SAN FRANCISCO – For those who love the Glen Park library, who find themselves popping into the Canyon Market to grab dinner, who enjoy a stroll along the Glen Park Greenway or who take their children to play at the park without worrying about a parking ticket – you have Michael Rice to thank.
He of course didn’t do them on his own – it truly takes a village – but without Michael Frank Rice, Glen Park would be a very different and less vibrant place. So take a moment to remember the legacy of this tireless fighter for our neighborhood and our city.
Michael, 79, died on May 31 in Portland, Oregon after a brief struggle against pancreatic cancer that had been discovered too late to fight. He is survived by his beloved wife of 49 years, Jane, his two sons Joel and wife Morgan Ogilvie in Franklin, Tennessee; and Nathan and wife Blanca Coma and their children, Aspen and Arvo in Portland.
Michael was born in France, lived in New York and San Francisco and moved with Jane to Portland in 2019. But his heart was in Glen Park.
His father James, a social worker, was sent overseas just after the end of World War II to help resettle Jewish Holocaust survivors in Austria. James returned to Europe with his wife, Paula, and young son, Bill, on condition they would have a refrigerator and a second baby. Michael was born in Paris in 1947.
“I assume she got the refrigerator,” Michael always joked.
The family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, where his father continued his work for the Joint Distribution Committee (The JDC) and then to Frankfurt, Germany in 1954, their last year in Europe. Until the move to Germany, Michael had been fully bilingual in French and English. As soon as they crossed the border into Germany, he stopped speaking French. Surrounded by American GIs, he would only speak English.
In 1955 the family moved back to the United States, when his father became the head of the HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), settling in Eastchester, New York, just north of the city.
Michael was a reader from an early age. One of Michael’s first memories of being in America was that he could eat dinner in front of TV. “Then he realized it’s much better to read a book, because if you want a snack, you don’t lose your place,” Jane said.
Michael followed his brother to Bowdoin College in Maine. He began his studies in chemistry but by his third year, he knew his true interests lay elsewhere. He became of the editor in chief of the Bowdoin Orient, the school newspaper (1967-68) and ensured that the paper take up the issue of the Viet Nam War. Michael graduated from Bowdoin in Art History which served as a bridge to his Urban Planning graduate work at the University of Michigan.
Michael loved cities, the bigger the better. “He liked nothing better than figuring out a new public transportation system,” Jane said.
In 1972, Michael, unhappy working in Providence, Rhode Island, packed everything into his yellow Toyota Corolla and drove cross country to San Francisco where his cousin Lin had already moved.
Love and marriage
Meanwhile, Jane was getting a master’s degree at San Franisco State University in teaching English as a second language. Originally from Santa Monica, as soon as she finished at UCLA she “high-tailed it up to San Francisco in my VW bug,” she said. Michael and Jane met in 1974.
The couple moved in together that year and were married in 1977 at City Hall, followed by a do-it-yourself party in Golden Gate Park. Son Joel came in 1978, followed by Nathan in 1980.
Impacting the Environment
Michael had a skill for writing and editing, an ability that stood him in good stead as California had enacted requirements for Environmental Impact Reports under the California Environmental Quality Act of 1970.
Almost every project required an EIR. In their draft forms, these reports could range from 100 to as many as 500 pages, with technical appendices, maps and diagrams. The final report for the development of Mission Bay was a thousand pages.
Michael’s specialty was managing the writing and editing of the volumes of environmental impact reports that defined many projects that make San Francisco what it is today.
“He did the ballpark, he did hospital studies. He did the big renovation on the De Young Museum. He did the Academy of Sciences. He did the garage at Golden Gate Park – that caused him many sleepless nights because it was so contentious,” Jane said.
Coming to Glen Park
Jane and Michael started married life in a small back apartment at 70 Liberty Street in the Castro. They then moved to their first house at 18 Fair Avenue in Bernal Heights.
Needing more space, in 1986 they found 400 Sussex Street, an iconic corner house adjoining Glen Canyon Park, and a structure that was then unreinforced brick.
It was only a matter of time before someone realized that a powerhouse had moved to the neighborhood. That person was Zoanne Nordstrom, one of the original Gum Tree Girls.
The Glen Park Association, which Nordstrom was president of at the time, held a debate about the proposed rebuilding of the De Young Museum, which had been critically damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Michael signed up to speak.
Nordstrom immediately realized how knowledgeable he was and asked him to join the Glen Park Association. She then told him he’d be perfect as the next GPA president.
He was to hold that position for 12 years, through some of the most contentious, and important, developments in the neighborhood’s history.
We almost didn’t get the library – Michael made sure we did
For decades, the lot where the Canyon Market now stands had been home to a thriving grocery stored named the Diamond Supermarket. An important community hub, it burned down on Nov. 20, 1998.
The cinder-strewn lot stood empty for six years while fights went on over what should go there, how much parking it should include, whether it was too tall and if it should be allowed.
The proposal was to build a supermarket on the bottom, a library on the second floor to give a permanent home to the Glen Park Branch (then in the tiny spot Bird & Beckett Books and Records now occupies) and add 15 units of housing on Wilder Street.
The project was blocked at every turn and endlessly wrangled over by several people making use of the city’s byzantine planning process to obstruct what neighbors who attended Glen Park Association meetings at the time overwhelmingly wanted.
The main excuse was that the Diamond Super’s tiny adjacent parking lot would be lost. In the fall of 2001 flyers decried a “parking nightmare” and petitions circulated calling for the project to be downsized and doctored images appeared on light poles in the neighborhood, making it seem as if the project was much taller than the buildings across the street.
Who was behind the years-long fight to block the market-library-housing project, or what their real motivations were, was never made clear. But what is clear is that one big reason the project was finally built was the Michael fought long and hard for it.
