()SPUR Issue 527 /Sept-Oct 2013
Ideas + action for a better city
THE URBANIST R
CIS
Presented by: SPUR AIA San Francisco, Center for Architecture + Design Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley California Historical Society San Francisco Public Library
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SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013
SPUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Chair
Board Members
Anne Halsted
Carl Anthony Veronica Bell Chris Block Larry Burnett Michaela Cassidy Madeline Chun Michael Cohen Charmaine Curtis Oz Erickson Manny Flores Geoff Gibbs Gillian Gillett Chris Gruwell Ed Harrington Dave Hartley Aidan Hughes Chris Iglesias Laurie Johnson Vijay Kumar Susan Leal Dick Lonergan John Madden Jacinta Mccann Hyrdra Mendoza Ezra Mersey Terry Micheau Mary Murphy Jeanne Myerson Adhi Nagraj
Executive Vice Chair
David Friedman Vice Chairs
Alexa Arena Andy Barnes Emilio Cruz Bill Rosetti Carl Shannon Lydia Tan V. Fei Tsen Secretary
Mary McCue Treasurer
Bob Gamble Immediate Past Co-Chair
Linda Jo Fitz Advisory Councll Co-Chairs
Michael Alexander Paul Sedway
Brad Paul Rich Peterson Chris Poland Joan Price Teresa Rea Byron Rhett Rebecca Rhine Wade Rose Paul Sedway Victor Seeto Elizabeth Seifel Chi-Hsin Shao Doug Shoemaker Ontario Smith Bill Stotler Stuart Sunshine Michael Teitz Mike Theriault Will Travis Jeff Tumlin Molly Turner Steve Vettel Francesca Vietor Fran Weld Allison Williams Cynthia Wilusz Lovell Cindy Wu
News at
SPUR Keeping BART on Track SPUR is continuing to watch the BART labor dispute very closely, and we 're trying to provide advice wherever we can. This complicated situation spans good government, transportation, labor and economic issues that affect our entire region . During the July strike, we highlighted the need for transportation resiliency, better traveller information and communication, the potential for new mobility providers to aid in transit and the need to create complete communities. We also recommended using the strike or any disruption as way to test some of the ideas from SPUR's Resilient City study - such as a carpool lane on the Bay Bridge and four-person occupancy requirements for carpool lanes. The stakes are high for BART, but we continue to believe there is a deal that will allow BART to control its rising operating costs while also being fair to workers.
CHAIRS & COMMITTEES
Program Committees
Regional Planning
Ballot Analysis
Larry Burnett Libby Seifel
Bob Gamble Disaster Planning
Laurie Johnson Chris Poland Housing
Ezra Mersey Lydia Tan
Operating Committees Audit
John Madden
Bob Gamble
Agencies Embrace Mobility Innovations
Human Resources
Good news: The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC)
Mary Mccue
proposed a rule that private ride-sharing services would be permitted to operate - if licensed by the CPUC. Operators would have to run background checks on drivers, institute driver-training programs, meet expanded insurance requirements and maintain a zero-tolerance policy on drugs and alcohol. Also this
Finance
Individual Membership
Bill Stotler Investment
Building Management
Ann Lazarus
Project Review
Larry Burnett
Major Donors
Charmaine Curtis Mary Beth Sanders Reuben Schwartz
Business Membership
Transportation
Anthony Bruzzone Water Policy
Bry Sarte
Linda Jo Fitz Anne Halsted
Tom Hart Terry Micheau
Planned Giving
Executive
Silver SPUR
David Friedman Anne Halsted
Dave Hartley Teresa Rea
Michaela Cassidy
SAN JOSE ADVISORY BOARD
Teresa Alvarado Andy Barnes Chris Block J. Richard Braugh Larry Burnett Brian Darrow Garrett Herbert
2 SEPT/ OCT 2013
Karla Rodriguez Lomax James MacGregor Connie Martinez Janine Mccaffery Anu Natarajan
Dr. Mohammad Qayoumi Suzanne Rice Robert Steinberg Lydia Tan Kim Walesh Jessica Zenk
summer, the SFMTA developed an 18-month pilot program to permit private shuttle buses to access 100 Muni bus stops in exchange for a fee for maintaining the stops. The "Muni Partners" policy covers both local and regional shuttle buses. We believe the wave of new transportation services can help improve the quality of life in urban areas, and we are generally
pleased at the direction these regulations are going .
Bike Share Comes to the Bay Area! At long last, a Bay Area bike-share program will launch on August 29, with a fleet of 700 bicycles at 70 kiosks in San Francisco, San Jose, Palo Alto, Redwood City and Mountain View. As we noted in our report "The Urban Future of Work," 80 percent of office buildings in the Bay Area are within three miles of regional transit, but only 11 percent of commuters take transit to work . The option to add a short bike ride to the end of a trip could turn rail commuting into a viable option for a much greater number of people. We look forward to evaluating the possibilities of bike share in the coming months. •
Cover: David Dana of Taller David Dana Arquitectura. The Urbanist is edited by Allison Ariefl and designed by Shawn Hazen, hazencreative.com.
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Imagine the Ferry Building surrounded by office towers, a grand casino on Alcatraz, the city wrapped in freeways and a subdivision covering flattened hills north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Within these pages, you can. This month, we are pleased to devote The Urbanist to "Unbuilt San Francisco," an ambitious five -venue exhibition that provides San Franciscans and Bay Area residents with an opportunity to confront visions for the region that never came to pass. If San Franciscans like to describe their city as "49 square miles surrounded by reality," the visionary ideas that were too grandiose for even San Franciscans to consider remain some of the most fantastic designs for any city in the world .
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INTRODUCTION
Unbuilt San Francisco 1
Today's urban landscape is shaped in profound ways by the buildings that never came to life, the plans that fell short.
