For the last few years, a mystery has loomed over the Haight-Ashbury: What in the hell is going on at the Red Vic?
The answer, it turns out, is a lot, although you wouldn’t know it from the outside.
For decades, the historic crimson hotel at 1665 Haight St., formally known as the Red Victorian, was owned and operated as a bed-and-breakfast by visual poet Sami Sunchild, the founder of the Peaceful World Foundation, who shared her vision for world peace with hotel visitors from around the globe. Guests came to elevate their consciousness, and to learn about the neighborhood’s countercultural roots at breakfast talks led by Sunchild.
After Sunchild’s death in 2013, the Red Vic operated for a time as part of the Haight Street Commons, a network of nonprofit communal properties. When the pandemic hit, and the nonprofit wanted out of its lease, some remaining tenants attempted a failed bid to fight eviction with socially distant drag shows. The building was sold in 2022, bringing hopes of renewal.
But three years later, the three-story, 20-room hotel has sat in a state of disrepair, an easy target for graffiti and squatters. Water heaters stored on the ground floor and random clutter have been the only things you can make out through the big front windows.
“It used to have a real prominent role in the neighborhood,” said Tia Lombardi, a board member of SF Heritage, an architectural preservation group. “Whoever owns it doesn’t seem to be taking care of things. It needs to be active, something wonderful should happen there.”
Robert Emmons, owner of the nearby San Francisco Mercantile, spoke for many business owners and residents of Haight when he told me, “Everybody’s asking, ‘When is something going to happen with the Red Vic?’”
The owner, or one of them, is Simone Shah. She’s been working behind the scenes to change the Red Vic’s trajectory. In an interview with Gazetteer SF, Shah said she hopes to reopen the Red Vic as a boutique hotel in January. She admits that’s an ambitious goal.
Shah said she wants to preserve some of the hotel’s bohemian roots, while creating a higher-end experience than a bed-and-breakfast. She’s aware that the Red Vic needs a lot of love and shares the neighborhood’s impatience for the hotel’s next chapter.
“I know that all the neighbors hate us,” Shah told Gazetteer SF, referring to the hotel’s stalled renovation. “I hope some day they’ll see the whites of my eyes, and see that I’m not an asshole.”
Shah, 47, lives in Malibu, and owns the Burlington Hotel in Westlake, an “unexpected cash cow.” She has a portfolio of other properties in Southern California. The Red Vic is her first investment in the Bay Area.
The Red Vic’s reopening, she said, has been delayed by a fight she’s having with her longtime real estate partner, Alexander Rivkin, who sued her last year. In his complaint, Rivkin, whose aesthetics clinic in Beverly Hills advertises a “non-surgical nose job,” claims that Shah diverted revenue from their partnership, treating it as her “personal piggy bank” to buy and operate her own properties.
“I’ve never stolen from anyone in my life,” Shah told me, calling the lawsuit “sad and unnecessary.” The litigation has spooked potential investors in the Red Vic project, Shah said, and cost her more than $500,000 in legal fees, money that was earmarked for the hotel’s renovation. As recently as last week, Shah and Rivkin met for settlement negotiations that both said didn’t produce an agreement. As the fight drags on, Shah is pushing forward with construction. Recent visits to the Red Vic reveal contractors busy at work.
Under Shah’s redesign, each room will have its own bathroom. (Previously, some guests shared showers and toilets.) Shah plans to maintain some of the names and themes that Sunchild used for certain rooms: Summer of Love, Flower Child, and Peace. She plans to replace others with her own ideas: China Cat Sunflower and Janis, based on a rumor that Joplin once stayed at the Red Vic. A new psychedelic room, Alice, will feature a pink and purple checkered design, a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.
“Each of them, down to the tile, was designed to match their specific theme,” Shah told me. While the colors are brighter than what you might find at a Four Seasons, she insisted that the quality of the building materials exceeds what you’d find at the luxury hotel. The rooms, which remain small, will go for between $200 and $300 a night, more expensive than the bed and breakfast was, Shah said, but still cheaper than the nearby Stanyan Park Hotel. She hasn’t decided yet what she will do with the ground floor.
The renovation got off to an inauspicious start when a contractor Shah hired began demolition work without proper permits, a move that quickly drew fire, in the form of complaints to the city by neighbors and local business owners.
Shah explained that the contractor went rogue on her by doing work that was outside her plan, and that she had no intention of doing unpermitted work. “I know this sounds like a rookie mistake, but I just literally didn’t know we didn’t have the permit,” she said. “This isn’t work that you can hide, right? We could have never gotten away with that.” After the error, Shah hired a local permit and building codes consultant.
“It’s a neighborhood where there’s a lot of eyes on the street, and I think there were probably three complaints issued to the Planning Department about the lack of permits within 24 hours,” said Christin Evans, co-owner of The Booksmith and The Alembic, both about one block from the Red Vic. “Different parties were concerned and reported it immediately.”
