Issue 307 ___Will you want to live in San Francisco - tomorrow ___October 2006

Embarcadero Historic District now
on the National Register of Historic Places

The largest, most important assemblage of historic port structures anywhere in the United States has been officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places after ten years of hard work by a diverse group of agencies: the Office of Historic Preservation, the National Park Service, Port of San Francisco, San Francisco Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board, Telegraph Hill Dwellers, and the Waterfront Committee. The listing of the Port of San Francisco Embarcadero Historic District was celebrated on October 4, 2006 with a gathering at Pier 1 on the Embarcadero. This is a superb nomination of this fragile resource with incredible layers of history.

The nomination report was the most detailed (over 500 pages), and the most complex: from the seawall, constructed in 1878, to the bulkheads, to the 20 piers with exceptional buildings like the Ferry Building and Agriculture Building. It covers a large area, over three miles long, separated by the China Basin water channel. So significant was this resource to maritime history that the Port of San Francisco Embarcadero Historic District was nominated at all three possible levels of significance in the National Register: local, state, and national.

In addition, it was also nominated in three major criteria in seven categories, from government to commerce and transportation, to the labor movement and labor leader Harry Bridges, to architecture and engineering and, finally, to local community planning. In the person of Jane Morrison and Jennifer Clary, San Francisco Tomorrow has for years participated in planning for major new Port development and championed projects which would gain new public access to the water, new public open space and retain as much maritime use as possible.
Being listed on the National Register provides the Port and its development partners access to Federal Rehabilitation Tax credits. The Ferry Building is an excellent example of how historic preservation and private investment can work together to breathe new life into the waterfront. Along with these tax credits, the Port’s Historic Preservation Review guidelines will facilitate the review process for pier and wharf substructure repairs and channel private investment dollars into new development opportunities.

We must defeat Proposition 90

Robert Redford is absolutely right when he says that Prop 90 “is the single most dangerous threat that has ever been leveled at California's environment. In one stroke, this measure would require that cities, counties and agencies that regulate land use and employ such methods as zoning, planning and land use regulations are liable for payment to the property owner to pay for the lost profits from limitations on land use that they enact. Prop 90 will make it virtually impossible for our state and local governments to protect the wildlife, wild lands and other natural resources that make California the special place that it is. The way Prop 90 works is simple. Anytime our government wants to protect some vestige of open space or save an old growth forest or restrict offshore oil drilling, Prop 90 would empower property owners to sue the government and collect compensation if they feel their properties or businesses have been compromised. Proposition 90 is opposed by an extraordinary coalition -- from NRDC and the Sierra Club to the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Farm Bureau, from the League of Cities to the California Taxpayers Association – plus many more. Send a personal email to friends and family enlisting their NO vote and urge them to do the same.

SFT Endorses:

Emily Drennen for BART Board

Q. What are your top priorities?
My top priority as BART Director will be to reinvest in BART's existing urban core, rather than continuing to build costly expansion projects without proven ridership. Every time BART takes on an expansion project, operating and capital funds are stretched more and more thinly for the stations that already exist. BART should only expand where there already is a very large pool of riders that need the service that only BART can provide. By focusing its slim capital, maintenance, and operating resources on making the best of what has already been built, I think BART can bring in many more riders for the system, and at much lower cost, than by continuously expanding the system into the suburbs.
Reinvesting in BART's urban core could take many forms in San Francisco: building "infill" stations like the 30th Street BART station in Bernal Heights; making Geary Boulevard a BART extension (as was originally planned when BART was first built); making the core stations more accessible, clean, and safe for riders; and funding MUNI to provide direct shuttles from the outer edges of San Francisco to BART stations (especially to Glen Park and Balboa Park). These are issues within my district - where most people are not effectively served by BART - as well as part of my long-term vision for San Francisco.

I also want to make BART's fare structure more equitable for urban riders, as well as for senior, youth, and disabled riders. I would work to ensure that urban riders no longer subsidize the suburban users of the BART system (by paying for costly suburban expansions and parking lots, per-ride surcharges, and other inequitable fare/service policies).

Let’s be European

One parking space equals one person. One bus equals 30 people. What are the merchants thinking? It would seem that there are more shoppers on buses than in one car in front of a store. In fact, most of the parking spaces are already taken by people who work in the Geary Boulevard area. Some of these merchants need to take a trip to Europe. Many areas in European cities and towns do not allow cars. There, lack of autos seems to encourage more shoppers.

Presidio Pavement
Do we need more?

The grading and tree removal work that is underway at Merchant Road near the Golden Gate Bridge toll plaza is billed as a safer and more welcoming park gateway to the Presidio. Fourteen Monterey Cypress trees along Lincoln Boulevard have been removed; the entrance to the Bridge workers’ parking lot has been widened and the parking lots enlarged to accommodate even more cars. Don’t any of the bridge administrators and workers take transit to work?
Granted, a number of good things are packaged with the parking lot expansion. The nearby Battery-to-Bluffs Trail and California Coastal Trail will be improved, natural habitat will be restored along the Presidio Bluffs, and an Army-era landfill will be removed. The roadway will be realigned to create an all-way stop at the intersection of Merchant Road, Lincoln Boulevard and Storey Road near Fort Scott. There will be a reforestation project to replace the removed trees which will occur in 2007.