The purest and most potent visions of American
urbanism, the ones that most deeply convey its aspirations and hubris, are, often as not, the ones that don't get built. This is true of any city, any region, and it is profoundly true of the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. From the propulsive thrust of the Gold Rush to the tech boom of today, people come to this place in search of utopia, their utopia, a setting in sync with their ideal of how life should be lived. San Francisco, after all, is a city perched on the tip of a small peninsula at the edge of a large continent - an act of the imagination rather than the outgrowth of ongoing economic forces such as the ones that fueled the ascension of Chicago arid Los Angeles. It's the capital "C" city of the region yet also a self-defined city of neighborhoods where many residents have little interest in what lies beyond the closest ring of hills. The architectural results of these insistent often 1 contradictory impulses are the subject of the exhibits being held at five Bay Area institutions under the broad theme of "Unbuilt San Francisco." Some of the works have endured in public memory, such as Daniel Burnham's "Report on a Plan for San Francisco" (1905). Others are forgotten by everyone except history buffs, such as Bernard Cahill's less ambitious city plan from 1899. Some projects were commissioned by clients ranging from developers and governments to neighborhood groups eager to offer an alternative to the proposals put forth by the 4
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powers-that-be. And some are the elaborate dreams of architects who, constraints notwithstanding, strove to make us see the potential of our surroundings in a fresh way. Not all of the visions are confined to San Francisco. Nor have we made an effort to fit them into a simple storyline with a moral at the end. Our aim is to explore the landscape that might have been, an alternate universe that in turn offers insight to how we live today.
Summary: The works on view in
"Unbuilt San Francisco" show us how people defined the future , and why those visions in turn sparked resistance. It's a parallel history of San Francisco and the Bay Area, for better and for worse.
By John King
John King is the San Francisco Chronicle's urban design critic.
Unbuilt Yet Influential An unbuilt vision often has lasting implications. It is the action that causes a reaction, the emphatic move that sets an unexpected chain of events in motion. Consider the 1969 design for a new residential district at Lands End , filling the cove below the Cliff House that today contains open bluffs and the ruins of the Sutro Baths. Designed by the well-regarded architectural firm of Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons for a private developer who sought to built a resort community, the lone roadway would have wound past woodsy townhouses down to a stepped-back seven-story block facing the Pacific, with a 20-story building to the north. If the barrack-like townhouses were reminiscent of mid-century dorm housing at a small liberal arts college, the oceanside block would look at home in Cancun. It is hard to believe anyone would have taken such a formulaic approach to the one-of-a-kind treasure that is our coast. But it was a serious proposal dating
THE URBANIST
The cove at Lands End where Sutro Baths once flourished was the site of proposed resort developments in the 1960s and 1970s, such as this one designed by Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons (above). More recently, Renzo Piano in 2006 conceived a mixed-use complex for First and Mission streets that would have included 1,200 foot towers (left).
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INTRODUCTION
back to 1965, the same year that the Marin County Board of Supervisors approved the master plan for Marincello, a planned community with an intended population of 30,000 people on 2,100 acres of the Marin Headlands. Look beyond the particulars of these projects and whatyou 'll see is the bottom-line mentality of the age, the mindset that empty or underutilized spaces were voids waiting to be filled. You'll also grasp why the Bay Area's environmental movement caught fire in the 1960s: Regular citizens saw the need to defend the natural spaces around them. Without the perception of imminent danger, there's no incentive to fight back. With projects like Marincello and the Lands End enclave came the threat of permanent loss, and this fueled the drive to create the Golden Gate National Recreation Area - an unprecedented urban national park that today includes both areas. The original projects may never have come to pass, but their impact is lasting and profound. Other failed quests have more subtle repercussions, exposing the public to architecture that differs from the norm . Certainly that's the story with the 10-story Prada boutique the design of which was unveiled in 2000 for the corner of Post Street and Grant Avenue, one block from Union Square. Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture envisioned a partially submerged, open ground floor topped by a pair of four-story cubes skinned in thick, bead-blasted steel
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and riddled with 8,000 glass portholes. In between the cubes would be a public terrace and coffee bar, hidden behind mesh but open to the air. Never mind that Koolhaas was the 2000 recipient of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize; his design set off months of debate before it was approved by the Planning Commission, despite the objections by staff who said it would violate the sanctity of the historic conser vation district around Union Square. So why is the building in the exhibition? The commission gave its blessing on September 6, 2011 - five days before 9/ 11 and months after the dot-com boom began to fade . Winning the necessary approvals is one thing. It's another thing to finance a high-concept boutique that included such embellishments as a baseisolation system to lessen the impact of earthquakes - as if the dresses and shoes inside were as fragile as the historic architecture of City Hall, where the expense of base isolation made sense. Eventually, Prada gave up the fight and put the corner up for sale, moving into an expansive restored space across the street. By challenging convention, Koolhaas and Prada forced the city 's decision-makers to acknowledge that 21st-century city building can 't simply reproduce the past. We need room for surprise. A few years later, another developer (Grosvenor) and architect (Brand + Allen) proposed to wrap the existing building at 185 Post with a sleek veil of glass, like a
Above, Marincello, a vast subdivision for the Marin Headlands that was approved by the county in 1965 but unbuilt beyond the entry gate, was among the controversial Bay Area projects that led to creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The Prada flagship designed by Rem Koolhaas (top right) met with local opposition but was cancelled due to lack of funds. Lower right, architect Charles Bloszies' "Recycled Batteries" (2008) proposed that the old and vacant bunkers along the coast be transformed into wind turbines to create energy for nearby buildings.
THE URBANIST
jewel box with the past displayed inside (not that the brick structure underneath is a treasure, even by all-old-is-good standards). Planners happily waived the concept through, if only to show they weren 't out of touch. The result is as distinctive in its own diaphanous way as the portholed cubes of steel would have been .
