COLUMN ONE : S.F. Opens Its Heart to Doubt : Raw sewage in the bay and other environmental problems have eased. But diverse groups in the city often can agree only on what not to do.

Environmental change--from polluted streams to congested highways and overdeveloped land--is affecting the quality of life across the nation. Such change is gradual, and often goes unnoticed while it happens.

To measure how various areas have been affected over the decades, The Times dispatched reporters to the places where they grew up. This occasional series of articles examines how our hometown environments have been altered--for better or for worse.

During World War II, a 13-year-old boy bet some friends that he could paddle a converted orange crate to a buoy anchored in the choppy, tide-swept waters of San Francisco Bay--a round trip of almost a quarter-mile.

As often happens in adolescence, the feat proved unwise: The makeshift craft began to sink on its maiden voyage.

What chilled the boy’s heart was not the fear of drowning, however. It was the sight of raw sewage clinging to his paddle and fouling the water all around him as he struggled.

So powerful was the experience that he vowed never again to venture onto the bay. He even gave up fishing for perch and shiners from the pier adjoining Ft. Mason, a former Army post where thousands of American soldiers embarked during World War II and where he himself later departed for Army duty overseas. Untreated waste poured into the bay from a concrete pipe near the fort.

Eventually, the sewage and other pollutants almost turned the bay into a California version of the Dead Sea. Starfish, for example, and thumb-size rock crabs seemed to go the way of the wartime anti-aircraft battery on Marina Green--a stretch of grass several blocks long between Marina Boulevard and the bay--and the anti-submarine nets that stretched across the mouth of the bay, opening and shutting to the accompaniment of high-pitched whistles.

Gone without a trace.

Imagine the shock of delight for that now almost-ancient mariner to discover a dramatic change for the better on a recent visit to San Francisco.

As dawn broke, I was jogging along the rocky seawall at the foot of Marina Green, built in connection with the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition to salute the opening of the Panama Canal and to hail the recovery of San Francisco from the 1906 earthquake and fire. I spotted a five-pointed purple starfish attached to one of the rocks.

The starfish has company. Thanks to Herculean efforts to clean up the bay, several forms of missing marine life have returned to the waters that flow through the Golden Gate. Indeed, the entire environment of San Francisco may be doing significantly better than it was in the days of my childhood.

That appears to be true even after last October’s earthquake that left more than 60 dead. Dealing with the millions of dollars in physical damage inflicted by the quake may drain money away from environmental projects for at least a while, however.

And the long-term effect of the quake on the city’s psyche is difficult to assess. Dining with longtime friends at an old San Francisco restaurant more than two weeks after the quake, I was struck that they spent most of the evening trading experiences of the natural disaster--not to share the experiences with a visitor but to achieve a kind of catharsis.

Despite knowing what havoc earthquakes could cause, when I was a boy we seemed to think it just would not happen again. Growing up in the Marina District, the area hardest hit by the October quake, we knew that it had been built on landfill--mostly sand carried from nearby dunes and hills to replace a lagoon. But that knowledge seemed no cause for concern; we had no idea that a temblor could momentarily turn the fill into syrup beneath all those houses.

Experiencing something like that could conceivably change the way people feel about almost anything. So far, however, there is no sign that it will change the passionate commitment of the community’s environmentalists.

And despite the progress, the environmentalists still have plenty of targets. The sharp reduction in raw sewage and other obvious pollutants flowing into the bay masks a continuing danger from less-visible pollution, such as toxic waste, that is damaging the water and its inhabitants.

Nor is the effect of environmental change confined to the bay itself. The land all around it has become a battleground as San Franciscans fight a bitter war among themselves over what kind of city they want for the future--a conflict with potentially critical consequences for the environment.

What may matter most about the struggle is not so much its outcome--likely to be a series of compromises that, whatever their details, will pay greater heed to the environment than anyone ever did in the old days. What could threaten San Francisco most is a change in the political environment.

The San Francisco of my growing up was a city with a political purpose. It was not unified by the kind of machines that dominated big-city politics in the East and Midwest, although the Democratic Party was clearly in the majority. San Francisco was unified by a series of shared missions.

It was the same whether it was lining Marina Boulevard to welcome President Franklin D. Roosevelt--I remember wearing signs hailing F.D.R. that I had made with those pieces of cardboard the laundry used to fold my father’s shirts--or to welcome home the emaciated survivors of the Bataan Death March.

San Francisco was a town that marched together.

Partly it was the successful struggle to recover from the great earthquake and fire of 1906. Partly it was the common experience of the Great Depression. Everyone growing up in San Francisco then thought of it as city rebuilding. The universal image was a Phoenix rising from ashes.

What strikes me now is how much The City--as narcissistic natives of the area call it--has become the province of the dominant negative. Splintered and fractious interest groups form coalitions from time to time, but only to defeat someone else’s proposal.

