S.F. Waterfront Undergoing a Millennium Make-Over

The signs are all here: Hard hats milling in the morning fog, chain-link stretched across upended pavement, pale blue portable toilets dotting the Embarcadero.

This graceful city’s waterfront is ground zero in a massive construction explosion, San Francisco’s first building boom in 15 years.

More than a score of projects--from a humble fishing pier and a face lift for tacky Fisherman’s Wharf to the nation’s first privately funded baseball stadium--dot the 7.5 miles of stunning shoreline.

With a price tag of more than $2 billion and a completion date of who knows when, the welter of traffic-straining upgrades will forever change the character of what was California’s preeminent port from the Gold Rush until mid-century.

Why now and why here? A red-hot economy is the answer to the first question, a well-timed temblor the answer to the second. For this waterfront renaissance-in-the-making would not have been possible without the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which led to the destruction of the reviled Embarcadero Freeway.

Built in 1958, the elevated thoroughfare also known as the “Dambarcadero” cut downtown San Francisco off from its waterfront. When the highway was torn down a generation later, it gave this built-out city, with its rock-bottom vacancy rates and soaring real estate values, a swath of precious, open, developable land and a rare opportunity.

“It’s a crass way of looking at an earthquake, but it opened up a lot of important land,” said Amit Ghosh, the city’s chief of comprehensive planning. “If the Embarcadero Freeway did not come down, we’d be stuck with that noose around the neck and the waterfront construction wouldn’t be happening.”

Happening it is, at breakneck pace, “transforming a working port,” Ghosh said, “into a modern working port.”

Just what is a modern working port? Think a little bit of fishing, a smattering of boating, joined someday by restaurants, offices, more cruise lines and nearby hotels.

Think home runs smacked over the right-field wall of the Giants’ brand-new waterfront stadium and splashing into San Francisco Bay. Think white collar. Think entertainment.

The port’s evolution mirrors the basic tensions of a water-ringed city with little place to grow but up, a city where land is so precious that an “industrial preservation zone” is in the works.

The larger conflicts of San Francisco land development have cropped up throughout the process of making decisions about the waterfront’s future: tourists versus residents. Open space versus development. Housing versus commerce.

But don’t expect too much in the way of maritime activity. While revenues from cargo shipping have begun to creep back up, that business is a shadow of its earlier self, when the Port of San Francisco ruled California’s waters from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th.

“The history of San Francisco is so rooted in being a seaport, but in reality, we are tiny,” said Paul Osmundson, director of planning and development for the port, which owns the waterfront. “We’re a little port with a faded, glorious past.”

And the future? Hopefully as bright as redevelopment efforts in Baltimore and Seattle, but with a twist: San Francisco wants its revamped port to be more than a Disneyland-like destination; the goal is to be entertaining and integral to the city.

“Our vision is to make the port part of the city,” he said, “to make the port a place for people to come to the water and do things.”

Erratic Development

Right now, the waterfront is hit or miss from one pier to the next. At some points, underused bulkheads block pedestrians from the water. South of the Ferry Building, which the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen dubbed “a famous city’s most famous landmark,” moss-covered piers crumble into the bay. A handful of restaurants have been closed for months.

But other sections are already a draw. The city makes much of its tourist revenue at the T-shirt shops and souvenir stands of Pier 39, which is thick with visitors on good days and bad. The $300-million Pacific Bell Ballpark is racing toward completion for opening day 2000, and the Embarcadero sidewalks are studded with poetry traversed daily by in-line skaters and pedestrians, bicyclists and joggers.

When Jim Heid, an urban planner designing a “new town” near Shanghai, wanted to show China what a modern waterfront should look like, he brought a delegation to San Francisco.

The lesson: that good waterfronts aren’t uniform waterfronts, said Heid, a principal of the San Francisco-based urban design firm EDAW. That changing character is what makes them great.

“They couldn’t get it, couldn’t get it, couldn’t get it,” he said of his earlier attempts to explain the concept to the group, whose new town is centered around a lake. “We brought them here. They got it.”