But building more parking spaces in the Presidio? It shouldn’t be happening. If you have questions about the project, please contact the Presidio Trust Public Affairs Office at (415) 561-5418.

Proposed Walt Disney Museum

Located at the heart of the Presidio on the historic Main Post, a row of three signature buildings known as Buildings 104, 108, and 122 are proposed to be rehabilitated as the Walt Disney Family Museum. Not yet have the Presidio Trust Board and their staff found a permanent location for the Presidio History Museum but they are on fast track to approve the Walt Disney Family Foundation’s request. It is symptomatic of the Presidio leasing policy that whoever pays the top dollar gets the choice buildings, no matter whether other uses that are not high-rollers but more Presidio-relevant are waiting to be located. The Trust is well on its way to financial self-sufficiency as mandated in the Federal law that created the Presidio as a National Park, so that is no excuse. The environmental assessment (EA) for the Walt Disney Family Museum and finding of no significant impact are available at www.presidio.gov

Golden Gate Park Shuttle
Paradoxes Abound

The free shuttles that have served Golden Gate Park on summer and fall weekends for four years may soon make their last runs. As one of the promises of the 1998 Proposition J, which allowed construction of a private garage in the heart of Golden Gate Park, the shuttles were funded with private donations as required by the language of the proposition and State Clear Air Funds. The
shuttles have served the Park’s attractions end to end and connected with various public transit lines.

But now that the Garage is in place, private donations are no longer required! State Clean Air Funds and other forms of state support are tied to ridership numbers. The recent Hardly Strictly Bluegrass concert weekend, which brought close to half a million people to the Park, should have pumped up these ridership numbers. But the Shuttle was not allowed to maintain its established route, because it went through a portion of the concert venue. Thus, concert patrons were not permitted to use the shuttle and the resultant ridership numbers did not express what would have been a tremendous increase in service.

The paradox is that Warren Hellman is the primary donor for the garage and for the Bluegrass concert. While the public shuttle was not allowed to gain access the concert venues, Hellman had a private shuttle for his special guests. THIS shuttle served as a connection with roadways in the western end of the Park which were closed off as private parking lots. THIS shuttle was allowed to drop off people who had driven to the park and parked in these parking lots, at various concert stages throughout the park, while those who came to the park on transit or on foot could not ride the regular public shuttle which was . . . bared from the venue.

THE NEW WESTFIELD MALL
The building that replaced the Emporium

Stitching together various e-mails received by SFT yields the following combined comments on the new Westfield Mall.

The building that replaced the Emporium Capwell is one thing, the promises/deals/agreements which entitled the development are another. While they are inextricably linked, they can also be viewed separately. Much of the political process around the entitlements and construction is distasteful to historic preservationists, or to land use devotees who care about the how and the what of San Francisco development. (San Francisco Tomorrow was a major litigant and contributor to the lawsuit regarding CEQA.)

The rotunda has been displaced and subverted in such a way that it no longer has any integrity as architecture on its own terms. The ribs of the dome carry the weight down to the columns to the floor, to what? To a warren of shops and walls below it? It is a rotunda without any sense of weight or place, a symbolic system that is all about the European tradition of man's place in an ordered cosmos, etc. all lost in an intentionally confusing shopping machine. It no longer has any meaning as architecture, it is just a fragment of something lying around, a disembodied trophy, a meaningless curiosity.

Whether or not the building is architecture is a good question. Whether it succeeds either as architect-ure or as a place of commerce, the fact that it failed so completely as historic preservation, is baggage it will always carry. The personalities who put it forward, enabled it, and their histories are also its baggage. The personalities who wrestled it to the ground and got the developer and the City to settle their lawsuit are also part of the story.

How the failure occurred is also an object lesson, one from which the "City" learned a lesson, if we are lucky. If not, we will only have vague memories
of the tickets we bought at Christmas time so our children could ride ponies on the roof, who we were there with, and how it reminded us of the "magasin sur la toit" with its suburban home and lawn on a roof in Paris that we saw before we had those children.

That buildings could leave such an impression, that they can exist in the memories of any one person or with the Emporium, with so many, is the
amazing thing about architecture. Its design and making is about the process, which leaves us with the thing. How we experience it, remember it,
how it affects us individually and collectively is in the end what matters. If it starts badly, then the first generations will remember it badly. But if it is truly a wonderful place, it could in future generations come to mean something more than a real estate ploy. The mall will only be a mall, the pony poop and pols it swept away are long gone, but the memories remain.

The process however, may yet yield some fruit, in the form of the $2.4 million the developer was required to pay for the (some say deliberate) demo-lition of a 65-foot diction of historic wall. If this law-suit settlement money is used, as now intended, as seed money to preserve parts of 19th Century San Francisco through the creation of citywide historic surveys, then it will have served a larger purpose.