Location may not always be everything as the realtor's mantra insists, but when it comes to UCSF and its complicated mix of owned and leased properties, it continues to offer surprises. How many employees on Parnassus are aware, for example, that more than 200 of their brethren work in the Financial District? Or that the once almost empty Laurel Heights building now has more than 400 employees, and more on the way?

Indeed, UCSF’s 15,390 faculty and staff can be found at nearly 30 different sites around and outside the city, although some 60 percent of UCSF employees (more than 9,000) continue to be based at Parnassus Heights, with others being centralized at buildings such as Laurel Heights. Should the proposed merger of UCSF Stanford clinical services take place as planned, the percentage ratios will, of course, change. But even in the current scattered configuration, UCSF's Parnassus Heights should continue to function as the historical hub of the campus, a role it has played now for almost a century.

Much less is commonly known about the many other locations where UCSF employees report daily, and the tasks that may make visits to the main campus unnecessary. In fact, there are some UCSF employees who have never been to the main campus at all, and who feel somewhat disconnected from its culture and the University's accomplishments as a consequence.

As part of its pledge to educate, inform and connect all UCSF employees to the larger world of which they are an important part, Daybreak will occasionally produce features on the various UCSF sites. In this first brief overview, however, we will confine ourselves to a few interesting details that might explain why delivering the campus mail -- all 20 million pieces of it each year -- is such a daunting task.

• UCSF has nearly 1,100 employees at Mission Center, working in such diverse areas as hospital accounting, parking and transportation, radiation oncology and campus planning.

• Outside the San Francisco city limits, Oyster Point is home to more than 100 UCSF employees. Groups located there include Material Management, Laundry Services and Medical Records.

• Approximately 125 employees call 44 Montgomery their work home each day. The largest single contingent is the Development Office with 68, but the departments of medicine, psychiatry and pediatrics base some groups there as well.

• Across Market Street at nearby 74 New Montgomery, another 125 UCSF employees occupy space on the fifth and sixth floors. Many of them are part of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.

• At the opposite end of town, a contingent of 270 employees is based at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Many are faculty physicians and researchers.

• UCSF/Mount Zion Medical Center with 1,100 employees and San Francisco General Hospital, with another 1,300 UCSF staff members (many others at SFGH are SF city employees) are important parts of the UCSF network as well. Less known, particularly about SFGH, is the large research enterprise centered there, which includes centers for the study of virology, cardiovascular and infectious disease, and alcohol addiction.

By Jeff Miller

1st appeared 6/04/97