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Another aspect of the most ambitious unbuilt work is that it can distill the goals and fears of an era with a clarity that often is more revealing than what got built in its stead. We see the initial impulse, rather than the filtered result of political compromises, value engineering and bureaucratic nips and tucks. That is true of Koolhaas' provocative Prada building (which looks almost tame today). It is equally true of the five reed-like towers that another Pritzker Prize winner, architect Renzo Piano, conceived for the northwest corner of First and Mission Streets in 2006. Piano likened the septet to a cluster of bamboo stalks - albeit bamboo stalks climbing 600 to 1,200 feet, amid alleyways and older buildings just a few stories tall. "It's a sad story ... I loved that project," Piano said later of his scheme, which never saw the light of day beyond an article in the San Francisco Chronicle when the initial plans were filed with the city. It's a project that, in retrospect, signaled the high tide of a boom , the mass delusions that come when the good times THE URBANIST
are so good that developers convince themselves that this time things are different, this time the bubble won 't burst. How could economics justify straight square towers reaching 300 feet beyond the Transamerica Pyramid, yet so slender that their typical floors would be less than half the square footage of other towers nearby? But Piano's far-fetched cityscape was also enthralling. What he contemplated was an elegant riposte to the skyscraper games of the past decade, the relentless quest for novelty from Guangzhou to Dubai. His towers were clad in terra cotta rather than glass, had clean lines rather than pirouetting forms , were self-effacing and sky-busting at once. The ground-level weave of pathways in its own way was the most willful act of all, a medieval terrain beneath heights categorized by the profession as "supertall." A statement like this could only be made at a moment in a city's history when the future seemed open to audacious acts of design imagination . Other potent visions in the exhibitions respond to aspects of the future that seemed grim . The most obvious example of the latter might be the efforts to accommodate the automobile in the decades before and after World War II. Like every city in the country, San Francisco was confronted by a fast-increasing number of automobiles trying to navigate streets that often had been mapped before the car was even invented. The answer, said many "experts," was to stretch a new net of roadways
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INTRODUCTION
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above the city. One such scenario came from Donald R. Warren Co., which in 1943 proposed to ring Union Square and the Financial District with a six-lane thoroughfare that would have space underneath for 10,000 cars - a misguided proposal that helped clear the way for the double-decker roadways along the Embarcadero and west of City Hall that in turn spawned the locally fabled "Freeway Revolt " in the early 1960s. For San Franciscans of today this might be the most harrowing what-if of all, a city sliced and diced beyond recognition. Yet these early engineering schemes were rooted in a truth of their time: Traffic was a very real issue that was being addressed with technical efficiency. There were architectural responses as well, such as the confounding but alluring designs by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin for the so-called Panhandle Parkway. There's
a sinuous beauty in his renderings of concrete curves snaking through the landscape toward Golden Gate Park, the visual poetry that results when one of the Bay Area's most lyrical designers strives to imagine an urban world that can accommodate the automobile. The parkway did not come to pass. thank goodness, but Halprin's participation shows the extent to which the conventional wisdom of midcentury America saw automobiles as a necessity of modern life.
Visual Seduction Whatever the era, whatever the style or scale, the strong thread binding the exhibitions is the power of imagery to open our minds to contemplate new urban forms. Architects, after all, are visual creatures: bold images become a way to tell a story, make a point. One recent example, modest in scope but alluring in execution, is architect Charles Bloszies' notion of adding windmills to the oceanside bunkers of the Presidio to harness energy. We know such an idea would never be allowed in such a carefully scrutinized national historic district tucked inside a national park. Then we look at Bloszies' lyrical
depiction and wonder, why not? This is not a recent trend : the brash aura of Vincent Raney's proposed United Nations Capitol makes you wish he had captured the international eye, even if in real life it would have been modernistic grandeur run amok. Nor is this bold imagery confined to single structures. Daniel Burnham's plan for San Francisco was commissioned by a group of businessmen , and the text that accompanies it is pragmatic, spelling out the details of a plan "so devised that the execution of each part will contribute to the final result." But Burnham's accompanying illustrations conjure up a gauzy realm of Greco-Roman splendor, such as a palatial public stairway up the side of Twin Peaks. This is the true City Beautiful , and you can understand why the plan's reputation endures, even if few of its recommendations were followed . Visual beauty has the power to shape discussions and plant a seed. So do straightforward diagrams as was the case when Hargreaves Associates did a series of conceptual studies to restore Crissy Field along the bay. We know the final result: the spacious marsh next to a vast lawn that memorializes a longgone airfield. But the landscape architects didn't have a free hand: The interest groups assembled by the National Park Service ranged from military historians to native plant buffs ijnd wind surfers. In response , the Hargreaves team assembled si x large
imaginary site plans, theoretical approaches to the 100-acre site. The most audacious of these plans reintroduced marshes and extended them inland past Mason Street, turning that road into a causeway and pulling the green of the Presidio Main Post down toward the bay. Such a move was not to be; nonetheless, the strong , colorful site maps offered a glimpse of the area's ultimate potential. Eventually, two approaches were presented to the public, one with a marsh alongside a lawn and one that paired the lawn with dunes. The result is the most treasured new open space in the Bay Area in a generation, and a marsh is among the main attractions. To the south, Doyle Drive is being rebuilt and lowered so that, yes, a recreated landscape can spill down from the Main Post to the bay. That, in the end , may be the most intriguing thing about San Francisco's false starts, the roads not taken , the buildings and plans that never fully came to pass. They form a city of shadows. Some make you smile; some make you recoil. Many were ahead of their time. They showed us what could have been and what might still might lie ahead. •
As Hargreaves Associates prepared to work on a design vision for Crissy Field, the landscape architects drew up six "park frameworks." This one (below) conceived of an extensive set of marshes that in turn would blend with an enlarged Main Post Parade Ground, while a portion of Mason Street became a causeway.
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The View From Futures Past Presented by the California Historical Society and SPUR Essay by Benjamin Grant and Cydney Payton San Francisco was called from its windswept sand hills in great haste. Hills were cut, valleys raised, tidelands and bay waters filled as a rectilinear grid of blocks and lots was laid over the natural landscape of the peninsula. Although most "water lots" were filled and built out, some of these invisible territories remain today, submerged in an odd limbo between legal title and environmental protection. By 1906, when most of the city was consumed by fire, San Francisco was an established city with global economic and cultural ambitions. No longer the rough upstart, it was filling out its peninsula and beginning to imagine reworking itself into a grand 20th-century metropolis, the " Paris of the West." 10 SEPT/OCT 2013
Daniel Burnham 's 1905 plan for the city, conceived at the behest of Progressive-era boosters who sought the city 's "improvement and adornment," looked to fundamentally restructure San Francisco, blasting neo-baroque boulevards through its utilitarian grid and pushing staid beaux arts unity over its jumbled Victorian filigree. Burnham's plan ushered in a new preoccupation in San Francisco: civic debates over the architectural contours of the city, charged with moral and aesthetic consequence. What is worthy of this special place? What is appropriate to the city's particular character? How do we solve pressing urban problems without eroding San Francisco's dueling identities as picturesque yet provincial? Who is empowered to decide? From its beginnings, San Francisco was a place to escape to and find oneself. It coupled entrepreneurial ambition with a licentious openness. For many people, the initial encounter with San Francisco was an experience of personal liberation - political, sexual, spiritual , pharmaceutical, natural. This sense of liberation cannot be unrelated to the city 's unique politics. The fierce affection that so many hold for this city, the intense aversion to change and the assertiveness of public debates over the city 's development has created a uniquely pressurized civic culture. It seems that, for many liberated transplants, San Francisco was perfect at the moment they fell under its irresistible spell, and everything that came after has been sacrilege. Attempts to reconfigure the city according to evolving notions of progress, beauty and justice have often proved controversial and even traumatic. Certain sites in particular have been repeatedly revisited , with a succession of design proposals
El The Panhandle Freeway, rendered here by Lawrence Halprin, would have run through the Golden Gate Park panhandle, between Oak and Fell Streets. It was the subject of fevered debate in the mid 1960s, and was ultimately rejected.