“It was through his leadership that I came to see you can make a serious commitment to your community but have a really good time doing it,” said Heather World, current Glen Park Association president. “He was knowledgeable, cheerful, kind and a great host.”
Michael read all the lawsuits, all the Environment Impact Reports, all the city documents and went to the meetings, never letting the efforts of a tiny group of people get in the way of the wider community’s needs and desires.
During all of this he stayed calm, professional, true to the facts and even cheerful even when misinformation and innuendo were rife.
“He struggled with it. People didn’t want anything built there, they wanted a parking lot,” said Jane. “The blowback on the loss of parking was unbelievable. People were upset because they said those condominiums “were so huge and big and ugly.”
Resident Marcia Schneider, who was Chief of Communications and Outreach for the San Francisco Public Library at the time, said her earliest memory of Michael was when, as president of GPA, he helped negotiate a deal for the new Glen Park Library, Canyon Market, and condos.
“As he testified before the Library Commission, he was cool under somewhat stressful (controversial) decisions as it involved closing a parking lot in the village.”
Without Michael’s expertise, perspective and doggedness, it’s not clear that the full project would have been built, and it certainly wouldn’t have been built in its current configuration, with a bustling library, a thriving grocery store and housing.
Ground was finally broken in 2004 and the Canyon Market opened its doors in 2006.
“No matter how contentious a situation was, Michael was always thoughtful, respectful and a gentle leader,” said former District 8 Supervisor Bevan Dufty (2002-2011). “He helped achieve so many things that have made Glen Park one of the very best places to live. This is part of his legacy.”
Michael also kept a sharp eye on what the City was up to. If staffers had listened to him in 2016, tens of thousands of dollars could have been saved, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
“He was also the one to alert SFMTA that the bulb outs they built at Diamond and Bosworth were too wide for buses and fire engines to make turns. If they’d taken his letter seriously, they wouldn’t have had needed to re-pour those concrete corners!” said World.
Michael also tracked the creation of the Glen Park Community Plan, which included a portion about improving the informal greenway, an overgrown, city-owned strip of land between Burnside and Brompton that parallels Bosworth Street.
“He picked up that idea and ran with it,” said Nicholas Dewar, who now directs the Greenway Project volunteers. “As the GPA President, he obtained the Glen Park Greenway’s initial grant funding from the Morris and Alma Schapiro Fund in 2014, and contracted the landscape architects Surfacedesign to conduct a series of community design workshops in the Glen Canyon Park Rec Center during 2015.”
Today the three-block greenway is a lushly planted green path that makes up part of Glen Park’s portion of the City’s Crosstown Trail.
Finally, anyone taking their child to Glen Canyon Park to play should know Michael is the reason you’re not always looking at your watch, wondering if you’ll get a $108 parking ticket waiting on your car.
“He negotiated for longer parking near Glen Canyon,” said resident Marcia Schneider. “The City wanted short term parking (two hours) but he worked to convince then-Supervisor Bevan Dufty of the need for families to be able to park for longer to make use of the playground and recreation center.”
Preserving history
Michael also helped preserve an important part of our neighborhood’s history. In 2014, he emailed Evelyn Rose, founder of the Glen Park Neighborhoods History Project. He told her he’d been reorganizing his garage and had come across boxes of vintage issues of the Glen Park News and its predecessor, the Glen Park Perspective.
“He personally hauled those boxes from his house at Sussex and Elk around the corner and down the hill,” he told the Glen Park News. “Dating back to the mid-1970s, the issues held a treasure trove of information about the history of Glen Park!”
At about that same time, the San Francisco Department of Memory and Shaping San Francisco were launching a citywide effort to digitize San Francisco’s neighborhood newspapers at the Internet Archive. “Because of Michael’s timely delivery, the Glen Park News and Perspective became some of the earliest available San Francisco neighborhood newspapers available online. The collection of digitized San Francisco Neighborhood newspapers are here.
A move to Portland
Michael and Jane thought they’d spend the rest of their lives in San Francisco. But then their son Nathan and his wife Blanca came to them in 2013 to tell them they were moving their family to Portland, Oregon because they couldn’t afford San Francisco.
“I thought my heart was going to get ripped out of my chest because I missed my grandchild so much,” said Jane. The couple went up to Portland every three months to stay connected.
Then one spring day in 2018 they were visiting friends in the City of Roses. “It was a beautiful May day, it was warm, we didn’t have our jackets on there was no fog, the days were getting longer. The flowers were everywhere. We looked at each other and said, ‘You know, it’s pretty nice up here.’”
The next year they made their move, living in the heart of the city’s downtown, near a streetcar and within walking distance of Powell’s Bookstore.
And, of course, Michael immediately got involved in architectural historic preservation, fighting to ensure that some of the older buildings in Portland weren’t torn down. The Rices also became active in advocacy for immigration and refugee rights, helping to assist an Afghan family who came to the U.S. in 2022.
A quick end
Michael had no idea he had advanced pancreatic cancer until April 9th, when he had a bout of what he thought was severe indigestion and got sent home from the ER with “nothing threatening.” But the next morning the higher ups reviewed the CT-scan and informed him he had a mass on his pancreas.
Michael stayed focused on the world, and Glen Park, until the end. When Carolyn Deacy saw Michael and Jane in April, “he was very excited about the housing proposal for Kern Street.”
For seven and a half weeks he was relatively pain free. “He lived until the end,” Jane said. “He cherished contact with family and friends. Conversation always gave him a boost. He kept reading his beloved New York Times print edition up until the end,” Jane said.
Michael, on hospice care, died in their living room, surrounded by family.
If friends would like to donate in honor of Michael, Jane suggests either the Glen Park Association, the Jewish Community Library of San Francisco or Congregation Sha’ar Zahav.