When I wrote a story back in January about the last Fotomat left in San Francisco, I didn’t expect the derelict little kiosk on the corner of Haight Street would hold out for much longer.
Abandoned for years and mottled in graffiti with a wad of gum stuck to its pyramid-shaped roof, the relic of the 1970s drive-thru photo development craze sitting in a vacant parking lot seemed destined for demolition, despite a few creative ideas I heard about how it could be repurposed: as a zine shop, maybe, or even a kissing booth.
But Arthur Javier and Erika Martinez, co-founders of the radio station and record label program.audio, read the article and saw potential in the architectural oddity.
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“I hadn’t even seen the inside just like you, but I just felt like one person, DJ equipment, had to fit in there somehow,” Javier, 27, told me on a recent Thursday afternoon. “We’d figure it out, even if it was a complete mess. We knew it could be Pandora’s box in there.”
By mid-March, that vision became a reality when the duo signed a three-year lease on the walk-in closet-sized booth, rigging it up within the span of a week during a record-breaking heat wave. The DJs, who go by sfcowboy and erika, live and work nearby, but for years, they never knew what the booth was. They noticed a sign next to it with a QR code and a phone number to reach the developer, David Peng.
Arthur Javier and Erika Martinez (and her dog Animal) are pictured in the doorway of the former Fotomat booth they transformed into a radio station on Haight Street.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Martinez, 26, said when they came by to see it for the first time, a heavy planter was propped up in front of its only doorway, and they weren’t able to get inside. Eventually, she climbed over, using her phone to capture videos of its dusty interior, where years of trash had been dropped into the slot that attendants once slipped film through.
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It didn’t have running water, and just a few shelves lined the walls in the modest setup. Both Javier and Martinez knew the viable options for other types of businesses in the space were slim, and after briefly considering a trial run, they decided to take the plunge. They negotiated $400 a month to rent it out.
“We did not tell anyone,” Martinez said. “Only our members.”
Building a radio station
Founded as a collective in 2023 after starting out as a late-night event series on the heels of the pandemic, program.audio now has its own print magazine, “soulseek,” and throws parties all over the city, from the wine bar Arcana to 1015 Folsom, as well as warehouses in the East Bay. Javier cites his early influences from his upbringing in San Jose, where his mother’s taste oscillated between early house music and No Doubt. He played the saxophone for eight years while delving into electronic music and new wave.
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Discnogirl DJs on Haight Street inside a long defunct Fotomat booth, as seen on Friday, March 27, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
“I was obsessed with Talking Heads and all these weird, freaky, fun, goofy sounds as a kid, and then you just go dig more and more from there,” he said.
Martinez, who was born in San Rafael, said her taste also evolved out of her parents’ background in music: Her dad was a b-boy and still plays in a Latin jazz band, and her mom loved clubbing and listening to Madonna. When she got into electronic music and started DJing, melding deconstructed Latin club music with pop vocals came naturally to her.
Javier and Martinez met one night in 2021 at the Make Out Room. They dated for a couple of years, ultimately continuing their relationship as creative collaborators, and program.audio was born. Javier helmed the visual side of the project while Martinez covered outreach and social media, finding a fast following on TikTok, where her videos have gone viral, amassing millions of views.
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“A lot of the initial engagement was combating the idea that SF is dead,” Javier said.
Martinez added that while more content creators use TikTok to promote nightlife today, she thinks that wasn’t really the case when she started out a few years ago.
“I think for the reason of [people saying] like, ‘Oh I don’t want to be a TikTok DJ,’ but I was definitely using it more to just educate people on the fact that San Francisco does have nightlife,” she said. “You’re not going to find it in the Marina.”
‘A third space for the community’
Program.audio’s name stems from the song by the ’60s electronic duo Silver Apples, who are considered pioneers in the genre for their early use of a self-constructed synthesizer. Javier, who has long been fascinated by the Summer of Love, which inspired him to move into his apartment in the Haight, said the track feels symbolic, “bridging the gap” between electronic music and the psychedelic rock scene the neighborhood is known for.
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“In the ’90s, there was a Second Summer of Love happening in the U.K. that was more about raving,” he said. “But a big pinnacle of raving was in San Francisco, which people don’t talk about leading into Burning Man. So I just love forgotten history and tying those things together.”
Martinez said another point of inspiration for the station came from The Lot Radio in New York City, a popular radio booth converted out of an old shipping container in Brooklyn, as well as Kiosk Radio in Belgium, which operates under a similar model.
“You show up, you don’t have to pay anything, DJs are playing,” she said. “We wanted something that could be a third space for the community in that way.”