Ill Ernest Born's 1956 vision featured the now eradicated Embarcadero Freeway set against commercial and cultural development.
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Benjamin Grant is SPUR's Public Realm and Urban Design Program Manager. Cydney Payton is an independent curator of contemporary art and architecture.
THE URBANIST
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that highlight the ever-evolving visions of whbt San Francisco ought to be. In the 1950s and '60s, in San Francisco as ir other American cities, urban renewal schemes leveled whole districts, precipitating conflicts over t ~ e shape of cities, the planning process and the exercise of power. Design schemes were repeatedly pro ~osed and abandoned, reflecting shifts in the broader debates about architecture, urban design anal development in the public life of the city. Yerba Buena - where heavy industry flowered on sand dunes and bay fill - was the subject of p ore than a century of contentious wrangling. In the 1870s, financier William Chapman Ralston 's bid to er end downtown "South of the Slot" via New Montgomery Street and the Palace Hotel ruined him , but similar ideas would be revived by developer Ben Swig in the 1950s and drive indiscriminate demolition in the late 1960s. Metabolist architect Kenzo Tange's 1967-69 megastructure for Yerba Buena Center perfef ly expressed both the ambitions and an xieties 9f San Francisco's boosters and its redevelopment agency. The gargantuan garages and corporate facili~ies he proposed would have spanned Mission and H6ward Streets, touching down only with massive spiral parking ramps. The plan offered a safely con tirolled extension of the Financial District, but its fortified design revealed the underlying assumption t ~ at South of Market and its residents were irredermably
B The Burnham Plan (1905) remains the most comprehensive attempt to reconfigure San Francisco. Burn ham's neobaroque diagonals and etoiles, inspired by those in Paris, would have cut across the grid, creating formal vistas to set off City Beautiful monuments. In spite of the opportunity presented by the following year's devastating earthquake and fire, it was never implemented. Daniel Burnham Plan courtesy David Rumsey map collection.
I "other: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the struggles of local tenants and hotel owners to resist eviction encapsulated in Ira Nowinski's singular photobraph of two locals peering into a demolition site - captured the moral imagination of the city. The legal vittories of the tenants created an opening for new design ideas. Subsequent proposals, in addition to c1eating court-mandated affordable housing, emphasiiZed public and cultural spaces but still maintained an inward focus. A series of gardens, follies a ~ d entertainments appeared , reflecting the heavily programmed " festival marketplace" approac ~ of the period . At Yerba Buena Center, the arts beca r e the bridge between the economic need for a convention center and the public's desire for more humaml e and public-spirited uses for urban space. As much as any site in the city, the Ferry Building has been the subject of debate and civic reim~gining through a succession of proposals. Schemes for the " Foot of Market Street " date back to Willis Polk 's Ferry Building peristyle (1901), which imagin ~d giving the city 's front door a monumental addition 'ÂŤorthy of the period 's aesthetic ambitions. Later notipns 12 SEPT/ OCT 2013
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lopped off the clock tower to suit a modernist sensibility, projected new towers on piers in the water and carved canals that would create a Ferry Building island. Of course the Embarcadero Freeway would become the key design challenge: first, in efforts to screen. tame or deny its impact. with fluttering flags and trees boldly rendered and the freeway scarcely acknowledged in light pencil , and later, in the city 's soul-searching over whether to demolish it and what should replace it. The efforts of engineers and architects to accommodate the automobile produced schemes that are some of the most shocking to contemporary sensibilities. A series of plans, includ ing the 1948 Comprehensive Transportation Plan . imagined a city laced with freeways - like the now-infamous proposals for elevated structures in both the Golden Gate Park Panhandle and the Marina District. In 1948, traffic planners envisioned a massive parking structure that would extend from Third to Eighth streets between Mission and Howard , with freeway ramps alighting directly in the garage to solve the problem of urban parking and traffic once and for all. Indeed, attempts to beautify and sell urban freeways would consume a remarkable amount of design effort at midcentury, as landscape designers were deployed in support of traffic engineers' increasingly embattled schemes. The best example may be Lawrence Halprin's stunning 1964 ink drawings of the proposed Panhandle Freeway. It was certainly not for lack of communicative prowess that the scheme fell victim to the Freeway Revolt.
open space be set aside? To what degree should the natural landscape be transformed to facilitate and integrate urban development? Schemes to level mountains and fill the bay, dozens of unrealized bridges and freeways , even a new city in the Marin Headlands - all reveal the Bay Area grappling with these questions under pressure from rapid growth . Major infrastructure - like BART and the Golden Gate and Bay bridges - can, in hindsight. seem inevitable, almost natural. But of course, these icons once seemed as speculative as they now seem certain . To prove this point, one need only look at the dizzying array of bridge and transit schemes that were never realized . In 1909, utopian engineer
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mThe 1942 "Reber Plan" was one of several proposals that would not only have filled huge swaths of the Bay for development, but dammed it to produce freshwater reservoirs behind land bridges.
