Grandeur Ahead for Undeveloped Waterfront Area : Building Likely to Expand ‘Downtown’ to Embarcadero

The old Navy ferry landing near G Street on Harbor Drive in San Diego may one day be the center of a bustling bayfront, with thousands of shoppers, diners and tourists strolling from a three-level cruise ship pier at B Street to a busy convention center a mile south at Navy Field.

Now, however, the crumbling relic sits in disrepair, white paint peeling from its wooden guardrail and spray-painted messages of love and hate scrawled across the plywood nailed over the building’s windows.

Once the daily point of departure for hundreds of workers bound for North Island, the landing is now a ghostly reminder of San Diego Harbor’s past and a dramatic symbol of how little-used the city’s valuable and scenic waterfront is today.

From the parking lots flanking the County Administration Center on the north to Navy Field at the foot of 5th Avenue on the south, blocks and blocks of land along San Diego’s embarcadero are either vacant or covered with warehouses, parking lots or temporary government structures.

All that may change soon.

Plans obtained from the San Diego Unified Port District, the City and County of San Diego, the Navy and private developers show that the waterfront is in for a transformation that planners hope will make it the perfect complement to the “new city” they believe is taking shape downtown.

By the end of this decade, half a dozen or more new hotels and office buildings should be standing within two blocks of the harbor. Other plans call for the commercial development of the county building’s parking lots, the rebuilding of the B Street Pier into a full-service cruise ship terminal, the rise of a new Navy administraton center, and an expansion of Seaport Village into the buildings that now house the San Diego Police Department headquarters.

Ground was broken May 22 on the cornerstone of the harbor-area development--a new convention center expected to attract dozens of major gatherings that will pump life into what is now little more than a ghost town after dark.

Today, there are about 1,500 hotel rooms in the harbor area; that number should at least double by 1990. Employment also will climb: Navy plans would bring about 4,000 new workers to the area, and a Santa Fe Land Co. development, implemented over a much longer period, is expected to mean permanent jobs for more than 16,000 people. Hundreds more will find work at the convention center and nearby hotels.

With the addition of a San Diego Trolley line linking the convention center to the Santa Fe Depot and an improved bus system, downtown workers and visitors are expected to see the harbor as a more attractive place for lunching out and after-work dining and entertainment.

“There will be more dramatic change on the waterfront in the next five years than there has been in the past 20,” said Frederick Trull, director of planning for the Port District.

But that transformation will not come without conflict.

Already, minor skirmishes and major political brawls have surfaced over the developments proposed for the S-shaped swath of land from the airport to the convention center. For every planner and builder’s dream, there is likely to be someone else who sees a nightmare.

Among the issues:

- Harbor Square. This $100-million complex of offices, restaurants and hotels planned for the parking lots flanking the County Administration Center has been in the works since 1981. Originally proposed as a way for the county to earn as much as $10 million annually in lease payments from a private

developer, the project has been scaled down over the years and may be abandoned in favor of development that is more passive and public-oriented. Environmentalists have insisted that the land, designated as a park in the city’s general plan, should be void of commercialism, but that prospect seems unlikely.

- B Street Pier. Now covered by a warehouse, the pier is to be redeveloped into a multilevel building to handle the needs of the cruise ship lines stopping in San Diego. The project may also include restaurants and shops, but some downtown planners and businessmen--including port commission Chairman William Rick--have questioned whether the city can absorb more “specialty retail,” and whether the port can afford to build the structure needed to house those activities.

Port commission observers now believe that the pier will be refurbished enough to receive cruise ship passengers in style but that the construction of space for other commercial ventures will be put on hold for several years.

- Naval supply center. The Navy plans to redevelop its land between Broadway and Market Street west of Pacific Highway. The scheme calls for refurbishing two buildings and constructing several office buildings and a 1,150-car parking garage. The buildings would contain offices for 5,200 employees as part of a regional administration center and would be set in a plaza open to the public, with military security in the lobby of each structure.

The Navy’s proposal has drawn the opposition of Mayor Roger Hedgecock, whose office has made early inquiries about the possibility of a land swap between the city and the Navy to free the eight-block parcel for tourist and commercial development.

“I don’t think office uses are appropriate on the tidelands and I don’t think the Navy’s redevelopment at the foot of Broadway is an appropriate use of that land if it includes an administrative office center,” Hedgecock said.

But Navy officials insist they intend to build the center as planned--perhaps in a joint venture with a private developer--and they say the waterfront land is crucial to the Navy’s ability to use the harbor efficiently in a national emergency.

Cmdr. Scott Shepard, deputy director of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, said the Navy pier, with its deep draft and railhead, is “an ideal staging point for loading ships. We’re convinced that we could not hold onto that without the acreage at the foot of the pier.”

- Seaport Village. Plans call for this 5-year-old collection of boutiques and restaurants on the site of the old San Diego-Coronado ferry landing to expand into the Market Street site occupied by the Police Department headquarters. The police are scheduled to move to a new building in the summer of 1986, and the Seaport Land Co. has proposed a $40-million project for the land, with an emphasis on restaurants and entertainment.

