15 seconds that changed San Francisco
A generation ago, the city had a fear of heights. But now, on land cleared by Loma Prieta, new high-rises are getting the chance to soar.
- John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer
Friday, October 22, 2004
The Loma Prieta earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989, unleashed forces of change that have invigorated San Francisco's waterfront, revived civic treasures and sparked the creation of new city landmarks.
Now comes the temblor's final and most visible effect: a new southern skyline where people live, not work.
The full impact of this vertical neighborhood near the waterfront south of Market Street goes beyond height or the potential 7,400 new housing units. It will transform the visual image of San Francisco. Unlike Chicago or New York, cities defined so emphatically by their skylines, San Francisco is something much more: a memorable and truly unique drama of hills and buildings, trees and towers, water and light and fog.
The skyline-to-be will climb above the low-rise industrial jumble of the blocks that line the approach to the Bay Bridge. The area already has a handful of residential towers as high as 250 feet, but the city now intends to allow a dozen or more towers up to 550 feet -- adding an urban neighborhood to a city long enamored with cozy, village-like settings.
All this might seem worlds removed from the harrowing 15 seconds of Loma Prieta. But several towers will be on land once covered by ramps of the late, unlamented Embarcadero Freeway -- a casualty of the quake -- and close by the newly inviting waterfront, with its attractions that didn't exist 15 years ago.
For the new skyline to enhance the city, San Francisco must heed the lessons of Loma Prieta.
The best changes since the earthquake are the ones rooted in San Francisco's distinctive setting and values. They're imbued with the sense of community, the notion that public spaces should be enticing, that neighborhoods should include diverse populations, and that well-crafted buildings can glow with pride.
But the residential towers built so far don't reach those standards. Looking at them together, you see monochromatic gray clutter. Despite prices that have surpassed $1.5 million per unit, the structures have a cut-rate feel. You'd think San Francisco is a city that doesn't care about its appearance.
As history shows full well, that most definitely is not the case.
When the 1960s dawned, San Francisco looked the same as it had for 30 years: Low, light-colored buildings draped the hills, except for a few modest exclamation points rising over the Financial District or on top of Nob Hill.
And then everything changed.
New towers popped up above the 435-foot gothic summit of the Russ Building, the Financial District's highest peak -- and pushed out into places where nobody ever expected them to be. Portsmouth Square in Chinatown sprouted a 364-foot-high slab that may be the least beckoning Holiday Inn in existence. The Bank of America proclaimed its corporate might with 779 feet of craggy red granite.
As the 1970s began, the Transamerica Pyramid topped everything before it with 853 feet of concrete across the street from the cherished, brick-lined passageways of historic Jackson Square.
For those who loved their big city's small-town scale, each new skyscraper was another dagger aimed at the city's soul.
"People living in neighborhoods like North Beach, Telegraph Hill and Chinatown saw towers coming at them," recalls Jerry Cauthen, one of the founders of San Francisco Tomorrow, which was created in 1969 to tackle development issues. "We had 50 or 60 neighborhood groups screaming. The buildings were brutish and pretty ugly -- a lot of schlock architecture -- and the city didn't seem able to do anything about it."
So residents did. They won some battles and lost most others before deciding the best defense was a good offense -- such as a 1971 ballot initiative to cap the height of new buildings at six stories. Period. The unlikely source: a dressmaker named Alvin Duskin, who kicked off his effort with newspaper ads proclaiming, "You can help decide if our city will become a skyline of tombstones."
What followed was a crusade more than a campaign, complete with an anti-high-rise coloring book featuring cartoons with such captions as "little cable cars that used to cling to the sides of sunny hills now moved through dark canyons."
The crusade also brought apocalyptic warnings that the towers would unleash "Manhattanization" -- a charged term that in 1971 meant more than tall buildings. New York City then embodied everything Americans feared about big cities: People were moving out as fast as crime was going up in a dirty city that couldn't pay its bills.
Why should San Francisco -- snug Baghdad-by-the-Bay -- follow New York over the cliff?