This kind of negativism is what leads to stories in the national press about the city’s fading image as “the city that knew how.” The spirit of unity that once drove San Francisco enabled it to make difficult and expensive decisions--such as those now required to solve environmental problems without totally derailing other interests. But the current accentuation of the negative too often seems to prevent that unity from reasserting itself.

On the plus side environmentally, raw sewage no longer spills into the bay as a matter of course. In the jargon of environmental engineers, total “pollutant loadings” in the bay are down 80% from the mid-1960s.

“There are sightings of harbor seals all up and down the bay,” said Lawrence P. Kolb, principal engineer of the California Regional Water Quality Control Board. In another, albeit sweet-sour sign of progress, piers in the bay recently have been assaulted by piling worms--creatures that, like the seals, had been all but driven from the area by pollution.

Most encouraging of all, there is a pervasive concern about the environment that was virtually non-existent 30 or 40 years ago. In those days, the word environment represented an idea that had really not occurred to most people. These days, virtually every development, public or private, is subjected to intense environmental scrutiny.

But environmental problems remain.

Toxic chemicals are still flushed into the bay. Despite steps taken to cut the flow, industry still is a major source, according to Barry Nelson, executive director of the Save San Francisco Bay Assn. “Urban runoff from city streets and rooftops” also contributes to the “tremendous amount of toxic contaminants that find their way into the bay,” he said.

Dredging and related activities stir up old contamination on the sea bed, spreading it into new areas. The salinity of the bay is rising as fresh water is diverted from rivers feeding the bay to slake the thirst of Central and Southern California.

Last July, fishermen and environmentalists aboard more than 100 boats crowded the waters west of Alcatraz to protest the Army Corps of Engineers’ dumping of dredge materials into a deep hole there. The tainted material is dredged in the ship-channel-clearing operations that the engineers conduct in the port of Oakland and elsewhere in the bay.

The protesters want the dumping halted at least during sport-fishing season. Eventually they want the sludge hauled at least 25 miles out to sea where the ocean depth drops from hundreds of feet to thousands of feet, a shift that would more than double the government’s costs, the Corps of Engineers maintains.

Progress indeed has been made, but the beauty of the bay is so fragile that it cries out for more environmental protection.

Nelson cites three major environmental victories in the bay: a halt to reckless filling that was replacing the water with garbage and landfill, cleaning up the sewage through improved treatment facilities and opening up the shoreline to public use so that 100 miles of it is accessible to the public now, compared to only four miles in 1960.

But critical environmental challenges continue to imperil the bay’s future. Among the problems are preserving wildlife-nurturing wetlands, with 61% of those in the southern part of the bay lost to development over the last 30 years, cutting down on toxic discharges that show up in virtually every level of the fish and waterfowl food chain and reducing the diversion of vital fresh-water tributaries to the bay.

And those are only the direct threats to the bay itself. There is the matter of how to use the land.

As a little boy, my favorite trip was a ferry ride from the foot of Market Street to the eastern side of the bay to meet my father’s train returning from the East. The best part of the voyage was crossing the bay back to the city. The hills, whether etched against the sky or shrouded by incoming fog, were such a striking sight that even a young boy knew there was something special about them.

The ferry boats are gone, and the skyline is drastically altered. It is punctuated now by Manhattan-like skyscrapers, which have replaced the hilly silhouette of my childhood.

The skyscrapers did more than alter the contour of the skyline. They constitute the city’s new “factories,” replacing smokestack industries with white-collar office jobs. Half of the city’s working population commutes to and from San Francisco, reflecting the soaring real estate prices within the city itself and middle-class residents’ hunger for more spacious living.

A pre-quake survey found that the sales-weighted average of home prices climbed 10.4% in the Bay Area in 1988, reaching $198,500--almost $70,000 more than the U.S. average and No. 1 in the nation. (Los Angeles, according to the same survey, registered an average sale price of $186,000, fifth-highest nationally.)

The skyrocketing real estate prices have accelerated the flight of the middle class to suburbs, producing traffic and congestion unimagined in 1957, my last year in San Francisco. Attempting to drive across the Golden Gate or Oakland Bay bridges or the Bayshore Highway at rush hour now produces the tight-lipped, squinty-eyed faces of tension once associated only with commuters in New York.

The skyscrapers, rising real estate costs and a host of related developments reflect basic changes both in San Francisco and in the economic realities of most major American cities. Here, they have polarized the city in a confrontation between those who favor continued development and those who want to slow or halt the pace of change.

It is a conflict that poses its own threat to the future.

In fact, continuing efforts to safeguard the environment of San Francisco have combined with anti-development sentiment to earn the city a reputation for naysaying.

The relationship between the environment and the conflict between the pro-development and status-quo forces comes into especially sharp focus over San Francisco’s efforts to keep the Giants in the city.

To persuade the baseball team not to move to the southern Bay Area, city leaders proposed building a new downtown ballpark. But concern over monumental traffic jams and intensified congestion was apparently great enough to defeat the proposal when it came before the voters last November, although by a slim margin.