Evans is also a board member of the Haight-Ashbury Merchants Association, and in that role has kept tabs on storefront vacancies in a zone that includes Haight Street and one block on either side of it, from Stanyan to Central Streets. Before the pandemic, the district reported 21 vacancies out of 150 storefronts. At the peak of the pandemic, that number rose to 32 vacancies. Since the enforcement of the city’s storefront vacancy tax, the number has dropped to 14 out of 150, Evans said. She had observed construction at the Red Vic in fits and starts, and said she’s encouraged by a recent resumption of building activity.
Built in 1904, the building was first known as the Jefferson Hotel. In 1967, amidst the flower power of the neighborhood, it became the Jeffrey Haight, a crash pad for hippies. Sunchild bought it in 1977, painted the building the color it remains today, and named it the Red Victorian. But the Red Vic is not in fact a Victorian, according to Woody LaBounty, President of SF Heritage, who notes that it’s an Edwardian.
LaBounty worked for Sunchild occasionally as a performer at street fairs. He offered his juggling skills and other performance ideas, but she had specific directorial instructions. LaBounty wore garish costumes, and Sunchild confined his performances to simply pointing at the hotel. If somebody asked what he was pointing at, he was told to say Red Vic, that it was a bed and breakfast, and nothing else.
“Sunny was an odd person,” LaBounty said, calling Sunchild by her nickname. “I don’t know if she had the gift of relating to everybody in a sort of friendly way. She was just her own sort of dynamic that you either got, or you didn’t. You liked her or you didn’t.
Evans also knew Sunchild, and attended her world peace breakfast talks at the ground floor Peace Cafe. Evans described Sunchild as colorful, both in character and dress, and with a flair for performance. Sunchild’s granddaughter, Tamara Randall, has described the Red Vic as Sunchild’s castle, and her grandmother as the queen living on the third floor.
“She was warm, would give people hugs, and talk about things in a powerful way,” Evans said. If Sunchild’s vision was rooted in leftist ideals, the subjects and talks remained relevant to current events and politics, Evans said.
Sunchild’s legacy lives on. The Peaceful World Foundation, the Petaluma-based nonprofit she founded, continues to fund Bay Area organizations. In 2023, it contributed more than $100,000 to various programs and foundations, including to Intermusic SF for its Peace Through Music Project, and the Tides Center’s Youth Art Exchange, tax filings show.
The foundation also loaned Shah $3 million of the $3.8 million she paid for the Red Vic when she bought it in 2022. After Shah’s company stopped making payments on the loan, Peaceful World sued her last year and moved to foreclose on the hotel. Shah got caught up on the payments and averted foreclosure. (Representatives for the Peaceful World Foundation didn’t respond to requests for comment.)
In Los Angeles, Shah has attracted negative media attention as a landlord. In a 2021 article on Knock LA, a publication supported by the progressive organization Ground Game L.A, writer Lisa Kwon reported that Shah had acquired rent-controlled residential units and illegally hosted Airbnb customers in them. Shah sued Kwon for defamation, prompting a follow-up story by USC’s Annenberg Media, about how the lawsuit required the reporter to undertake a crowdfunding campaign to cover her legal costs.
When I asked her about the lawsuit, Shah denied the article’s claims. “There’s nothing in that article that’s factually correct,” she said. Shah said she couldn’t convert rent-controlled units to Airbnb properties if she wanted to, and that in any case the undertaking wouldn’t be profitable due to the cleaning costs. Then she explained what bothered her most about the stories: that neither the reporters, nor the publications, called to get her side or response.
“Call me first, that’s all I wanted her to learn from it,” said Shah, who holds a masters degree in journalism from Columbia School of Journalism. The lawsuit was settled early last year, the terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed. Kwon declined to comment for this story.
As for the Red Vic, Shah said she’s approaching the opening soon. “We literally just have to hang up some light fixtures, and put in the furniture, which we already have for the most part,” she said. An elevator also needs to be installed, and the build-out of the ground floor will require another $500,000 to $1 million, depending on what it ends up as, she said.
Rivkin, her business partner, makes it sound as if a resolution is within reach, even as he accused Shah of stealing from her.
“The question between us is one of accounting: how to figure out who owes who what,” Rivkin told me. He acknowledged that the fight has been “messy,” but said he never intended to harm the Red Vic or slow Shah’s renovation and opening. “Nobody’s the good guy or the bad guy here,” he told me. “We’re coming to, it seems, an understanding now. It seems like we’re coming to a resolution.”
Rivkin confirmed that the Red Vic is the pair’s first property deal outside of Southern California and that he had no interest in the hotel until Shah brought it to him. “She said, ‘This is a good deal, invest money,’” Rivkin said. “So, you know, this is our relationship.”
Shah told me that if the city lets her open the Red Vic before she installs an elevator, guests could be staying in its rooms soon. A graduate of Stanford, the opening marks something of a return to the Bay Area for Shah, who said in her experience, the complaints of crime and homelessness in San Francisco are overblown.
“I absolutely love the city,” she said. “I haven’t had a bad experience because of anything at the Red Vic. It’s just been, sort of, internal conflict that’s made it not happy.”
