Walk down Cosmo Place on a weekday afternoon and you will find what has been there for years: a gated surface lot behind the old Le Colonial building, ten parking spaces, chain link, the backsides of six-story apartment buildings pressing in on three sides. No plants. No lights. No sign that for three days last November this exact alley held 350 potted trees and shrubs, thirty yellow Adirondack chairs, a DJ, and a cocktail invented for the occasion. Cosmo Court came and went. The parking lot stayed a parking lot.
That gap between what showed up for a weekend and what remains on an ordinary Tuesday is the real story here, and it says something about how open space actually gets decided in a neighborhood like this one. The short version: Lower Nob Hill's decade-long push for a park did not stall because the city said no. It stalled because a private buyer closed faster than Recreation and Park could finish its paperwork, and now the neighborhood's only taste of a town square depends on the goodwill of the bar owners who ended up controlling the block.
The push for green space in this pocket of the city is not new. It traces back to 2013, when then-Supervisor Jane Kim first raised the issue of open space in the Lower Nob Hill and Upper Tenderloin area. The Lower Nob Hill Neighborhood Alliance, the resident group now leading the charge, formed in December 2021 specifically to organize around issues like this one.
The math explains the urgency. Alliance board member Peter Gallotta defines Lower Nob Hill as the blocks between Geary and Pine to the south and north, and Mason and Larkin to the east and west, a dense residential grid he says has no parks to speak of. The nearest options sit outside those boundaries entirely: Huntington Park straight uphill at the top of Nob Hill, or Father Alfred E. Boeddeker Park straight downhill in the Tenderloin. Neither is a walk a senior or a parent with a stroller makes casually through a neighborhood this steep.
In late 2024, a small surface lot at 50 Cosmo Place came on the market. The Alliance saw an opening. Asking price started at $3.2 million and was later reduced to $2.2 million. San Francisco Recreation and Park Department staff identified the site as a potential acquisition and began environmental due diligence, according to reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle. District 3 Supervisor Danny Sauter called it "a fleeting moment for acquisition of a space like this" and said it would be a priority in his transition meetings with the department and the mayor's office.
The deal never closed. The lot sold to a private buyer while the city was still working through its process, and the Alliance's first choice for a public park was gone.
The building next door tells the other half of the story. At 20 Cosmo Place sits the roughly 16,300-square-foot structure that housed Trader Vic's from 1950 to 1994 and then Le Colonial for 26 years, until it closed in 2024. That building sold in April 2025 for $3.7 million, about $231 per square foot, to an entity called Calle 24 LLC, tied to Juan Loredo and Jose Natividad, the operators of the nearby cocktail bar Persona and two Burlingame bars, Barrelhouse and Vinyl Room.
| 50 Cosmo Place (parking lot) | 20 Cosmo Place (building) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Roughly 8,000 sq ft surface lot | Roughly 16,300 sq ft two-story building |
| Price | Reduced from $3.2M to $2.2M ask | Sold for $3.7M, about $231/sq ft |
| Buyer | Private buyer, city plan fell through | Calle 24 LLC (Loredo and Natividad) |
| Status by mid-2026 | Alliance eyeing a smaller fallback lot | Bar and business buildout in progress |
Two adjacent properties on the same short alley, one that the city wanted and lost, one that a hospitality operator bought outright. The buyer who ended up controlling the parking lot next to his own new building was not the Recreation and Park Department. It was the person who now decides whether Lower Nob Hill gets any outdoor gathering space at all.
With the acquisition off the table, Sauter pitched something smaller: a temporary demonstration of what the space could be, modeled on a similar pilot he had seen work in Cole Valley. The nonprofit Civic Joy Fund, led by executive director Luke Spray, partnered with the Alliance to build it out.
For three days, November 5 through 7, 2025, Cosmo Place became Cosmo Court. What arrived by truck:
Natividad, who owned the adjacent parking lot along with the vacant restaurant building, opened the old Le Colonial lobby for a cash bar during the event. About 100 people came out despite the threat of rain.
Nick Neumann, who has lived his entire life in an apartment overlooking the lot, walked through the back gate to see it for himself. "We don't have a place where we can hang out outside," he said. "It's just bars." Rachel Johnson, an architect and Alliance board member who lives nearby on Bush Street, came down from her apartment and described the scene as the first quiet she had felt in a place normally defined by traffic noise.
By Friday afternoon the trucks came back and took it all away.
More than a year after buying the building, Loredo and Natividad are close to finalizing what actually happens at 20 Cosmo Place. According to reporting from the San Francisco Examiner in June 2026, the two want to operate a bar on the second floor alongside one or two other businesses. They are also weighing a cafe or gathering space for the outdoor lot, though Loredo has been clear that a repeat of Cosmo Court would not be permanent.
Loredo has framed the project as an extension of what came before rather than a break from it. "We want to continue that legacy," he told the Examiner. "We want the next business to be there, 25, 40 years as well." Natividad has echoed the same sentiment about the lot itself: "It's important as a business to give back to the community, open up our doors. Well, our parking lot."
As of that June reporting, permits had not yet been filed. The timeline is still theirs to set.
The Alliance has not given up on a permanent public space. With the larger Cosmo Place lot gone to a private buyer, the fallback discussed as of the November pop-up is a smaller lot closer to Taylor Street, and getting it would still require a deal with Natividad. A separate, longer-running effort targets a lot at 989 Post Street, where Rec and Park agreed a couple of years ago to study feasibility, though that process has been slowed by environmental mitigation work.
None of this changes what exists today. Anyone who wants to sit outside in this stretch of the neighborhood still walks uphill to Huntington Park or downhill to Boeddeker Park. Whatever comes next at Cosmo Place, permanent or occasional, will be set by the calendar of two bar owners finishing out a commercial buildout, not by a public parks timeline. That is worth knowing before you plan your next Thursday evening around it, and worth watching if you want to see how a fourteen-block neighborhood's only real shot at open space gets decided one closing date at a time.
If you own a building near Cosmo Place, on Post, or anywhere else in Lower Nob Hill and want to understand how a still-forming amenity like this one factors into how your property reads to buyers, the Bonn Webb Team offers a complimentary, confidential property valuation.
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