When plans for the 45,000-seat China Basin ballpark were announced in July, those who work near the site and even those across Market Street working in the financial district reacted with fears of having to cope with even worse parking and traffic problems than they now face.

City officials contend that a variety of public transportation, plus wider streets, would conquer those problems, but doubters abound.

The proposed ballpark was a bellwether, said Gerald E. Newfarmer, the Oakland-born former city manager of San Jose and Fresno who became president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce in June. In recent years, it has become fashionable in San Francisco to shoot down other people’s ideas for development, he said in an interview last summer, and as a result “many different interest groups hold veto power” over projects to enhance the city.

With the ballpark, “extraordinary efforts (were) made to address the negatives,” ranging from environmental problems to adverse traffic, Newfarmer said. The city’s Opera House and Symphony Hall cause traffic problems, he noted, “but no one suggests the city eliminate those facilities. . . . You got to have a ballpark.”

A measure of how concerned business interests are about the clout wielded by environmental and other single-issue groups over city policies toward business and development can be found in an extraordinarily candid “white paper” on the local economy adopted only hours before the earthquake last October by the San Francisco Economic Development Corp.

The report cited the city’s “fading star image” and “a growing sense that we may no longer be on the cutting edge of economic opportunity.” It spoke of San Francisco as being in transition from self-sufficiency to being “the more specialized hub of an interdependent metropolitan economy.”

Any suggestion that the city was tied to any neighboring community--most of which San Franciscans saw only by looking down their noses--was sheer heresy in my youth. How times have changed.

After several unsuccessful tries at limiting growth through initiative measures, city voters in 1986 adopted Proposition M, ranked by the white paper as “the most restrictive growth-control measure ever enacted by a major U.S. city.” It set a permanent annual limit on office construction and made neighborhood preservation, creating blue-collar jobs and mitigating traffic problems key requirements for approving development projects.

The Economic Development Corp., sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce, city government and organized labor, contends that the slim majority (51.3%) that passed Proposition M mistakenly views development as a source of the city’s woes, rather than a solution to them.

Although some contend that the future of San Francisco’s environment hinges in large measure on the outcome of the battle between pro- and anti-development forces, The city sits on such a hoard of natural jewels that it seems likely to retain its claim as the nation’s most naturally blessed big city.

The Presidio and Alcatraz Island are two cases in point.

The Presidio, 1,441 acres of San Francisco’s choicest real estate, with its eucalyptus and pine tree-dotted hillsides, Spanish tile-roof structures and unequaled views of the Golden Gate, the Pacific Ocean and the bay, is being closed by the Pentagon as an Army headquarters.

Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae) fought to keep the government from closing the historic base and transferring the prime property from the Army to the National Park Service. But they succeeded only in directing the Army to possibly lease back Letterman Army Medical Center and a few other structures when the base is closed.

Thanks to a 1972 law, the property will become part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and cannot be developed commercially.

Despite these prohibitions, Brian O’Neill, superintendent of the recreation area, said he knows that there will be pressure to operate the addition to the park with “revenue neutrality,” rather than seeking federal appropriation of the $16.5 million that it costs to maintain the facility annually.

Estimating that it will take nine months to explore alternative concepts for use of the land, O’Neill said three categories of proposals are already coming in. Local organizations are proposing to use the existing structures for social service work and new campuses for overcrowded San Francisco State University, UC Medical School or Hastings Law College.

Then there have been “visionary proposals,” such as a major museum to tell the story of the West, a “world university” or conference center--a “Geneva West,” as O’Neill puts it. The third category comes from “all those who would like to profit from the Presidio,” with a 36-hole golf course as an example.

“We don’t want to trivialize the Presidio or give the impression that it’s up for development per se,” he said.

Alcatraz, the 22-acre island in the center of the bay that shut down in 1963 as a federal prison for the toughest convicts in the system, is another developing asset in the Golden Gate Recreation Area.

The island was strictly off limits while I lived in San Francisco. Even boats were prohibited from coming closer than 150 yards. In 1946, prisoners revolted and for 28 hours the island was under siege. The uprising was finally put down with the aid of the Marines. Using binoculars, we could see occasional puffs of battle smoke as authorities regained control of Alcatraz.

Limited parts of Alcatraz--the name is drawn from the Spanish word for cormorants--now are open to the public; last year, more than 900,000 people boarded commercial boats at the Embarcadero to take the 1 1/4-mile voyage to the island.

But the trip is largely a sight-seeing excursion to an infamous prison. The island’s vegetation, 360-degree views of the bay and surrounding lands and its pre-prison history as a fortress go unnoticed.

This would all change if a plan being developed for Alcatraz is put into effect, which, among other things, would open the entire island, with a walkway covering the perimeter, most of it at sea level.

Then Alcatraz--which once imprisoned society’s worst and tantalized them with sights of San Francisco’s skyline and even the sounds of revelers at the St. Francis Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve--would to offer an incomparable vista for tourists.