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The Region: Bridges, Burbs and the Bay As midcentury San Francisco turned inward to grapple with the political and aesthetic challenges of urban change, much of the Bay Area was urbanizing for the first time. Throughout California, growth swallowed up orange groves, wilderness and mountaintops. The process of domesticating the natural landscape not only persisted but grew in scale and ambition. The bay was rapidly filled to make land for development, abetted by new institutions and new technologies. Development increasingly occurred not a handful of structures at a time, but in tracts of hundreds or even thousands. The experience of witnessing the conversion of wild and rural landscapes to homes and strip malls was widely lamented . As the Bay Area region grew - its population far exceeding that of San Francisco - a different set of problems emerged . Where should growth occur and how could it be managed? Where and how should
14 S EPT/OC T 2013
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OUTLINE of the San Franclaco &y Project CQni:oived Oy John Reb4tr Iâ&#x20AC;˘ here shown. New lo.nda to ho crealod by hyd raulic !Ill oro lndlct1ted In red, while the rock quar¡ rloa which m!Qhl be oxcovaled to provide und&rQround ator.iQe 1pace for Q<u10\lne and munll!on1. and concea!rtrl hunr;ion ore 1hown ln tho qray ahadlm1.
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Fletcher Felts planned to build " The Suspended Auto Motor Railway," which would have linked the Call Building with Oakland's City Hall by way of a high-speed, carless railway bridge over the bay. Visionaries later proposed a second Bay Bridge, immediately adjacent to the first; bridges connecting San Francisco to Alameda and from Russian Hill to Angel Island to Tiburon; and a roundabout linking four bridges at Verba Buena Island. A 1947 study compiled some 14 possible alignments on a single map. BART was the subject of great debate as well. Original 1956 plans showed lines to Marin and San Mateo and underground out to Geary Boulevard. Marin and San Mateo counties pulled out of the
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scheme in 1962. Not only do the structures we build become familiar while the also-rans fade from memory, but they shape everything that comes after; they are reinforced by their sr:: ~ i al and economic embeddedness in the region we know. How might the Bay Area be different if different alignments had prevailed, if Marin had made its peace with taxes and transit? How might a Southern Crossing have shaped the region 's growth? The most ambitious unbuilt schemes at thE1 regional scale met their match in the rising environmental movement. Marincello, a proposal for a 30,000-person city in the Marin Headlands,
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CITY PARKWAYS
DA summary of proposed " trafficways" in San Francisco from the city's 1948 Comprehensive Transportation Plan included the Panhandle Freeway connecting to freeways flanking Golden Gate Park, as well as a "Southern Crossing " bridge. These proposals and others would spawn citizen revolt in the 1950s and 60s.
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Ii This 1909 scheme imagined rapid transit from San Francisco to Oakland and beyond - nearly 30 years before the Bay Bridge and more than 60 years before BART.
B In the 1980s, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was hired to develop a series of gardens for Verba Buena. While this imagined Chinese Garden was never realized, the overall Verba Buena Gardens scheme was.
mIn this photograplt from Ira Nowinski's series from the 70s, residents contemplate a demolition site at Verba Buena Center, where mass evictions led to protracted conflict - and numerous design schemes - over the district's future.
THE URBANIST
was forged through the uncommon partnership of an oil company (Gulf) and an East Coast developer (Thomas Frouge). Marincello was approved in 1965, and initial construction was underway by the time it was scuttled by public outcry in 1972, becoming part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area . The practice of filling the bay to make buildable land spread from Front Street to Mission Bay to Berkeley and Treasure Island. It appeared that the bay would be filled until only slim navigation channels remained. Then came the famous "Bay or River? " graphic, traced from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers map projecting bay fill trends, that helped galvanize the Save the Bay movement in 1964. Filling the bay was enthusiastically supported by some as a key economic opportunity. This led to a massive 1968 scheme to top San Bruno Mountain and fill and develop a Manhattan-sized area of the bay was defeated by environmentalists. Boosters sketched the region with most of its hills targeted as fill material , an approach that could eliminate two endemic inconveniences at once. Plans referenced Dutch polders to demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale drainage. Perhaps even more far-reaching were schemes like the 1942 Reber Plan , which proposed to dam the bay at Richmond and south of the Bay Bridge, creating valuable freshwater reservoirs upstream , along with causeways for roads and rail and plenty of filled land . Typical of their time, these proposals gave scant attention to the critical dynamics of the bay estuary. (Interestingly, the specter of climate change has revived debates about large-scale engineering of bay hydrology, with competition entries showing massive tidal barrages
plugging the Golden Gate when storm surges threaten.) The rise of environmental movements and the creation of regional institutions killed many such schemes, but a comprehensive approach to regional planning, such as that imagined by the Association of Bay Area Governments' 1970 Regional Plan , remains elusive. Although discussions of integrated regional planning go back at least to the 1910s, interjurisdictional competition and a powerful home rule doctrine have stymied repeated campaigns, and the reg ion's footprint now reaches the Sierra Foothills. Resistance to sprawl is measured in precious lands saved from the bulldozer, but these are the remnant exceptions to a broader policy failure . An integrated region, with location-efficient growth, effective transportation infrastructure and protections for open space and agriculture, may represent the grandest unbuilt scheme of all.
Visual Civics and Visual Persuasion At both the city and regional scales, the proposals on view in " Unbuilt San Francisco" reveal competing interests and value systems. Models, renderings and plans - the rhetorical tools of planning and design - engaged each period's prevailing aspirations and anxieties, clamoring for the attention of decisionmakers and citizens. Concern with a particular site, pmblem or opportunity often spans a period of decades and presents a window into the city 's changing attitudes, politics and values. Every bit as much as the cities we build, the cities we imagine and reject reveal the collective creativity of the urban project and the imperfect civics of placemaking. â&#x20AC;˘ SEPT/ OCT 2013 17
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THE URBANIST
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THE URBANIST
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UNBUILT SAN FRANCISCO
El Virgil Theodore Nahl'sPanama Expo Site of the Great Panama Pacific International
Public Spaces
Exposition 1911
Ill The Plan 1899 was designed by architect and cartographer Bernard Cahill, an early proponent of the San Francisco Civic Center.
II "Suggested Illuminated Water Effects of a Monument and Cascade at Twin Peaks"
Presented by the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library Essay by Thomas Carey
drawn by Joseph Gosling for Bernard Maybeck, reveal the influence of Daniel Burn ham's 1905 plan for the city. Thomas Carey is curator of the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public library.