The waterfront has been the soul of San Francisco for more than a century and a half, when the Gold Rush swelled the city’s population from 800 to 30,000 in the course of a year. By 1860, every commodity that could not be raised or obtained locally had to arrive here by water because of the deficiencies of the rail system, said historian Nancy Olmsted, and “the waterfront became the commercial artery of the city.”

Passenger ferries were so commonplace that a depot was built at the foot of Market Street in 1875, to be replaced by the massive Ferry Building in 1898. By 1913, 50,000 commuters a day walked through the Ferry Building, which is topped by a graceful clock tower.

At its peak in the 1930s, 50 million passengers traipsed through the Ferry Building each year, arriving from as close as the East Bay and as far as the East Coast and fanning out into the city to hook up with streetcars and trains.

But the construction of the Golden Gate and San Francisco/Oakland Bay bridges in the 1930s, along with the advent of the automobile age, marked the beginning of what seemed like the end for the stately structure with the marble mosaic floors and soaring nave.

Once the Embarcadero Freeway cut the building off from the city and ferry service was halted, the port constructed a third floor and offices where the vaulted waiting area once rose 42 feet.

Today, the neoclassical Beaux Arts edifice is embarking on a $70-million renovation, which the city views as the centerpiece of the waterfront’s revival. Among the biggest challenges is to hollow the building out again and re-create the airy main gallery.

If all goes as planned, the 660-foot-long first floor will contain open air markets and restaurants where locals and tourists alike can shop for things peculiarly Northern Californian--think Seattle’s Pike Place Market rolled into Harrods and splashed with a good pinot noir.

The renovation, along with the $40-million conversion of nearby Pier One into an office building, is “turning an important part of the city’s past into an exciting part of the city’s future,” said architect Cathy J. Simon, who is working on the project.

The two renovations are “test cases for how these wonderful warehouse buildings that line the waterfront of San Francisco can be reinvented as people spaces,” Simon said at a recent design critique of the project.

Other highlights include a new terminal for cruise lines at piers 30 and 32, completion of a rail line linking the northern and southern segments of the waterfront, a music pavilion highlighting a historic organ in the Ferry Building plaza and a boutique hotel off the foot of Market Street.

In addition, at Fisherman’s Wharf, the Wax Museum is being remodeled, a three-story Gap store is in the works and tentative plans are being drawn up for a hotel-museum.

A Sense of Faded Glory

The renovation is not without its detractors. Some are concerned that the port is barely a port anymore, after a proud century as the state’s preeminent commercial harbor. With technology changing the cargo business, by the 1970s the ports of Los Angeles, Oakland and Long Beach had overtaken San Francisco, and cargo business bled away.

By state law, however, the waterfront is still held in the public trust for maritime use. And Proposition H, passed by voters in 1990, outlawed hotels on the piers, requiring the creation of a waterfront plan, which was adopted in 1997.

Jennifer Clary, waterfront chairwoman for an activist organization called San Francisco Tomorrow, argues that only three of the nearly two dozen projects currently under way are related to this water-bound city’s maritime life. The waterfront plan, “instead of being visionary, it’s a list . . . tables telling you the kind of uses you can put on the piers.

“The idea behind waterfront development is that you should have development that can’t exist without the water, that creates a link to the water,” Clary said. “That’s how San Francisco was born and how we flourished. I’m worried that’s not going to be the case.”

Architect John Kriken, who has served for years as a design advisor to the port, feels that the main missed opportunity for San Francisco is actually “that we can’t get a greater mix of uses” along the waterfront, including residential development for this housing-starved city.

But he believes that when the trolley lines are complete between Fisherman’s Wharf and the ballpark, when the last tree is planted in the Ferry Building plaza, when the three new parks are finished and terminals are built for more cruise lines, that the waterfront again will be a center of city life.

“If we’re really successful,” he said, “it will feel like it’s for all the citizens of the city.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Building Boom on the Waterfront

San Francisco’s 7.5-mile waterfront is undergoing a $2-billion overhaul that includes a facelift for Fisherman’s Wharf and construction of a new ballpark.

1. Aquatic sports-related complex.

2. Ferry Building rehabilitation project

3. Pier 24 Annex retail, restaurant & entertainment

4. Bryant Street Pier cruise ship terminal.

5. Pacific Bell Ballpark