Plan’s Vision of a Car-Free Heart Splits Friends of Balboa Park

Balboa Park is primarily a park to be cherished as a place of natural beauty. Although it is one of the largest parks in the country, the time is coming when the building of hospitals and schoolhouses or even libraries and museums must cease or else we shall have a city there instead of a park.

--George White Marston

Park commissioner, 1925

To Hamilton Marston, that prediction, made by his grandfather more than six decades ago, was a chilling prophecy of things to come.

Marston, a dapper, silver-haired man as well-versed as anyone in the history and lore of Balboa Park, believes a park is a place to find refuge from the bustle and noise of the urban world, a place to reflect, stroll, gaze, picnic.

San Diego, Marston feels, has sadly failed to protect the expansive greenbelt from a series of encroachments that have nibbled away at its open acreage. There’s a freeway up its belly, a Naval hospital on its western face, museums atop its heart, two schools on its flanks, and even a city maintenance yard at the mouth of one of its canyons. Such intrusions are a threat, Marston says, to Balboa Park’s 120-year-old mandate, which declared it to be “free and open park space.”

“As San Diego grows, we will have an immense population with increasing density of settlement. And the thing that makes density tolerable is the presence of parks,” Marston said. “With the accumulation of buildings and institutions, we have risked losing the true purpose and value of our finest park.”

A new master plan for the park has given Marston a ray of hope for the future.

The voluminous document, which has been under debate by a plethora of community groups and committees for nigh on five years, proposes dozens of sweeping changes that would alter the face of one of San Diego’s prime tourist magnets. The City Council is set to begin considering the controversial tome on Monday.

Closing of Bridge

Among the most radical aspects of the plan is a proposal to tear up parking lots along the park’s central spine and replace them with lawns and a string of decorative malls and plazas. In conjunction, supporters of the idea recommend closing the Laurel Street bridge across California 163--one of the primary access routes to the park--to cars. A new, 600-space parking structure also would be built in Archery Canyon.

“We’re recapturing concrete and turning it back into parkland,” said Robert Arnhym, vice chairman of the city’s Park and Recreation Board. “We will turn what is now nothing but an outdoor garage into a splendid corridor with plants and fountains and flags. What a tremendous difference it will create in the ambiance of the park.”

While the vision is an aesthetically appealing one, not everyone is charmed. Indeed, the proposal has infuriated leaders of museums and other cultural institutions in the 1,100-acre park, many of which are clustered in the El Prado area at the eastern end of the two-lane span.

In their view, the Cabrillo Bridge that carries Laurel Street is a lifeline, a vital link that brings the vast majority of their patrons into the park. To bar vehicles from entering via the bridge, and then rob patrons of parking on the museums’ doorstep in the Prado, would cause a precipitous dip in attendance and threaten the facilities’ economic security, critics say.

“That is the main artery to our institutions,” said Steve Brezzo, director of the San Diego Museum of Art. “That is the classic, traditional, most frequently used and most clearly viable and understood access to the heart of the park. To arbitrarily assume that visitors will make extraordinary adjustments that are both impractical and unrealistic is very damaging to us.”

Doug Sharon, director of the Museum of Man, added: “The consequences would be dire. It’s hard enough for museums to drum up visitors as it is. With the bridge closed, you could have blockbusters every week and people would still not leave their cars and walk in. This is Southern California.”

Sharon cites statistics from 1981-82--when the bridge was closed for five months for resurfacing--to show how attendance takes a tumble when that entrance is sealed.

Moreover, some environmentalists are opposed to construction of the 600-space parking structure in Archery Canyon, a project designed to compensate for parking lost when lots near the Prado and the so-called Palisades area are ripped up.

“We’re very concerned about the addition of any new buildings in the park,” Barbara Bamberger, conservation coordinator for the local Sierra Club branch, said. “We want to see as much open, passive parkland remain as possible. So much has already been lost.”

Others oppose the creation of new access routes to the Archery Canyon parking structure, including a frontage road beside Highway 163 and a new bridge across the scenic, lushly bordered thoroughfare.

And some critics note that construction of the parking garage--a multimillion-dollar project--would net the park only 61 more spaces after deleting the spaces in surface lots.

Most Controversial

While by far the most controversial, the bridge closure and related parking changes are only one issue to be tackled during the upcoming debate over the master plan, which would replace a 1960 blueprint and guide park uses and development into the 21st Century.

The document was initially drawn up by The Pekarek Group, a local landscape architect and planning firm, and a draft was first released in 1983. That plan detailed a modern vision for the park that included everything from an artificial lake to an amphitheatre and overpasses across Florida Canyon.

Since its release, the Pekarek plan has been attacked, massaged and modified by an assortment of bodies, among them the Park and Recreation Board, the Planning Commission and authors of an environmental assessment of the plan. Also tossing in comments have been community groups from North Park, Golden Hill and Uptown, as well as organizations as diverse as The Square Dance Assn. of San Diego County and Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, an environmental group.

Everyone, it seems, wants a say in the future of the park, which was dedicated in 1868 when leaders of San Diego--its population a paltry 3,200 back then--set aside 1,400 acres of barren pueblo lands. The City Council’s task will be to strike a balance between six often conflicting sets of recommendations on each of the major proposals in the master plan.

Among other disputed recommendations in the plan is the proposed construction of a 1,500-space parking structure on the existing lot at the San Diego Zoo. Designed to alleviate cramped parking conditions in the east park area, this proposal has been bitterly opposed by zoo officials.

Called ‘Unrealistic’

Betty Jo Williams, president of the San Diego Zoological Society, has sent a letter urging the society’s 135,000 member households to fight the plan. Williams called the proposal “completely unrealistic” and said it would saddle the zoo with the responsibility of housing the cars of all park patrons.