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Arthur Javier works on his laptop at the Fotomat booth-turned-radio station in the Haight.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Buck Wilson DJs on Haight Street inside a long defunct Fotomat booth, as seen on Friday, March 27, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Program.audio plans to have DJs play every Friday and Saturday from 4 to 8 p.m. When Javier and Martinez recently put out a call for residencies to fill out their programming schedule, they were flooded with over 200 applications. Many of them were from artists based in San Francisco, but others came from all over: Los Angeles, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago and even from a couple of DJs in Asia who wanted to stop by during a visit to the city next fall.
“The thing is, we weren’t surprised,” Martinez said. “We knew that people wanted this.”
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Drawing crowds
The process of getting the idea off the ground and starting an artist-owned space hasn’t been easy. Javier and Martinez were previously working toward opening up another club in the city, but red tape and lengthy permitting processes felt insurmountable.
“We hear all the time that the city needs more nightlife, but without making it easier for artists or small businesses to actually contribute to it,” Martinez said. “Then we’re noticing that the government and bigger corporations are partnering to put on these nightlife experiences, which is great, because people who don’t necessarily listen to electronic music are getting introduced to it. But they’re not investing in the locals that have actually built the scene here, so this is really important to us.”
A pedestrian stops to photograph the Fotomat-turned-radio station on Haight Street, while Tom Marsi and Discnogirl DJ on Friday, March 27, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
The radio station is bringing new life to a quiet corner of Haight Street.
Mireya Acierto/Getty Images
As she spoke, standing outside the booth with her dog, Animal — named for the cult favorite In-N-Out fries — someone walked up, asking if they could pet him. After introducing themself as a neighbor living a couple of blocks away, they expressed how excited they were that the little booth was being used before wishing Martinez and Javier luck and heading on their way.
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“That happens all the time,” Martinez said with a laugh.
Over the past couple of weeks, they’ve gotten their fair share of curious pedestrians who want to take a peek inside. Some said they used to work at Fotomat; others just wanted to know how the space was being repurposed as Javier painted it in a new shade of aluminum silver. He said a few people have lamented the loss of the booth’s mushroom paint job — including an A24 film crew that was recently shooting at Amoeba Music and wanted to use it in the backdrop of a shot for its counterculture-adjacent imagery, despite the paint job only dating back about a decade.
“But people who have lived in the Haight for years come up and tell us they’re excited,” Javier said. “They see the neighborhood like I do, which is a place that lets the youth bring in new cultures and movements. The mushroom isn’t the Haight. The Haight is what we’re doing, you know?”
The soft opening for program.audio launched on a Saturday afternoon, drawing about 300 listeners over the course of six hours. Groups of people trickled in and out, leaving to grab dinner and coming back to dance. Passing double-decker buses that once ignored the kiosk altogether now stopped to let tourists out so they could listen to the music.
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Tourists drive past the old Fotomat kiosk on Haight Street in San Francisco, on Wenesday, Jan. 28, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Arthur Javier and Erika Martinez (and her dog Animal) are pictured in the doorway of the former Fotomat booth that they are turning into a streaming radio station in San Francisco’s Upper Haight neighborhood.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
The beauty of it for Martinez is the reciprocal relationship between the DJs, who get exposed to new listeners, and the crowd, which doesn’t have to pay a cover charge or be over 21 to get in. “You can just pull up here and hang out with a La Croix or something,” she said.
Javier and Martinez share high hopes for future gigs, especially with the Haight Ashbury flea market taking over the nearby parking lot every Thursday through Sunday until September. Their label’s latest compilation, a surprise Bandcamp release, serves as a fundraiser for the National Immigrant Justice Center and features tracks from Oakland-based producer and DJ Linda Lo and Los Angeles’ Avi Loud. They could see a collaboration with Amoeba on the horizon and hope to invite some of their favorite artists, including the ’90s electronic duo Underworld, to stop in. In the meantime, they’re still troubleshooting the livestream component of their setup and focusing on other things, like making sure the electricity still works, while DJing themselves for hours on end.
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“We have literally spent every waking hour here for the last two weeks,” Martinez said, adding that she screen prints T-shirts out of Javier’s nearby apartment. “It’s crazy.”
On my visit, a man drove up next to the booth, stepping out of his car to scrutinize his parking job. He looked over at Javier and Martinez. “It’s safe here, right?” he asked.
Javier told him that as long as he fed the meter, he was good to go. The man thanked him and headed into a nearby restaurant.
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“We are becoming a little bit of an information booth,” Javier said with a grin. “We wear a lot of different hats.”