Sandler opened 1015 Folsom in 1988, at a moment when SoMa's warehouse blocks were absorbing the energy of a scene that had nowhere conventional to go. What he built — and kept running through various waves of city permitting battles, neighborhood pressure, and the blunt economics of keeping a four-room, 1,500-capacity venue solvent — was less a nightclub in the bottle-service sense than a civic infrastructure for electronic music in San Francisco. Jungle, house, techno, drum and bass: the room didn't specialize so much as it accommodated, rotating residents and touring acts through a calendar that ran most weekends for over three decades.

People who worked the door, the booth, the coat check over the years tended to describe Sandler the same way — present, operational, not given to the promotional persona that nightlife often rewards. He was the person making sure the thing ran.

The club itself has faced pressure in recent years, as the blocks around it have filled with new construction and the conditional-use fights that follow it. 1015 has continued to operate, booking weekends into the present.

Sandler's death doesn't change what's on the marquee this Saturday. But anyone walking down Folsom this week, past the loading dock and the old painted lettering on the side of the building, is passing a place that exists in the shape it does largely because one person decided, in 1988, to keep the doors open.