“We have a terrible time now getting zoo-goers into our lot, and to build such a thing would only make things worse,” said Williams, noting that the zoo lot was closed on July 4 due to traffic tie-ups even before it had reached capacity. “We fear we would become a magnet for all visitors to the park. We would be seen as the most convenient parking spot.”

As an alternative, zoo officials propose keeping their existing lot and creating a set of terraced parking platforms on the western face of Florida Canyon. Environmentalists, however, object to the idea, arguing that the canyon is the last remnant of natural landscape in the park.

On another front, the city has recommended relocating the municipal gymnasium, which now sits amid a cluster of buildings in the Palisades area, to Morley Field. The Pekarek plan suggested limiting the Palisades area to museums and concentrating all athletic facilities at Morley Field.

But the Sierra Club opposes any new construction in the park, noting that open space already is scarce. Sympathetic to the argument, city officials are hunting for alternative sites and are now negotiating to move the gym to the San Diego City College campus.

Two other shifts in park uses also are drawing fire. The plan advocates relocation of the Centro Cultural de la Raza from its current site in the Pepper Grove area to Spanish Village. Leaders of the Centro, housed in an old water tank, say the move will cause the destruction of valuable murals on the sides of the tank and may land them in smaller quarters.

Scout Camp to Go

And leaders of the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls--who have camping facilities on 35 acres in the northwest portion of the park--have been advised that they should look elsewhere for territory. Although reluctant to boot the troops, the city proposes that a lease with the groups not be renewed when it expires in 2005. Camping activities can be better accommodated in Mission Trails Regional Park, officials say.

A related issue not covered in the Pekarek plan but sure to stimulate debate is the recently announced expansion of the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater and Science Center. The $17.5-million expansion, which would more than double the size of the facility, includes a theater with moving platforms like those in Disneyland’s “Star Tours” attraction, along with a new planetarium and an outdoor science park. City officials said such museum expansions would be handled on a case-by-case basis under the master plan.

Overriding all of the individual changes recommended for Balboa Park, officials say, is one driving goal: to liberate the park’s heartland from the burden of traffic.

“The conflict between automobiles and pedestrians is the most dramatic of all problems in the park,” said Dave Twomey, assistant Park and Recreation director for the city. “Not just in the sense that there’s a danger there or there are obnoxious carbon monoxide fumes, but in the sense that traffic keeps you from being able to do a lot of things you want to do.”

Recreating a new, car-free atmosphere along a corridor from the Aerospace Museum on one end to Spanish Village on the other will return the park to the era of the 1935 Pan-American Exposition, backers of the idea say.

It also will free up space for strolling, picnicking and other passive uses. Today, only 14% of parkland is available for such activities, with the balance occupied by one use or another. Under the new plan--and with the pending demolition of all but three of the 42 Naval Hospital buildings--that figure will jump to 23%, Twomey said.

As for concerns that closing the bridge and relocating parking will discourage visitors, Twomey and others say any effects would be only temporary.

Educating the Public

“People are going to go to the zoo and visit the pandas if they have to park in National City,” Arnhym said. “Conversely, there are lots of places where parking is convenient that I’ve never been.”

Leaders of the park’s cultural institutions smart at such a suggestion, with some charging that the park discriminates against its very residents.

“It dawned on me some time ago that this plan is a plan for the green spaces only,” the zoological society’s Williams said. “The needs of the cultural institutions really have not been addressed. We have been patted on the back and shuttled off to the next committee.”

“It’s discriminatory in a sense,” said Philip Klauber, past president of the San Diego Historical Society, whose relatives helped found two park museums. “These institutions have a mission of showing and educating the public about the treasures they have. If the public--the elderly and the infirm, particularly--cannot get to them, that mission will be impeded.”

Some museum officials sympathize with the desire to remove blighting, smog-producing cars from the park, and a few say they could ultimately live with closure of the bridge. But they insist that such a strategy would be deadly unless new parking structures and access routes were not in place first.

To fight the proposal, the park’s 20-odd cultural institutions have banded together as the Central Balboa Park Assn., testifying at hearings and sending letters to the City Council expressing their concerns. COMBO, the Combined Arts and Education Council of San Diego County, also has entered the fray.

“It is not reasonable to try to recast Balboa Park in the image of 1916,” a July 22 letter from COMBO to the City Council states. “San Diego was not a mobile society then. It is now.”

‘Romantic Visions’

In the end, museum backers hope a balance can be struck between their needs and the desire to foster a more serene setting in Balboa Park. They are counting on the City Council to find that balance.

“All the romantic visions of parasol-carrying strollers and jugglers and organ grinders along the park as people walk in this kind of utopian setting is fine, provided that all the other, practical elements of the plan are implemented to allow for that,” Brezzo said. “But this knee-jerk idea of, ‘We don’t like cars so let’s get them out,’ is just absurd.”

For the moment it is unclear where the city will find the more than $100 million needed to fund changes recommended under the master plan. A bond issue on the November ballot--if passed by the voters--would provide $35 million or $45 million, which would be used for building restoration in the Prado and Palisades area.

State grants provide some money to cities for park uses, but nothing nearing the bill required for the major road projects needed under the Balboa Park plan.

“This could all be on hold for quite a while if we’re unable to find money,” Twomey said. “All this disagreement might not mean a thing.”

BALBOA PARK PLAN

PROPOSED CHANGES 1. Expansion of Zoo parking lot. 2. Closure of Cabrillo Bridge to vehicular traffic. 3. Balboa Drive cul-de-sacs. 4. Archery Canyon parking structure (600 vehicles). 5. Palisades Building parking structure (400 vehicles). 6. Zoo Place one-way northbound. 7. Extension of Village Place one-way southbound. 8. Realignment of 28th Street. One group’s position, Page 11.