San Francisco imposes political, economic and geographical limitations on realizing visions of the developing city. The buildings we see today are a reflection of the possibilities and constraints of the times in which they were constructed . Some of the sites we know so well today bear little or no resemblance to their original proposed schemes from long ago. From comprehensive city plans to architects' varying treatments of a single building, this exhibit gives us a glimpse of what could have been, views that never materialized . In the 19th century, architect Bernard J. S. Cahill was the first to envision - and name - a "Civic Center" for San Francisco. His "Plan of 1899 " incorporated the best of existing architecture in the blocks bounded by Golden Gate Avenue, Mission Street, Ninth Street and Polk Street. However, civic leaders and architect Willis Polk looked instead to Chicago's Daniel Burnham for his vision of a new seat 20 SEPT/OCT 2013
of government. Burnham's 1905 plan to redesign the city 's grid , sketched by Edward H. Bennett, was sidelined by the 1906 earthquake and fire but not entirely forgotten . This is evidenced by early designs for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (circa 1910-1914), and later by Joseph Gosling 's sketches for Bernard Maybeck's "Suggested Illuminated Water Effects of a Monument and Cascade at Twin Peaks " (1933), which show the influence of Burn ham 's plan. The Reid brothers' 1910 " Suggested Design for Main Public Library Building " on the block bounded by Hayes Street, Fell Street, Franklin Street and Van Ness Avenue was the first plan to give the library its own building . However, the adoption of a Civic Center plan in 1912 meant abandoning that site. The final competition entries for the new Main Library (1914) were strikingly similar. Plans for the lot where the current Main Library (1996) sits went unrealized for many years. After the demolition of the old City THE URBANIST
Hall following the 1906 disaster, a courts building and a Hall of Justice (by Dodge Riedy, 1932) were suggested, and finally, a modest structure was built: the 1941 Hospitality House, later demolished to make way for today 's library. Louis Mullgardt revived the notion of a San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 1925, though it was left to other engineers to manifest. His vision encompassed a bridge with "functional skyscrapers that doubled as piers" spanning the bay. It was perhaps a more graceful treatment than the plan, 40 years later, for a " Panharidle Parkway " (1964), which was essentially laid over an urban park. The Freeway Revolt canceled these plans to move motorists quickly across the city. The " El-Way" imagined for the lower Market Street area (1943) seems relatively less intrusive than freeways planned for the western side of San Francisco. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition site THE URBANIST
was literally all over the map in its early stages: Lake Merced , the Tanforan race track and lslais Creek were some suggested locations for the expo. Robert Behlow's 1910 plan incorporated Golden Gate Park, Lands End and Harbor View (now the Marina District). San Francisco Chronicle publisher M. H. de Young favored the Golden Gate Park site, but later joined in a unanimous endorsement of the Harbor View option , of which only the Palace of Fine Arts remains today. This exhibition was supported by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.
SEPT/O CT 2013
21
UNBUILT SAN FRANCISCO
Ambition and Imagination Environmental Design Archives, University of California Essay by John King
"Ambition and Imagination" views the unbuilt realm of San Francisco from five perspectives, some obvious, some not. The most counter-intuitive section is "First Takes" - buildings that exist around us, but began
in much different forms. There 's an early version of the revered Pacific Telephone Building, and a set of working models for the Millennium Tower that reveals how a 21st-century high-rise evolves in San Francisco's regulatory and financial climate. There 's also the original proposal for One Rincon - with a pair of towers that are 20 stories shorter than what is now being built. "The Rhetorical Unbuilt" consists of schemes that were meant to prod us to look at the city with fresh eyes. These include a competition-winning scheme by Jill Stoner that imagined the Embarcadero as a 22 SEPT/OCT 2013
canal and notebook sketches from 1990 by architects Liz Ranieri and Byron Kuth who wanted to preserve a section of the Embarcadero Freeway as a reminder of what was - a concept that predates New York City's High Line by 20 years. "The Phantom Skyline" offers what the name implies. a century of skyscrapers that never came to pass. Renzo Piano's 2006 design for Mission Street that envisioned five towers as tall as 1,200 feet is here. So is a campanile-like tower designed for the Spreckels family after the 1906 earthquake. There is even a pair of towers by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe - a proposal for the foot of Russian Hill that was abandoned when the would-be developer died in a plane crash. Two other sections have a geographic focus. One concentrates on the Civic Center - not just alsorans in the 1912 competition for City Hall but also such recent efforts as a glass-walled addition to the Veterans Memorial Building by Mark Cavagnero Associates and BAR 's postmodern makeover of Trinity Plaza on the south edge of the district. a concept far different from the modernistic slabs now on the rise. The final section is "Along the Shore." This includes everything from a 1979 study for a multipurpose stadium where AT&T Park now stands to the casino proposal for Alcatraz that prompted the 1969 occupation of the island by the group Indians of All Tribes, as well as proposals for Sutro Baths and the Embarcadero. â&#x20AC;˘ Special thanks to Adolph Rosekrans Architects and the Joan Draper Endowment, Department of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, for their support.
THE URBANIST
El After the Federal Government closed the
Ill An early design by Arthur Brown Jr. for
Bl A 2009 study by Mark Cavagnero
liJ These towers designed by Ludwig Mies
prison on Alcatraz, proposals included this
what now is one of the city's best-loved
Associates on expansion possibilities for
van der Rohe for Russian Hill were never
one for new cultural facilities and housing
buildings, Coit Tower, was shorter and more
San Francisco Opera included this new
built - the would-be developer died in a
by architect Ernest Born. The island was
elaborate than what opened in 1933.
glass-walled wing for the War Memorial
plane crash.
ultimately made into a national park.
Building.
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SEPT/OCT 2013 23
UNBUILT SAN FRANCISCO
rJ For a student competition, David Dana of Taller David Dana Arquitectura developed
Grand
an award-winning design to conserve and give new purpose to the soon-to-be unused section of the Bay Bridge.
