S.F. Can’t Put On the Ritz for Millennium

The city that has reveled since the Gold Rush in living la vida loca finds itself facing the embarrassing prospect of welcoming in the millennium with more of a whimper than a bang.

Some less than fully booked hotels in this tourist mecca have had to drop sky-high New Year’s Eve rates and four-day-minimum stay requirements to lure guests. Now protests by environmentalists and a lack of money have forced Mayor Willie Brown to drastically scale back what he hoped would be a world-class blowout.

The mayor’s office canceled a midnight fireworks and laser display on the Golden Gate Bridge because of fears that crowds would trample newly planted shrubs and flowers in parkland flanking the bridge. The city also canceled fireworks at the Civic Center because it couldn’t raise enough private money to pay for them.

The result, Golden Gate Bridge District official Mary Currie said, is that “as the time zones change across the world, there will be celebrations in Hong Kong, Paris, New York--but San Francisco probably will not leave a lasting impression as we come into the new century.”

It is a blow for a city that prides itself on hedonistic excess, a place where tens of thousands march in and cheer on the Gay Pride Parade each year; where the Chinese New Year is welcomed with an elaborate parade and festival; and where ethnic and neighborhood parades and festivals abound.

When the last century turned, San Franciscans celebrated with gusto. People poured into Market Street on New Year’s Eve, greeting midnight in “a tide of feverish life, tooting horns, crashing cymbals, jangling bells, beating cans, utilizing every noise-producing device that ingenuity had heretofore produced and others that were unheard and undreamed of until last night,” said the San Francisco Examiner. “It was a shouting, dancing, capering human kinetoscope of noise and color.”

This New Year’s Eve, the city plans a more sedate “peace celebration” put together by local churches, synagogues and temples at Union Square.

Choirs, gospel choruses, poetry readings, inspirational speeches and a sermon by the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church will inject a spiritual element into the festivities. The event is free, but the public will be allowed into the square only with tickets handed out by local churches and other religious institutions. Police hope the tickets and the religious tenor will cut down on the rowdy behavior that has marred secular New Year’s Eve celebrations at Union Square in recent years.

The Embarcadero will host the second city-sponsored event. Several blocks along the waterfront will be closed all night and given over to a massive street party. Disc jockeys will play dance music, and there will be a fireworks and laser display using the historic Ferry Building as a backdrop.

City officials are trying to put the best face on the downsized events, but they acknowledge their disappointment that it won’t be quite the event of the century that Brown ordered up last January, when planning got underway.

“The Golden Gate Bridge is an icon that represents San Francisco nationally and internationally. We thought it would be marvelous to showcase it,” said Martha Cohen, the mayor’s coordinator of millennial events.

Brown had hoped to preside over the Civic Center party with a midnight champagne toast to the masses from the balcony of the gold-leafed City Hall. Instead, he will mingle with crowds at Union Square and the Embarcadero.

“We, like everybody else, have to live within our budget,” Cohen said.

Park officials say that they are glad the city came to its senses and canceled the Golden Gate extravaganza.

“The problem was that no thought had been given to the fact that the bridge rams at either end into national park lands,” said Trent Orr, a member of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area advisory commission.

“What you would have been doing with a spectacular fireworks show on the millennium is creating an extraordinary attractive nuisance for areas that aren’t equipped to handle crowds, that are poorly lighted, where there are steep cliffs. We were afraid people could fall from the cliffs and drown in the bay,” Orr said.

On its San Francisco side, the bridge rises from the Presidio, the former Army base turned national park. An army of volunteers is planting thousands of pickleweed and other native plants on the dunes of Crissy Field, the beach that would have offered the best viewing of the display, Orr said.

“It all would have been severely damaged for a single night of revelry,” he said.

Bill Arsotti, producer of the city’s millennial events for Bill Graham Productions, said he just wanted to ring in the millennium in San Francisco style, with the second--and most elaborate--display of fireworks ever mounted from the 62-year-old Golden Gate Bridge.

“The job I was given was to make it more spectacular than the bridge’s 50th anniversary party,” Arsotti said.

That party began early on May 25, 1987, with the bridge closed to cars and so many pedestrians crowded onto it that the span visibly sagged. That night, a cascade of fireworks from the bridge into the bay capped the festivities.

The proposed New Year’s Eve fireworks and laser display “would have put the Golden Gate Bridge on every TV set in the world,” Arsotti said wistfully.

Instead of being a focal point for festivities, the bridge’s pedestrian walkways will be closed at noon on New Year’s Eve, a security precaution that bridge officials say they are taking in case someone decides to greet the millennium by diving from its cables.

Arsotti insists that San Francisco still will put on a party to remember.

“I’ve watched what goes on in Times Square for many years and talked at length to the police and the presenters there,” Arsotti said. “Believe me, you would be much better off being on the Embarcadero than Times Square New Year’s Eve. At Times Square, what do they have? They have a ball that drops, and it takes 10 seconds.”

San Francisco, Arsotti said, “is going to have a whole night of dancing, lasers and lighting effects. We’re going to have an event very worthy of the tradition of San Francisco celebration.”

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Times researcher Norma Kaufman contributed to this story.