenderloin Housing Clinic. “Maybe with what’s going on in Mid-Market, businesses will think of moving here.”

Others caution that it’s still too soon to declare a Mid-Market renaissance. And the would-be tenants themselves acknowledge that nothing is set in stone.

The American Conservatory Theater, currently located a block from Union Square, is planning to expand into a $100 million Mid-Market arts complex that would include a 300-seat theater, housing for visiting artists and various other facilities. ACT has found the land — a 200,000-square-foot lot at the corner of Turk and Market streets — but is still seeking the partners and funding it would need to complete the deal.

“Either it’s going to happen or it’s not going to happen in the next six months,” said ACT executive director Ellen Richard.

Burning Man has narrowed its search to three Mid-Market sites, including the historic Warfield Building, but the organization remains uncertain it can afford the move, Goodell said.

In the meantime, Melchor is continuing to talk up the neighborhood’s potential while dealing with the harsh day-to-day realities of being a lonely pioneer.

“We’ve become this beacon in the area, but there’s no one else to help balance out what’s going on all around us,” she said on a recent afternoon, after politely turning away a man who knocked at the door asking for money. “We have a five-year lease. After that, we’ll have to see.”

Article source: http://www.nwfdailynews.com/articles/blighted-37981-real-downtown.html