The Lab Secures New Lease, Plans to Expand Into a 109-Year-Old Ballroom

For the first time in decades, The Lab, San Francisco’s 39-year-old experimental arts space, will have more than a year-long lease. On Tuesday, the nonprofit announced they’d secured a lease with renewal options of up to 12 years from Lakeside Investment Company, which purchased the Redstone Building, formerly known as the San Francisco Labor Temple, in 2021.

After years of uncertainty and precarity, The Lab is doubling down, literally — expanding its footprint by about 70%, from around 3,700 square feet to nearly 6,400 square feet.

Taking on this additional space, which includes the full extent of the 1914 building’s original ballroom, complete with ornate molding and a three-story-high ceiling, helped bring the lease negotiation to a close, says Andrew Smith, The Lab’s newly appointed executive director.

“It turned out to be a pretty substantial negotiating point with the landlords,” he says. The new lease raises The Lab’s rent from under $1 a square foot to $1.92 a square foot over the next two years.

“It’s been a dream of The Lab for the last decade to officially take over this square footage,” Smith says. “They were willing to cut us a deal on rent — it’s obviously still a very expensive increase for us, but a lot cheaper than it could have been.”

A new chapter

Founded in 1984 as a site for interdisciplinary artistic production, The Lab moved into the Redstone Building in 1995. Its reputation for genre-defying and sometimes challenging (yet exciting) programming persists. Upcoming events include Mills After Mills, a three-day festival featuring composers associated with the college’s now-defunct music department. On Nov. 17, the space will play host to a far quieter gathering: a book release from Small Press Traffic.

Taking on the added square footage and rent expenses represents a new chapter for the organization, which was in a very different financial state just a decade ago. (In 2014, The Lab owed $150,000 in back rent and taxes.) But over the past nine years, under the leadership of Smith’s predecessor, Dena Beard, The Lab became solvent without losing its punk ethos, launching a generous commissioning program that provides artists with $25,000–$100,000 and 10 weeks of time and space with “the option to revise every aspect of The Lab’s operations.”

With the new space comes opportunities for larger-capacity shows and more ticket sales, but the existence of the lease itself may also open doors to additional funding.

“When I started at The Lab at the beginning of July,” Smith says, “I started reaching out to a number of past funders, and the question I received was ‘What’s up with the lease?’ Board members had the same question.”

With full use of the combined spaces, Smith envisions returning to the Labor Temple’s original floor plan, reserving what was once the assembly hall for smaller gatherings and exhibitions, and using the ballroom as The Lab’s performance and event space. Smith wants to return the ballroom to its original (humble) splendor — once two layers of drop ceilings, defunct HVAC systems and flooring tiles are removed.

Looking at the remnants of dingy cubicles, it’s hard to imagine the ballroom as it once was: filled, for example, with partygoers for the 1917 Union Printers’ Mutual Aid Society ball.

When the San Francisco Labor Temple opened in 1915, it was home to union offices, medical services and entertainment spaces, and hosted about 30 meetings each week for various organizations. It was a key site during several important moments in Bay Area labor history, including the San Francisco general strike of 1934. Murals organized in 1997 by the Clarion Alley Mural Project adorn the building’s main entrance and lobby, commemorating its years of union activity. The building was landmarked for its association with historic events in 2003.

According to Smith, the ballroom hasn’t been used for its original purpose since 1968, when the Labor Temple Hall Association, facing foreclosure, sold the building, eventually transforming it from a union hall into something more like a community center.

Current and future tenants

“There’s been a continuity of it being a hub for social and economic justice organizing continuing even after the San Francisco Labor Council,” points out Karl Kramer, whose San Francisco Living Wage Coalition occupies an office on the third floor.

Kramer is also a member of the Alliance for Social and Economic Justice, which is actively trying to preserve the former Theatre Rhinoceros on the building’s first floor. “Our hope is to have event space in the building for our member organizations to have cultural performances of music and poetry,” he says, “but also to have it accessible to other community organizations, to help new emerging organizations get started.”

There used to be three theaters in the building, Kramer notes, but two have been stripped bare during ongoing renovations, and now only the Theatre Rhinoceros space remains. Currently, it sits dark, stage lights in a pile, construction materials and paint buckets lining its entrance hallway.

Kramer says they haven’t been able to get an answer from the landlords about their plans for the theater, pointing out that if they intend to convert the building over to tech offices, retaining the theater as a community-focused event space could be a selling point.

“Particularly among a younger generation of people who are in startups, they’re more finely tuned to authenticity,” Kramer says. “They don’t want to be in a building that was cleared of organizations serving low income and immigrant workers. They would want to see themselves as being a part of strengthening the community, not displacing its members.”

Amidst disruptive building upgrades and unresponsive landlords, news of The Lab’s lease is heartening. “It’s a very good sign,” Kramer says. ”And we are just asking for the same thing that The Lab was able to accomplish.”

The Lab can now begin to look forward from the vantage point of firm footing. “So many things have been on hold and now I can really charge forward on this stuff,” Smith says. “It’s such a relief.”