An Oh-So-San Francisco Bridge Brouhaha

They have formed a sort of creative cabal, this small cadre of elite architects, with a mission that is simple and a little subversive:

To rescue the soaring San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge from the plebeian state of California. To wrest it from the Department of Transportation--an agency, they sniff, that has feet of asphalt. To remake the bridge--or at least the bridge designers--in their very own, more artistic image.

“Caltrans says it’s their bridge, but it’s in the middle of San Francisco Bay, and it will be a part of the visible landscape of this city,” said Aaron Betsky, curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art here. “Our interest is very much to say: ‘It’s not just a bridge. It’s not just a piece of engineering. It’s a piece of the landscape, a piece of the culture of San Francisco.’ ”

In a process that already threatens to become oh-so-San Francisco, the Bay Area is trying to figure out how to rebuild the eastern span of its No. 2 visual icon, which was patched up after the powerful Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

Caltrans is floating several designs for a replacement, possibilities that range from a stripped-down Kmart version all the way up to the Saks Fifth Avenue model. From design through construction, the project could cost more than $2 billion and take up to seven years.

The obstacles are enormous: The design process must be fast enough to outrun the next big earthquake but measured enough to create a functional monument that will withstand the tests of time.

It must be accommodating enough to include nests for endangered birds, bicycle lanes and possibly pedestrians, but flossy enough to satisfy a city that prides itself on its sense of style.

No one must be left out of the process. No advocacy group can be silenced. And no way can this city--which presumes to call itself The City--live with a bridge designed by the likes of what they see as an aesthetically challenged state agency.

This is, after all, San Francisco, home to “the best and worst of democracy, where everyone wants to have a say,” contends architect Clark Manus. “But great ideas get watered down. Could a Golden Gate Bridge be built today? Probably not.”

Just a minute, says Greg Bayol, spokesman for Caltrans District 4, fuming at what he views as unfair criticism by special interests. “Just look at what we’ve done,” he said.

“The most recent bridges we’ve built, designed directly by Caltrans, were the [nearby] Antioch Bridge and the Dumbarton Bridge, and both have won national beauty awards,” Bayol said. “There’s a lot of expertise here. . . . And we’re open and willing to talk to people beyond the doors of Caltrans.”

Bayol would be the first to agree that public outcry--over anything and everything--has been raised to an art form in the Bay Area.

San Francisco is where debate over pesticides in public places forced officials to enlist a squadron of gopher-eating barn owls to counter rodents in Golden Gate Park.

Where animal rights activists went up against Chinese residents in what became an international food fight over the selling of live beasts for human consumption.

Where the hubbub over the death of the fruit flies in a Mill Valley student’s science fair project got him temporarily kicked out of the competition.

Where talk reigns, spices things up--and threatens to slow them down, way, way down.

“The public debate in this community is essential,” said Mary V. King, an Alameda County supervisor and head of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s bridge design task force. “We still believe in the Free Speech Movement of [1960s firebrand] Mario Savio.”

On the other hand, King is quick to add, there’s a bad side to the free speaking tradition. Parts of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland are still down, she notes, victims of the 1989 Loma Preita earthquake. In contrast, the Southern California freeways damaged in the 1994 Northridge quake were up and running in a matter of months.

The difference, she contends, is talk. “We have people here who will lay their bodies across that bridge” to get their point across, King said.

“I don’t think my counterparts in Sacramento appreciate what my office has to go through in our day-to-day business,” Bayol says with a sigh. “We get calls and letters from people who are very vehement. . . . In the Bay Area there are a lot of interest groups that know how to be heard.”

A circumstance Bayol describes as “the inferiority complex of Oakland and the superiority complex of San Francisco” also has produced trans-bay bridge design tensions.

It isn’t the first time that East and West Bay have clashed over the historic structure, which is actually two distinct bridges that span San Francisco Bay and meet in the middle at Yerba Buena Island.

UC Berkeley engineering professor Abolhassan Astaneh-asl was researching the original 1936 structures when he stumbled over the minutes of a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting early in that decade.

“The Board of Supervisors said: ‘We need a very elegant and inspiring span for the San Francisco-to-Yerba Buena Island side,’ ” Astaneh-asl said, “ ‘ and behind the island, we need to be able to take loads to the Port of Oakland.’ They didn’t even give it the dignity of saying ‘the city of Oakland.’ ”

The ensuing 61 years have done little to assuage the East Bay’s nagging self-esteem problem. At a recent bridge design committee meeting, a plaintive Greg Rowe, economic development manager for the Oakland Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, beseeched the group: “It’s important to look at aesthetics. A design that looks at Oakland as a gateway to the East Bay is very important.”

In an angry e-mail missive to Caltrans titled “The Lesser of Two Sides of the Bay,” East Bay resident Rudi Raab complained about what he sees as longtime architectural inequity.

San Francisco got the Golden Gate Bridge and the graceful half of the Bay Bridge, he huffed. Oakland got the ugly side once and is threatened with more “ugly, cheap” treatment during the rebuilding process.

“Are we trying to say that Oakland does not rate what the ‘City’ rates?” Raab wrote. “Or are we saying that we are financially and aesthetically bankrupt? Nothing but a graceful suspension bridge will suffice!”

So far, the simplest design is among the most controversial. Its detractors compare it to a freeway offramp, and Raab and others think it gives short shrift to struggling Oakland.

But there are also worries that a fancier new eastern stretch of the bridge will clash with the beloved western segment. Some fear that a dolled-up design suggested for the portion between Yerba Buena Island and Oakland is too fussy to blend with the grand suspension bridge that remains.

“It’s like having two operas playing on the same stage at the same time,” said architect James Ream. “They can both be great operas, but trying to play ‘Aida’ on one side of the stage and ‘Don Giovanni’ on the other, what you get is aesthetic clutter.”

There can be no aesthetic clutter here.

Of course the local newspapers have gotten into the act. “No Ugly Bridges,” screamed a San Francisco Examiner editorial when the design process began in early spring.

The San Francisco Chronicle, disgusted by the first two possible designs offered by Caltrans, enlisted famed bridge designer T.Y. Lin to draw a prettier and cheaper alternative in a sort of front-page nanner-nanner.

The article, promised Chronicle architecture critic Alan Tempko, “was just the opening salvo.”

Then there’s the public.

Nearly two-thirds of those who spoke at a bridge design committee hearing in Oakland last week were begging for a bike lane--and not just any bike lane. Nope, these activists want a bike lane that would span both segments of the bridge--all eight miles’ worth--and would accommodate in-line skaters, wheelchairs and pedestrians.

“I’m a cyclist, and I’m also disabled,” said Cecilie Birner, who suffers from a genetic joint disorder and had to stand on a chair to see over the podium. “The disabled community is really excited about the ability to roll across the bridge.”

And then there was William Caldeira of Berkeley, who described himself as an “aboriginal Bay Area person--multiracial,” and asked the bridge design committee to . . . well, it was hard to tell just what he wanted.

“All of us in the Bay Area and the world are the architects of the future,” Caldeira told the baffled panel. “Haste makes waste. Think globally and act locally. In life, in the Bay Area, where I’ve lived my whole life, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

Caldeira’s ensemble was probably the best indicator of his intentions. Dressed in black from toes to nose, his outfit was topped with a white bike helmet.

So persuasive was the wheeled set that Caltrans officials have agreed to attend a meeting of the Bike the Bridge Coalition in Berkeley next week.

“They’re very well organized,” Bayol says. “They are being heard.”

But then again, who isn’t?