Although some downtown planners have been troubled by the prospect of the village competing for business with the Horton Plaza retail center, Lee Stein, president of Seaport Land Co., said the Horton center should be well-entrenched by the time the new leg of Seaport Village opens.

“The police leave in July, 1986,” Stein said. “So we’re talking about a year and a half before then and a year and a half for construction. That’s three years. Horton Plaza having three years of breathing room I think is pretty comfortable.”

- The view. With at least three high-rise hotels planned for the convention center area, the Navy’s project on Harbor Drive, and the Santa Fe Land Development Co.’s plan for its land north of Broadway (to include at least half a dozen high-rise buildings) the view of the harbor from downtown will be substantially reduced.

Sonny Sturn, project manager for Ernest W. Hahn’s Horton Plaza center, has compared the Santa Fe plans to the wall of a racquetball court. And Alan Williams, a member of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, said the lack of a master plan agreed upon by the city, the county, the Port District and the Navy will lead to a string of high-rises along the water.

“We feel it will be one multistory building adjacent to another from Market Street almost to Laurel,” Williams said.

But others say the loss of the harbor view is inevitable.

“The views of the harbor will be from one block, two blocks,” Trull, the Port District planner, said. “The days of being able to sit on Cortez Hill and see the harbor forever will be gone.”

Hedgecock said: “A lot of people are saying, taking all these high-rises together, it’s difficult from my high-rise to see the water. That’s a growing-pain problem. It’s a fact of life. I don’t know that you’re going to be able to do much about it. Each parcel wants to develop and, of necessity, the parcels behind it will have some of their view blocked.”

More important, Hedgecock says, is the view from the street. As the area along the harbor matures, it will need to be connected--physically and psychologically -to the financial district at the heart of downtown.

Today, the ribbon of land between the harbor and the business district offers little to entice walkers from one area to the other.

South of Nordstrom’s, the fashionable department store that will anchor the southwest corner of the Horton center, a no-man’s land of warehouses, machine shops and railroad tracks blocks the path to the convention center and Seaport Village. West of the county courthouse on Broadway, blocks of porn shops, arcades and empty lots sit between the business district and the water.

Hahn Co. officials contend that the southern edge of their complex, facing the water, will soon be the most attractive, but James Nordstrom, president of the department store chain, said he would have preferred to put his store on the other side of the center.

“We weren’t forced to take that spot, but we didn’t really have any choice,” Nordstrom said, pointing out that his was the last department store to commit to the center. “It’s going to take some time before the connections are there between the harbor and Horton Plaza. Obviously, we feel Horton is going to have a big impact and there are other things happening so that eventually the machine shops are going to sell their property and move to other locations.”

For now, though, the lack of linkages between the harbor and center city means the areas are generally seen as two distinct communities. A person at the county building on Pacific Highway, for example, will refer to an office building 10 blocks away as “downtown.” Similarly, office workers in the center city don’t associate themselves or their work places with the harbor.

“I think when people go to the waterfront to go to a restaurant they don’t think they’re downtown,” Michael Stepner, the city’s assistant planning director, said. “They think they’re on an extension of Shelter Island.”

What could change that?

“A lot better image of downtown and a lot more things happening down here,” Stepner said. “When Horton Plaza opens up, when you get some nighttime activity, when you’re able to move the transients somewhere, clean up the Gaslamp Quarter a little bit and get more housing down here, the waterfront will become an extension of the downtown neighborhood and not just its own thing. Right now there’s very little access to the waterfront from downtown.”

By 1990, Stepner said, many of those elements will be in place.

Horton Plaza will have been open for five years, the convention center will be in its second year, and the Seaport Village expansion will be off and running. Walking bridges over Harbor Drive will connect the two areas, and many of the half-dozen railroad tracks will be removed. On the remaining tracks or on new ones nearby, the San Diego Trolley will ferry passengers from the Santa Fe Depot, and perhaps the airport, to the convention center and points south. A separate, antique trolley may take downtowners from Broadway and 5th Avenue to Seaport Village.

On the other side of downtown, several businesses now catering to Navy enlisted men will disappear when the Koll Co. flattens three blocks just west of the county courthouse and builds a 1.2-million square-foot office, retail and restaurant complex. With the renovation of the YMCA and the Santa Fe Depot, and the construction of the cruise ship pier at B Street, the corridor down Broadway to the harbor should be much more enticing, planners say.

It may be, however, that all the talk of “linkage” and “connection” is overkill. Given the relatively compact nature of the downtown and harbor areas, newcomers to San Diego tend to see the area in a way different from that ingrained in the minds of longtime San Diegans.

“If I’m a businessman coming from out of town, I’ll stay at the Hotel Inter-Continental,” said Stein, president of Seaport Land Co. and a recent immigrant from Los Angeles. “I consider that downtown. It’s a five-minute taxi ride. Because it used to be Navy, because it used to be a ferry landing, they (older residents) don’t look at it as downtown. That doesn’t make sense. They’ve just been looking at it for so long that they are just now getting accustomed to going into that area.”

MP