From wharf rat to crown jewel

In the 1955 science-fiction movie “It Came From Beneath the Sea,” a giant octopus slithered out of San Francisco Bay and pulled down the landmark Ferry Building.

What actually happened two years later was almost as bad. The double-deck Embarcadero Freeway rose like a great concrete beast and cut off San Francisco’s historic waterfront from the rest of the city for more than three decades, until the 1989 earthquake weakened the freeway and the hated structure was torn down. The city could again see the Ferry Building, but it was in sad shape: The great hall that runs the length of the edifice had been subdivided and crammed with offices, its skylights roofed over, its mosaic floors covered with linoleum. Beaux-Arts details had been lost to cheap mid-century fixes. The once beautiful building looked like a bag lady on a bad day.

Now, after years of wrangling and a $100-million architectural rehabilitation, the Ferry Building has been restored to its former splendor. The grand concourse is again open to the public, streaming with sunlight and people. A bustling farmers market fills the surrounding sidewalk with life. For the first time in years, the soaring clock tower tells the correct time more than twice a day.

“The building is really a living thing,” says developer Chris Meany, whose firm, Wilson Meany Sullivan, teamed with Equity Office Properties Trust and the Port of San Francisco for the venture. “Working on this project has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Everyone loves this building.”

The Ferry Building is the pivot of the port’s ambitious plan to redevelop its waterfront.

“Its not just an icon anymore,” says Byron Rhett, director of planning and development for the Port of San Francisco, which owns the structure. “People are using the building again. It’s a symbol of what we’re trying to do.” The building began reopening in stages in March, and although some of the retail stores on the lower level are still operating out of boxes, more than 90% of the space has been leased, Meany says.

“The Ferry Building is the major focus of the waterfront,” adds J. Gordon Turnbull, president of Page & Turnbull, one of the architects that worked on the rehab. “It’s a real direction-giver to the city. San Francisco doesn’t have a Grand Central or a Union Station. This shows people what the connection between the city and the water can be.”

When the Ferry Building opened in 1898 that connection was obvious. At the foot of Market Street, the city’s major thoroughfare, the gray-green Colusa sandstone building was San Francisco’s gateway to the world. The continental railroad ended in Oakland, and passengers and freight finished the journey by ferry. Fifty thousand people a day flowed through the terminal. “A famous city’s most famous landmark,” columnist Herb Caen called it.

Arthur Page Brown, an alum of McKim, Mead & White, designed the three-story building that stretched along the shore for the length of more than two football fields, and that was topped by a 240-foot clock tower modeled after the Cathedral of Seville.

The building was one of the few to survive the 1906 earthquake. Tugboats hosed down the structure while fire raged across the street, destroying most of downtown. The Army used it as its headquarters while the city was rebuilt. Troops were back at the Ferry Building in 1934 when radical labor leader Harry Bridges and his longshoremen went on strike, shutting down the port for almost three months and eventually the entire city as well (in 2001, the new plaza in front of the building was named in Bridges’ honor).

Then came the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, which were built in the late 1930s. Cars replaced ferries as the main way to get to the city.

In 1955, the Ferry Building was remodeled. The concourse was closed to the few remaining ferry passengers; another floor was inserted into the space, which was filled with offices.

“The Ferry Building was a casualty of the automobile age and the neglect of public space,” says Turnbull. “The port began to think that the building couldn’t be used for much.” Next, the Embarcadero Freeway severed the building from the rest of the city. By the 1980s, even most container ships were avoiding San Francisco’s waterfront and heading for the Port of Oakland instead. The only stretch of shoreline that saw much foot traffic was Fisherman’s Wharf.

“San Francisco is one of the great waterfront cities in the world and yet there was no connection with the water except in the tourist zone,” says Meany. “The city was walled off from the water. All the Ferry Building was was a clock tower you saw peeking over the freeway.” In 1991, the freeway -- perhaps the most loathed urban structure in America -- was demolished. Life returned to the waterfront. Tony restaurants like Boulevard opened. A lively farmers market popped up in the makeshift parking lot that replaced the freeway in front of the Ferry Building. “When the freeway came down it created the opportunity to think about how to reconnect the citizens to the waterfront,” notes Rhett, the port’s planning director.

The city built an esplanade -- named in honor of columnist Caen -- to show off the fantastic views of the bay, lined the shoreline road with palm trees and started running antique trolley cars along the route. Pacific Bell Park, the new home of the San Francisco Giants, also attracted visitors to the area.

Finally, in 1998, the Ferry Building rehabilitation project got off the ground. Three firms worked on the building: SMWM (Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris), BCV Architects and Page & Turnbull.

Early planning coincided with the dot-com boom, leading the developers to expect that office space could fetch $60 a square foot. However, the price had dropped to about half as much by the time the building actually started leasing.

“This was not an easy job,” says developer Meany. “After City Hall, this is the most loved building in San Francisco. Every agency you can think of has jurisdiction. The food community was suspicious of business. [The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks] happened. San Francisco went through a bleak period with tourism. It was difficult in every way.”

Construction workers gutted the building. New skylights opened the length of the nave to natural light. Workers ripped out the third floor, which had been wedged into the concourse. More controversial was tearing holes in the second floor to brighten the ground level, which originally had been a baggage handling area but now was to become the main public passageway. After addressing preservationists’ complaints, the architects removed only 10% of the floor and went to great pains to relocate the floor’s uncovered mosaic tile to other parts of the second story.

“The big idea was that this building had a soul,” Meany says. “It had this great hallway that ran the length of the building, one of the most important and dramatic interior spaces in the western U.S.” The ground floor was turned into a food court with 65,000 square feet of shops purveying local goat cheese, organic olive oil, grass-fed beef and yuppie kitchen accouterments such as hand-cranked chrome juice squeezers. The building is also home to the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture, a nonprofit organization that runs the farmers market, which is now held four times a week and which eventually will be open daily. The upper reaches of the building contain 175,000 square feet of office space. The famed Slanted Door restaurant is also scheduled to move in later in the year.

The Ferry Building is only part of the Port of San Francisco’s master plan to redevelop its waterfront, which stretches from Fishermen’s Wharf in the north for more than seven miles to a cargo shipping facility on the southeastern side of the city.

“The overall plan for the waterfront is to reconnect it with the city,” says Rhett. “The waterfront is in transition from historical piers and sheds and industrial uses to other kinds of development. People live right on the waterfront these days. The redevelopment will take a couple of decades.” The city recently approved a $44-million project to turn three piers near the Ferry Building into a restaurant-and-office development. Also on the drawing board is a $400-million plan to build a cruise ship complex that will more than double the port’s docking capacity.

“The Ferry Building is the crown jewel of the Embarcadero,” says Lex Campbell, a Page & Turnbull designer who worked on the refurbishment. “It’s neat just to take a walk and see what’s happening on these old docks and piers that had been falling apart.”