Cort, a longtime Mission landlord with several properties across the neighborhood, died Monday. She was 82 years old.
Vera Cort walks by one of the pillars at 1890 Bryant in 2006. She converted the property into a space for artists to rent. Photo by Charles Stinson.
“She always encouraged me to be better. She told me that if I took classes and learned English, she would give me a raise,” said Gabriel Alvarez, a construction worker from Mexico who worked with Cort for 23 years and is working at the Cine Latino building. “She invited us to her home, and we would sit right next to her at her table.”
Cort’s renovation of Cine Latino did not go as smoothly. The 111-year-old theater is just finalizing its facade after years of being vacant and a troubled history of renovation, in which the city said in 2011 that Cort had overstepped what permits allowed in demolishing the front of the building. Still, for architect Charles Hemminger, who worked with Cort for 25 years, the landlord was a unique businesswoman, unlike any developer he had ever met. Hemminger even remembers one of Cort’s employees living at her home for a couple of months because the employee couldn’t find housing.
One of those artists at 1890 Bryan is Jeremy Sutton, who met Vera in 2005, when the building had not yet been converted to an artist space. He remembered Vera being open to whatever he needed to turn the space into the art studio he envisioned. Alvarez, the construction worker at Cine Latino, was hesitant to talk about Cort the day after her death: He felt he would cry remembering what the landlord had done for him and his family.
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