From Army Airfield to Bayside Park

For years, Crissy Field served as the industrial back door for the U.S. Army at San Francisco’s historic Presidio military base.

Strewn with rubble, paved with more than 40 acres of asphalt and scarred by an elevated freeway separating it from the rest of the Presidio, the field graphically underscored the post’s 200-year military history. By trashing the site, the Army turned its back on the breathtaking mile-and-a-half panorama of San Francisco Bay visible from its shores.

Now, all that is changing as the 100-acre waterfront site, which stretches from San Francisco’s Marina district to the Golden Gate Bridge, undergoes a $27-million rebirth.

An army of volunteers is working with the National Park Service to erase decades of abuse and transform Crissy Field into a bayside showpiece for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

It is a project unlike any other undertaken by the park service, one combining an ocean promenade, amphitheater and beach with the reintroduction of a 20-acre slice of tidal wetlands in the midst of a city.

“We’re not even done and bird species already are arriving and trying to colonize,” said Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Assn., the nonprofit group that has raised private funds to finance the restoration. “There are still bulldozers moving around in there and yet we’ve seen egrets and sandpipers and herons.”

Project supporters say the reintroduction of nature to the Presidio stands in sharp contrast to the development underway on the rest of the 1,480-acre base site.

The Army handed over the Presidio to the park service in 1994 and it was the first national park that Congress ordered to become self-sufficient. It also is the first national park to be managed mostly by a quasi-governmental trust.

The Presidio Trust, a presidentially appointed board of businesspeople, government officials and environmentalists, is renting former homes of officers, barracks and administrative buildings to residents and businesses at market-rate rents. So far, filmmaker George Lucas is the highest-profile would-be tenant.

Lucas plans to replace the base’s abandoned military hospital with a futuristic digital movie studio and a campus to house his subsidiary corporations. The trust hopes Lucas’ project will turn the Presidio into a magnet for multimedia and high-tech companies.

Park advocates worry that in the rush to develop the property, the trust is giving short shrift to the Presidio’s intended purpose as parkland.

Crissy Field’s restoration, park advocates say, offers proof that the public will get more than just office space out of the old base.

Wrapped around the San Francisco Bay headlands, the Presidio is one of the most visually stunning and historically important sites in Northern California. Established by Spanish explorers, the base boasts a grassy parade ground lined with red-roofed wooden and stucco buildings once used by the 6th Army. Its wooded slopes are dotted with spacious officers’ homes, open meadows, a military cemetery and forests of towering eucalyptus trees. Beneath its soil lies archeological remnants of Native American, Spanish and U.S. Army occupations.

Nineteenth century photographs of Crissy Field show more than 100 acres of wetlands edged by clapboard Army buildings. The old photographs were taken after tons of rubble created by the 1906 earthquake were dumped in the marshes, but before most of the wetlands were filled in for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition.

In 1919, the Army Air Service built the airfield--named for flyer Maj. Dana H. Crissy--that gave the site its name. The airfield became obsolete in the 1930s, after the Golden Gate Bridge was built and it became too dangerous to take off and land.

Crissy Field began a long, slow decline.

“The military just saw it as a big, open space they could occupy for industrial use,” Moore said. The Army paved over much of the old airfield and other parts of the site, built warehouses and a fuel depot. Caltrans erected an elevated approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Crissy Field’s luck began to change in 1972, when Congress created the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which eventually grew into 40 miles of parkland stretching north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge. Portions of Crissy Field’s shoreline became part of the park, and park service officials began to dream about transforming it.

The restoration got a big boost when the Haas family, owners of San Francisco-based Levi Strauss Co., contributed $16 million to the project.

The Army spent more than $10 million ridding the site of old fuel supply tanks, pesticides, chemicals and 85,000 cubic yards of contaminated soils. The park service pumped clean sand onto the beach and built a mile-and-a-half-long, 20-foot-wide promenade winding along the shore to the Golden Gate Bridge.

A 28-acre meadow will soon replace the asphalt that covered the old airfield on the west side of the site. A newly planted grove of Monterey pines now serves as the site’s gateway on the east side.

Thousands of volunteers from churches, neighborhoods and nonprofit groups have spent months collecting native plant seeds and raising seedlings for the project. They’ve planted verbena, yarrow, pickleweed and other hardy coastal flora in restored sand dunes, and will plant thousands more this winter along the edges of the tidal marsh.

On Nov. 9, a sea wall will be breached and bay water will be allowed to flow back into a 20-acre marsh sculpted by Philip Williams and Associates, hydrology consultants who have worked on 100 West Coast marsh restorations.

At the moment, much of the field looks more like a massive, muddy construction site than a natural wonderland, but San Franciscans are already flocking to it. Families and dogs crowd the narrow beach on weekends. Joggers and bikers pack the promenade. People settle on the low bench built to separate the beach from the parking lot and feast their eyes on the the bridge, Alcatraz and flotillas of sailboats scudding along the bay.

An environmental education center that will run tours of the marsh and explain the site’s history, picnic tables, restrooms and a snack bar are slated to open in the next year.

Bay Area environmentalists applaud the project, particularly the restoration of marsh on the highly urbanized bay.

“The fact that they’ve been able to embark on an ambitious program like this so close to a highly urban section of San Francisco is critically important when we’re trying to build a community in the Bay Area to support additional restoration,” said Grant Davis, executive director of the nonprofit Bay Institute.

“This will give urban kids who have never seen a tidal wetland an opportunity to see it in a park-like setting beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s pretty dramatic.”

In recent weeks, the parks association has launched a “Help Build Crissy Field” campaign, posting banners on lampposts and buses across the city to raise money for more plantings.

“We wanted to find a way to instill a sense of community stewardship in this site,” said Brian O’Neill, director of the National Recreation area. “We want people to become part of the restoration.”