Visions Presented by AIA San Francisco/ Center for Architecture + Design
Essay by Margie O'Driscoll
The Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kantner famously described San Francisco as "49 square miles surrounded by reality." If reality only exists beyond its borders, then the visionary and outlandish ideas that were too grandiose for even San Franciscans to consider remain some of the most fantastic designs for any city in the world. "Un Built San Francisco: Grand Visions" considers these never-realized plans and buildings. Among the photographs, original drawings, video and models in the exhibition, two themes illustrate the collection of thought-provoking projects: "Dreams Deferred " tells the underlying story of the people, cultural impacts and opinions that envisioned - or destroyed - San Francisco's urban fabric while "On the Boards" celebrates significant planned projects that will shape the city fabric over the next decade. Highlights in "Dreams Deferred" include the proposed home for the United Nations at the foot of Twin Peaks by Vincent Raney and a "ventilated" levee 24 SEPT/ OCT 2013
that protects shorelines by mechanically managing tides, designed by Kuth Ranieri. Also showcased are provocative ideas - such as Fougeron Architecture's "Cultivating the Urban Eutopia" - that challenge us to consider whether a vertical agricultural system , fed by reclaimed water, should become the skin of our buildings. Taller David Dana Arquitectura 's masterful Bay Bridge project provokes us to imagine preserving the current Bay Bridge structure as a location for high-density housing. "On the Boards" illuminates grandiose contemporary projects that will forever change the urban fabric of San Francisco. These projects include Pelli Clarke Pelli's Transbay Center, Sn0hetta and EHDD's plans for the expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill's design for one of the most eco-friendly neighborhoods in the world at Treasure Island. Once completed, these projects will transform the city as we know it. â&#x20AC;˘
Margie O'Driscoll is the Executive Director of AIA San Francisco and the Center for Architecture+ Design
THE URBANIST
Ill Folding Water by Kuth Ranieri Architects
Ii For their project "Cultivating Urban
is a ventilated levee proposal designed to
Utopia," Fougeron Architecture envisioned
protect shorelines by regulating both rising
San Francisco as a model sustainable city,
sea levels and the delta and bay waters.
with agriculture woven directly into its urban framework
Ii
THE URBANIST
SEPT/ OCT 2013
25
UNBUILT SAN FRANCISCO
Venues Exhibition Dates Gallery Hours AIA San Francisco I Center for Architecture + Design 130 Sutter Street, Suite 600, San Francisco Exhibition open August 15 - October 25 Monday - Friday, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm Free admission
California Historical Society 678 Mission Street, San Francisco Exhibition open September 6 - December 29 Tuesday - Sunday, 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm $5 suggested donation, free for members and children
SPUR 654 Mission Street, San Francisco Exhibition open September 6 - December 20 Tuesday, 11:00 am - 8:00 pm; Wednesday - Friday, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm Free admission
The Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, College of Environmental Design 280 Wurster Hall, University of California, Berkeley Exhibition open September 14 - November 8 Wednesday - Saturday, 10:00 am - 2:00 pm Free admission
San Francisco Public Library Skylight Gallery, 6th Floor, Main Library, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco Exhibition open August 24 - November 27 Monday - Thursday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm; Friday, 12:00 pm - 6:00 pm; Saturday, 10:00 am - 6:00 pm; Sunday, 12:00 pm - 5:00 pm Free admission
Opening Reception Unbuilt San Francisco Exhibition Opening September 6, 5:00 - 9:00 pm at 678 and 654 Mission Street, San Francisco For more information, please visit spur.erg/exhibitions/unbuilt-sf-view-futures-past 26 SEPT/OCT 2013
THE URBANIST
THE URBANIST
SEPT/OCT 2013 27
CITY NEWS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE
Urban Drift Is This the Way to Grand Central?
1' Valediction Artists Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather have been collaborating on visual explorations of the Bay Bridge over the past several years: " Valediction " is their new series of works on paper that focuses on the soon-to-bedemolished East Span of the structure. Part of the daily landscape of hundreds of thousands of commuters, it will soon exist only in our collective memory. "Valediction" is on view at Electric Works Gallery in San Francisco from September 6 to October 19. www.electricworks.com Elon Musk vs. High-Speed Rail
Elon Musk, the restless innovator behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors, recently unveiled the details behind the Hyperloop, an elevated system of steel tubes that he 28 SEPT/OC T 2013
says could move passengers enclosed in aluminum pods from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes, at a total construction cost of $6 billion over 20 years. (Compare that to the current highspeed rail estimates of $70 billion). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the technology world responded with exuberant enthusiasm while the transportation world jumped on the plan's myriad implausibilities. Writing for Bloomberg News, Timothy Lavin reflects that this sort of tension is the kind we could use more of. "The Hyperloop itself may never become a reality. But Musk has clearly captured the public imagination . In doing so, I suspect he also issued a challenge that will be very hard to pass up one that may yield some dividends we never expected." "Elon Musk's Ingenious , Implausible Hyperloop," by Timothy Lavin, Bloomberg.com, 8/12/13
Conceptual artist Nobutaka Aozaki has been working on a partial map of Manhattan compiled of individual, hand-drawn maps he's collected from strangers . The ongoing project, " From Here to There," is part of his exploration of the process of giving and receiving directions. Dressed as a tourist. armed with a baseball cap and shopping bag, Aozaki walks up to strangers on the street and asks for directions. He's focused on both major tourist destinations and places where he goes out to eat or to meet friends. While he's found more and more that people are likely to rely on GPS mapping apps to give directions, he insists on hand-drawn maps scribbled on a napkin, receipt or stray piece of paper.
streets at their leisure, avoiding inclines if they desire. hillmapper.com -J, Playing House
"Architecture on the Carpet: The Curious Tale of Construction Toys and the Genesis of Modern Buildings " by Brenda and Robert Vale offers a novel vi ew of the development of modern architecture through the prism of children 's construction toys. www. thamesandhudson.com â&#x20AC;˘
"Meet the Ma n Try ing to Save the Lost Art of Hand¡
Drawn Maps," by Stephanie Garlock, The Atlantic Cities, 8/13/13
Hillmapper
Many can agree that the best way to see and appreciate a city is to walk its streets. For residents and visitors of San Francisco however, this is not always an inviting pursuit. The seven major hills and their corresponding slopes can leave even the most eager pedestrian tired and defeated. Fortunately, U.C. Berkeley student Sam Maurer developed a smartphone app designed to help navigate those daunting hills. Uphill and downhill streets are marked in red and blue with varying intensity of color depending on the steepness of the slope. People can travel the city THE URBANIST
MEMBER PROFILE
Empowering Urban Entrepreneurs Julie Lein & Clara Brenner, co-founders of Tumml Both Julie Lein (above right) and Clara Brenner, co-founders of Tumml, an urban ventures accelerator, were always interested in urbanism , albeit from very different perspectives. Julie was always a government/policy nerd, and had worked in political polling in San Francisco. Clara came from an urban real estate and sustainability background. When the two met at MIT Sloan's MBA program , they realized they were both driven by a passion to make cities better places to live.
