workshop window "A studio/workshop in a hotel lobby? That sounds unlikely," Caydance said to Jack. "But SOMA -- South of Market -- was home to workers' hotels and artists' studios for many years, before the arrival of the Moscone Center and the resulting displacement that emerged from so-called urban renewal. And now, there is the forthcoming Yerba Buena Gardens and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's recent announcement of their plans to move to SOMA."

"What we are looking at here," Jack said, "is an abandoned studio that was walled up long ago. Because its entrance from the hotel lobby was boarded up and wallpapered over, for many years, in the lobby there was no evidence of this studio’s existence. It was discovered when an architect, a junior partner in the firm hired to renovate the hotel, saw the space labeled 'Studio/Workshop' on the blueprint that now sits on your studio table. She bushwacked through a garden of overgrown flowering bushes until she arrived at a large, dusty window.

arrow "Looking in, the first thing she saw was a dark wooden chair, set in front of an artist's easel."