Debut of a Glittering New Diamond

For decades, when it came to baseball, “the City That Knows How” decidedly didn’t. The hometown Giants turned in routinely sketchy performances on the field, while drawing only the hardiest fans to frigid, forlorn Candlestick Park.

But the Stick has been abandoned by baseball, and San Franciscans are lining up in their tweedy splendor to christen a new downtown stadium that is stylish, intimate and exclusive--in short, all things that this city holds dear.

With an opening series against the hated Dodgers beginning today, Pacific Bell Park is essentially sold out. For the entire season. Brokers are asking $600 to $2,500 for an opening day seat.

The stadium opening marks the zenith of a renaissance in the south-of-Market Street neighborhood once known as a haven for junkies and dilapidated warehouses. Now dot-com companies have created a boomtown atmosphere in SoMa, as it is known. Free-spending “dot-commies” snapped up many of the “charter seat licenses”--the lifetime rights to the best seats in Pac Bell Park--just another affirmation of their feeling that they are living in one of the city’s golden moments.

“I walked to the first exhibition game, and everyone was just flooding down to the park. Everyone was smiling, really happy. It was the greatest,” said Kevin Kokoszka, 29, a programmer for an upstart Internet company. “You look around, and everybody is making money, driving a Range Rover or a Lexus. And people are into the park being right here and walking there. It’s like a Gold Rush right now.”

Corporate Sponsors Key

But the new neighborhood and its star attraction are not without their detractors. Some in San Francisco say steep ticket prices--the sixth highest in baseball--exacerbate the city’s giant class divide. Artists who embraced the neighborhood before it was trendy resent being driven out by the high-tech invaders, the baseball team and the higher rents they’ve brought with them.

Without the city’s new wealth, most people here realize, the Giants probably couldn’t have afforded to build the first privately financed ballpark in the major leagues in 30 years.

Four times, Northern Californians rejected ballot measures that would have required public subsidies for a new stadium before they signed on to the waterfront proposal.

Much of the $319-million construction cost will be carried by Pacific Bell, which paid $50 million to place its name on the park, and by 14 other corporate sponsors. Fans paying $1,500 to $6,000 for “charter seat licenses” have already fronted $70 million for lifetime rights to the best seats in the house. (That doesn’t include the ticket prices of up to $3,400 a year.)

Pac Bell Park is not entirely “free” to the taxpayers, however. The city spent about $11 million to help assemble the 13 acres at what used to be Pier 46B and to relocate port facilities. An additional $15 million, at least, has been spent to build roads and make other public improvements.

Mayor Willie Brown insists that “every nickel” of public spending will more than be repaid through rent and a combination of property, sales and payroll taxes.

For their money, the Giants get a stadium that tries to capture the feeling of ballparks of the past and retro stadiums of the present--like Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore and Coors Field in Denver. Pac Bell Park’s brick towers and soaring green steel girders make a striking contrast to the Bay Bridge to the north and downtown skyline to the west.

An ‘Instant Civic Treasure’

Locals are captivated by the idea that they can stroll 15 minutes from the financial district to catch a game, where star outfielder Barry Bonds just might plunk a home run over the right field fence and into San Francisco Bay.

With the closest seats just 46 feet from home plate, the stadium is said to be the most intimate in baseball. The quirky geometry of the outfield, a hand-operated scoreboard for out-of-town scores and an open concourse circling the stadium also evoke baseball venues of old.

The mayor calls the new brickyard by the bay an “instant civic treasure” and an “icon for a city that is very possessive of its icons.” He believes that any history of his administration should include the stadium’s construction “in the first sentence.”

Others would agree, but say that legacy is not a proud one. Brown has been criticized for failing to slow development or provide housing for low- and middle-income families, such as those forced out of the nearby Mission district. Now, some longtime residents see the new stadium and Internet businesses putting the squeeze on sheet metal plants, garment shops and photo studios, which can’t afford to stay in the South of Market neighborhood.

“This is a small town, and there is nowhere left to get a piece of the American pie for you and your family or for a small business,” said Paul Boden, director of the Coalition on Homelessness. “They act like, ‘If it doesn’t look good to tourists, we don’t want to see it in this town.’ What is this, San Diego north?”

The city has previously attempted zoning to prevent expensive housing from driving out light industry, even creating an “industrial protection zone.” In 1986 voters passed a proposition to cap office development. But none of it has been able to slow the high-tech companies from gutting warehouses and propping up computer cubicles.

South of Market bristles with scaffolding and roars with the sound of jackhammers.

