The Little Free Library outside 2418 Pine Street in Lower Pacific Heights has been toppled by hand, threatened with a $1,402 city permit, and — last week — pulled off its stand a third time. Each time, the block puts it back.

On the 2400 block of Pine Street, in front of the house at 2418, there is a small wooden book box that has been toppled, fined, and pulled apart again — and is, at last check, back on its stand. The posted hours have never changed. "Always open," the sign says.

The box belongs to Susan and Joe Meyers, who put it up in the fall of 2018 and bolted a smaller house alongside it, kept full of biscuits for the dog walkers who pass. Susan Meyers is a psychotherapist; the library sits on a busy public sidewalk in Lower Pacific Heights, the kind of block where a shared thing gets used hard. For a while it simply worked — mysteries and spy novels and Harry Potter cycling through, people pausing to swap a title and talk.

Then someone tore it apart. The first time was May 29, 2019, when the box was "violently attacked and toppled," as the Meyers family put it in a letter reprinted by The New Fillmore (external source, opens in a new tab); the cement pedestal that had looked so solid proved to be the weak point. Neighbors rang the doorbell for days with notes and money to help rebuild, and some, the family wrote, "actually broke into tears" at the sight of the wreckage. The Meyers stood it back up and signed off: "Evil recedes and love wins."

The second threat arrived without a crowbar. In March 2023, one anonymous complaint routed through the city's 311 line brought the Department of Public Works to the sidewalk with an ultimatum: take down the library and its bench, or pay $1,402 for a minor encroachment permit. The idea of charging a fee to keep a free book box drew national coverage from CBS (external source, opens in a new tab). The Meyers refused to move it, and the episode became part of the box's lore on the block (external source, opens in a new tab) — proof, again, that the neighborhood would not let the thing stay down.

Last week's damage is the plainest of the three. The little cottage was ripped away from a stand shaped like a cherub and left in pieces; its door ended up out in the street, and paperbacks landed on the pavement and on the cars parked along the block. In an account given to the San Francisco Chronicle (external source, opens in a new tab), which first reported the latest wreck, Meyers said she was out back in her garden and neither saw nor heard any of it. She told the paper she doubts the library was ever the target — that whoever did this was in real distress, not making a point about a book box. She planned to file a police report this week. After the sidewalk was cleared, her husband taped up a sign asking neighbors to hold "good thoughts" for whoever had done it.

The 311 line that nearly ended the library in 2023 is the same channel Pacific Heights leans on all the time — roughly 291 requests logged across the neighborhood in the past week alone, per DataSF (external source, opens in a new tab). None of that apparatus catches a book box being pulled down at random on a weekday afternoon. What catches it, three times over, is the block itself: the doorbell, the notes, the neighbors who walk down and set the little house back on its base. Pass 2418 Pine tomorrow and it will be upright, door on, books inside, open.