Last Friday, a group of about 60 writers, artists, Telegraph Hill residents and community activists gathered in a North Beach art gallery to hear seven poets wax lyrical about that oh-so-San Francisco landmark, Coit Tower — and protest a proposed plan by city officials to open the top floor for private parties.

Lincoln Bergman, a San Francisco poet, captured the fervor of the crowd with his verse in praise of the New Deal-era artwork inside the tower:

The beautiful murals that meet us,

In the tower some teens call Coit-us,

We must make agitation

To fund preservation

Unified, no one can defeat us!

The event was “a classic North Beach happening,” said Jon Golinger, president of the association Telegraph Hill Dwellers and the leader of the Protect Coit Tower effort, which is a reaction to what some residents say is a disturbing trend toward public space being commercialized.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Over the past few years, in response to deep budget cuts, the city’s parks department has become increasingly focused on finding ways to raise money from its property holdings. Many of those efforts have led to neighborhood skirmishes.

“Privatization is bad,” said John Rinaldi, an author and activist known as Chicken John, who led an effort to keep food trucks out of Dolores Park last year. “Our park system is not supposed to be a revenue generation system.”

Golinger’s group is planning to turn in signatures on Monday to get a measure on the June ballot that would strictly limit “commercial activities and private events at Coit Tower” and also require the Recreation and Park Department to earmark more money from admission fees to maintenance of the tower, which was built in 1933. The city earns around $650,000 a year, largely from the $7 entrance fee.

The department is seeking a new vendor to run both the tower’s gift shop and the new event program, which it hopes will begin by summer.

For Golinger, the concern is that using Coit Tower for parties would transform “what is one of San Francisco’s most iconic public spaces.”

Phil Ginsburg, head of the parks department, disagrees.