The Duskin initiative lost handily. But five more variations followed in the next 15 years, and voters in 1986 put a cap on growth that for all intents and purposes allowed no more than one smallish office tower a year.
Looking back, Cauthen suggests that height became symbolic of much deeper concerns.
"There was always an element of the population that hated to see something disappear and be replaced by something much bigger, but there was lots more going on," Cauthen said. "There were beautiful buildings being destroyed, and we seemed to be submerging the hills in high-rises. All that wrapped in together."
So what happened to the fear of heights?
One answer is that San Franciscans found more pressing things to worry about -- AIDS, homelessness and out-of-control housing prices. And the recession of the early 1990s, exacerbated in San Francisco by Loma Prieta's economic aftershocks, meant that for years there was no demand for new tall buildings.
By the time there was, the skyline upheaval that began in the 1960s was a full generation in the past.
The average San Franciscan today is 36, meaning he or she was born in 1968 -- the same year the Bank of America building soared into the air, and months before pickets wearing dunce caps protested Transamerica's planned tower.
Now, the Transamerica Pyramid is the most recognizable icon on the skyline -- the only San Francisco skyline many of us have ever known.
"The genie is out of the bottle," says Michael Antonini, 58, a planning commissioner who has lived for 31 years on the city's west side, where anything larger than a single family home is viewed with suspicion. "You don't see hills like you once did ... Now height is secondary to the quality and tastefulness of what gets done. There's the potential that some really good things could happen."
The future of high-rise living in San Francisco will depend on people like Nav and Avi Singh.
The young couple moved north in May from Orange County and a townhouse snuggled close to the ground. Now they own a condominium in a much different setting: the eighth floor of the Metropolitan, a complex at First and Folsom streets in a fast-changing part of town called Rincon Hill.
The 21- and 27-story towers include a health club, a concierge, freshly planted trees along the sidewalk and a view that stretches from Potrero Hill to the Financial District. The Singhs have a car but rarely use it because they work downtown. The couple's Saturday ritual is a stroll to the Embarcadero and the Ferry Building and, if there's time, up to North Beach.
"I feel like we're getting the total San Francisco experience even though it's not a neighborhood neighborhood," says Nav, 29, a financial analyst. "The benefit of living in a nice building near work outweighs the benefit of being in an old setting."
Planners and developers know there are other Nav and Avi Singhs who, given the chance, will pay good money to live in a district that's new and tall. They might be young couples who aren't ready to settle in the suburbs, or older ones looking for a change after their children leave home.
"There's the push of bad traffic and the pull of better downtowns," says John McIlwaine, a senior fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C., a developers' think tank. "You're buying a lifestyle. They want to go out in the evening and feel like they're part of the action."
The high-rise scene will center on about 95 acres between Yerba Buena Center on the west, Mission Street on the north, the bay on the east and the Bay Bridge on the south.
It's an area that hasn't been glamorous since the 1860s, when Rincon Hill and its stubby 100-foot peak had a brief reign as the city's address of choice before cable cars made it possible to build mansions atop Nob Hill. The blocks inland from the Embarcadero and south of the Financial District devolved into a backwater of warehouses, repair shops and light industry.
Now the nearby waterfront is in bloom, the old warehouses have become lofts or office space -- and the blocks on either side of Folsom Street are poised to take on a new identity.
The north side is under the watch of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which has drawn up a plan that allows six towers between 300 and 550 feet on land formerly covered by ramps that tied the Embarcadero Freeway to the Bay Bridge.
Selling the ramp land to developers will help finance the $2.1 billion Transbay Terminal project, which involves an underground extension of the Caltrain commuter line from the Peninsula to a new transit hub at First and Mission streets.
On the south side of Folsom lies Rincon Hill, where the city's planning department last year made the mistake of approving two projects containing a total of four 350- and 400-foot towers. The quartet -- packed tightly in a zigzag along Folsom between Spear and Beale streets -- could block views to and from the bay.
Since then, the department has taken a more pro-active approach: It is drawing up a long-range plan for the neighborhood rather than reacting to what developers bring in the door. The department's proposal would allow four more towers between 400 and 550 feet, but they are spaced widely at the crest of the hill to prevent views from being walled off.