So we have to ask: Just what is an
What are some of the products
"urban ventures accelerator"?
and services you're most excited
Tumml is all about empowering entrepreneurs to solve our most pressing urban challenges. We 're looking for the next generation of Zipcar and Revolution Foods - startups developing consumerfacing products and services that solve challenges unique to our cities. We identifiy these companies at an early stage, and provides hands-on support. office space. and seed funding to help grow their businesses and make a significant impact on their communities.
about right now?
Of course we 're a bit biased, but we're most excited about the ones coming out of the five companies in the current Tumml cohort. For example, WorkHands - a blue-collar online identity service - helps match workers in the trades and potential employers. providing an important workforce development tool for our cities . And Earth Starter, which helps urban dwellers grow food in small spaces - connecting people with their own local food. These startups have innovative, scalable approaches to solving our most pressing urban challenges.
What's the urban problem you'd
Building:
most like to solve?
Julie's is Aqua, the Chicago skyscraper designed by Jeanne Gang .
We hear too many people in San Francisco complain that startups and entrepreneurs don't care about the communities in which they work. These critics see technology companies (and their employees) driving up housing costs and pricing out longstanding residents from their homes. We want the startup community to feel connected to their city. Our goal is to build an ecosystem of entrepreneurs using technology to tackle challenges in their own backyards. That means creating products and services that are inclusive of the diversity of the entire city, as well as employing individuals from across the community. Sounds fantastic. So now we'd love to learn what's your favorite ... City:
San Francisco . .. obviously!
Clara's is Union Station in Washington , DC. Urban View:
The view of the Bay from a table on the terrace of Hog Island Oyster Bar in the Ferry Building. And your favorite book about cities?
The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H.W. Brands does
an amazing job of telling the story of the making of the state of California - much of which revolved in and around San Francisco. The author weaves together the lives of many early San Franciscans. It was cool to learn the back stories of folks who 've lent their names to our streets and buildings (John Fremont, Sam Brannan, etc). â&#x20AC;˘
WELCOME New Business Members
CB Richard Ellis Group, Inc. (CBRE) Mineta Transportation Institute New Members Robert Banovac David Barry Timothy Beedle
Russell Berkowitz Patrick Carney Susan Carson Ryan Croft
Jim Cunneen Katherine Doi James Dunbar Kaia Eakin Jeff S. Fredericks Lydia Guel Anna Haynes Jim Hewlett
James Hicks Cayce Hill Cassie Hoeprich John Hollar Heather Imboden Ryan James Sally JenkinsStevens
Matthew S. Jones Kieran Kelly-Sneed
Naomi NakanoMatsumoto
Arielle Segal Alex Shim
J.R. Killigrew Keenan Lee-Peters Chris Lepe Elizabeth Mattiuzzl Connie Migliazzo Katie Morales
J Madeleine Nash Jeff Oberdorfer
Blake Silkwood Stephanie Silkwood Garen Srapyan Jessie Stewart Pat Swan Ned Thomas
Christian Park Paul Pereira Raul Prebisch Kimb Seelye
Shivam Vohra Lynda Ward Mike Wasserman Juliet Wilson
0S PUR
The Silver SPUR Award is the most prominent award for lifetime civic achievement in San Francisco. EVENT CHAIR: Ken McNeely is President of AT&T California, where he leads a workforce of more than 36,000 employees. He has led AT& T's efforts in California as it transitions from a residential phone
company to one of the world's largest wireless and broadband companies. Ken 1s a board member of the California Chamber of Commerce, the California Business Roundtable. the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and
Bay Area Council, where he chairs the Education Committee. In 2010, Ken was named one of the 50 Top African Americans in Technology.
This year, please join us in honoring: Chief Judge Karen V. Clopton has been promoting active public discourse, integrity and transparency in government for more than two decades. As the chief
accessible to the public and more efficient. She served as a San Francisco civil service commissioner for four terms (1993-2000) and as chief of operations
adm1nistrat1ve law Judge for the California Public Utilities Commission. she has made its crucial regulatory work more
for the Port of San Francisco. Whether encouraging youth to get involved with government through the Junior State of
Thomas C. Layton has been a dedicated philanthropic leader, seeding and supporting pos1t1ve social change for almost four decades. As the president of
grant-making that has served some of
The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation since 1975, Layton has built a track record of 1nnovat1ve and risk-taking
the Bay Area's most esteemed leaders. movements and institutions in their nascent stages. His leadership in the philanthropic community, encouraging foundations to courageously support the
grantees, has made him one of the most respected leaders in the field. Prior to joining to the foundation, he was a business executive and. later, the vice president and national director of the Coro Foundation.
policy and advocacy work of their
co-founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a passionate spokesman for the cause of the city. Solomon's work
Daniel Solomon, FAIA is an architect and urban designer whose career combines professional practice with teaching and writing. His commitment to the construction and reconstruction of urban neighborhoods extends beyond his renowned project work; he is a
as a partner in the Mithun I Solomon San Francisco office - including the LEED Platinum David Brower Center in Berkeley and the redevelopment of San
Senator Art Torres (Ret.), J.D. has been a life-long public servant and advocate for civil rights, healthcare, stem cell research and environmental justice. In a career spanning more than three decades, he has distinguished himself by tackling complex policy issues that affect all California residents. Sen. Torres has
leadership roles in two core institutions serving the Bay Area: he is president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and vice chair of the governing Board of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine. He served 20 years in the California Legislature. both in the State Assembly
Thank you to our generous sponsors:
America or teaching citizens how to participate in the electoral process with the League of Women Voters, Judge Clopton has been deeply and widely engaged in civic leadership for San Francisco.
~ at&t
Francisco's Hunters View neighborhood - exemplify his commitment to the evolution of community design. He is professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and Kea Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, and has published many articles and three books.
and State Senate. Involved in many crucial bipartisan initiatives, he was co-author of the groundbreaking California Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65).
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