“This is a kind of land use that is brand new for us, and nobody really knows what kind of impact it will have,” said Amit Ghosh, the city’s chief of long-range planning.

Farther south along the waterfront, the 200-plus-acre Mission Bay development--including a research campus for UC San Francisco--promises to replace more corrugated metal warehouses.

Struggling to survive the new wave are companies such as Arion Press, a lead-type foundry and art book publisher on Bryant Street that can’t afford to stay in a neighborhood where monthly rents have jumped from about 50 cents a square foot to more than $6.

Historian Kenneth Starr has said the loss to the city of this “cultural treasure” would be incalculable, like awakening to a San Francisco without City Lights Bookstore or the American Conservatory Theatre.

“The city government has just caved in to this whole wave of change,” said Andrew Hoyem, the press’ publisher, who is scrambling to find a new home. Dot-com employees in their 20s and 30s now loll about the lawn of the neighborhood’s South Park, making it look like a college quad. But Hoyem said he fears that “we lose the mix and variety of the city that has characterized San Francisco and made it such a wonderful place.”

But like many people who live and work south of Market Street, Hoyem views the changes as a mixed bag. He and a friend, a private detective, are charter seat holders at the new stadium. After two exhibition games, he proclaims the Pac Bell Park “fabulous.” Hoyem just hopes his company can hang around, so he can keep walking to games.

With the first pitch rapidly approaching, workers swarmed over the stadium last weekend, feverishly applying final touches. Painters sprayed another coat of green on the giant Coke bottle/children’s slide beyond left field. A crane lowered an archway on the soon-to-open ferry landing just behind center, and a technician hit a switch, blasting water from four columns atop the right field wall--the signal that will memorialize Giants’ homers that splash into the bay.

Directly behind the wall, a wide promenade will allow the public to walk around the ballpark and even catch ground-level views of the game through the chain-link fence in right field. It won’t cost a dime to watch the action there.

Giants Chief Operating Officer Larry Baer said it’s all part of the team’s desire to create a “great urban scene,” one that begins even as black-and-orange-clad Giants fans stream into the park. More than half should arrive by bus, rail, streetcar, ferry, bicycle and walking, making the stadium the most mass transit-intensive in the country, Baer said. Ten Giants live within walking distance of Pac Bell; one in a condo right across the street.

A Tall Order for Transit

With just 4,800 dedicated parking spaces, the many transportation alternatives are a must. Extra buses and light rail cars managed the load admirably during two exhibition games. But some locals are skeptical that the city’s transit system can sustain the service over 81 games. Opening day will be an early bellwether, with the first pitch at 1:05 p.m. and the game probably ending just as downtown’s already hellacious rush hour begins.

“It’s an impossible situation. We can’t sustain that kind of diversion of buses throughout the whole city, just to make one project work,” said Doug Comstock, an activist who opposed building the stadium, “especially when projects are popping up on every street corner.”

But transit officials insist they can keep the fans moving and not cut service elsewhere in the city.

Other Pac Bell Park operations remain in the shakedown phase as well. Restaurants and concessions will offer everything from Alaskan salmon to garlic fries, sushi and quesadillas. But one local newspaper critic protested that most of the specialty foods are sold only on the pricey Club Level. And new concessions operators didn’t get any spring training, which became apparent with the huge lines for food at the exhibitions. Those glitches probably can be straightened out, but the prices are there to stay: $9 gets you a hot dog and a beer.

Baer and the Giants management said they wouldn’t have already sold 3 million tickets, though, if they weren’t cognizant about service and becoming a total “entertainment destination” for more than just die-hard baseball fans.

That’s why there’s a giant Coke slide in the outfield, along with a miniature Pac Bell Park play area and picnic tables. That’s why Sega of America will soon open 20 computer gaming consoles in a complex behind center field, for cyber-baseball and other games. That’s why the stadium provides those sweeping views of the Bay Bridge and the downtown skyline.

In fact there is so much froufrou around the edges of the park that it took Willie Mays, the Giants’ incomparable center fielder, to remind some members of the media why it was built in the first place.

“Everybody is talking about the [bay] view,” Mays said at the dedication of a towering statue of him outside the park’s main entrance. “Who cares about the view? This is not a condo here. It’s a ballpark. Let’s play ball.”

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New Game in the Neighborhood

With a series against the Dodgers beginning today, the opening of Pacific Bell Park marks the high point of a renaissance in the neighborhood south of Market Street once known as a haven for junkies and struggling warehouses.