The changes flanking Folsom Street have other things in common beside height. Roughly 20 percent of the housing units will be reserved for low- and moderate-income residents -- a smart reminder that new urban neighborhoods should provide housing for all types of people.
And there's a focus on the ground, not just in the air, with small parks and landscaped sidewalks laced throughout the dense urban terrain.
"We're trying to create a neighborhood where people want to live," says David Habert, a redevelopment planner, "that people want to visit."
Make no mistake: What's proposed will alter San Francisco.
Instead of the Transamerica's pointy peak capping a thicket of blocky corporate towers that stops just south of Market Street, slender glassy high-rises will spike up within yards of the Bay Bridge approach. They'll be what greets hundreds of thousands of people entering downtown San Francisco each day.
That's why it's so troubling that the first set of residential towers comes up short.
The concrete high-rises that now squat near the Bay Bridge proclaim an architecture of expediency, not inspiration. You sense the developers were focused on getting City Hall to sign off and then getting the units ready to sell. The impact on the cityscape -- what the rest of us must deal with -- was an afterthought.
In a location this prominent, that's not enough. And it's the lack of ambition that's the problem, not the height.
The good news is that San Francisco has recent examples of how to get things right. They are two office towers, 560 Mission and 101 Second, which enhance the skyline with crisply detailed elegance. The buildings also improve the street-level environment -- especially 560 Mission, with a plaza that blends grass, water, tall bamboo and potted maples.
As for residential models, look across the bay to Oakland and the recent Essex condominium building on Lake Merritt. While it's modest in height at 20 stories, the graceful silhouette and the curved wall facing the water show a sophistication that Rincon Hill has yet to see.
The vertical world envisioned along Folsom Street is new to San Francisco. A shortsighted emphasis on housing quantity over neighborhood quality could result in a set of towers that block views and create wind tunnels.
But anyone who has visited downtown Chicago knows that such a district can hum with urban excitement. Vancouver does the same while also showing how high-rises can draw energy from a distinctive bayside terrain.
The challenge at Rincon Hill and Transbay is to make this tall new neighborhood the culmination of all the positive developments around it.
The stakes are too high to settle for anything less.
What the years since the Loma Prieta earthquake have shown is that for all the city's knee-jerk protectiveness, San Francisco is still a city that can achieve great things. Risks and vision have produced lasting results that enrich life on a day-to-day basis.
Fifteen years later, instead of the Embarcadero Freeway's grim wall, there's an inviting downtown waterfront that ties San Francisco inseparably to its bay. Provocative new museums invigorate the cultural and architectural scene. Union Square and the blocks around it are again filled with activity. Civic treasures such as City Hall have been reborn; so has the Hayes Valley neighborhood, long deadened by the Central Freeway.
Is there more to be done? Of course. It will be difficult to strike a balance between public access and private development along the Embarcadero, and to finish the task of reviving the Civic Center. Transbay and Rincon Hill are just getting started.
There also are whole sections of the city that, while not affected by the 1989 earthquake, are still in early, vital stages of their development.
There's the Mission Bay neighborhood, stretching west and south from SBC Park, with its long blocks of residential units and a new campus for UCSF. And the 1,491-acre Presidio, near the Golden Gate Bridge, which faces the difficult task of making a former Army base with hundreds of aged buildings blossom anew as an urban national park.
Not everything done since 1989 in San Francisco shines, of course. Look no further than the unadventurous towers of Rincon Hill or the drab residential lofts erected hastily during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. But the boldest strokes are the ones turning out the best -- the ones driven by a creative determination to make San Francisco a fuller, more seductive place. That's the lesson to remember.
Changing the landscape is always controversial in the Bay Area, and for good reason: There's a lot to lose in a region that, despite a population topping 8 million people, still casts a spell because of its intimate bond to the hills, the bay, the valleys and the sky.
But the ingenuity and vision that have shaped San Francisco in the aftermath of Loma Prieta show that change is not to be feared. It can make the urban landscape better than it was before -- even in a city as alluring as San Francisco
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