Getting The Bay Area Waterfront Shipshape
Published: December, 2000
Roma Design Group, one of the premier urban design firms in the nation, has agreed to sponsor a series of roundtable discussions on the renaissance of the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The inaugural meeting took place at a luncheon meeting on October 16, 2000 at the Roma Design Group offices in North Beach and included the following participants:
Boris Dramov, President of Roma Design Group
Richard Springwater, Partner, Wilson Equity Office
Will Travis, Executive Director of San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC)
Jim Chappell, President of San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR)
Jack F. Bair, Senior Vice President and General Counsel, SF Giants,
Peter Victor, Vice President, Office Leasing, Boston Properties
James W. Haas, Chair of the Committee to Remove the Embarcadero Freeway and citizen activist
Diane Y. Oshima, Manager, Waterfront Planning, Port of San Francisco
The meeting first concentrated on the history of the development of the waterfront over the last decade. With the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway in 1991,a major barrier was removed and the City became reconnected to its waterfront. Now there are broad walks for pedestrians and cyclists, and a palm-lined boulevard. A spacious new plaza links the Ferry Building to Market Street. Historic street cars connect Fisherman’s Wharf to the Ferry Building, where new ferry docks will restore it as a major regional ferry terminal. The freeway removal and the building of the new Embarcadero Roadway set the stage for the renaissance of San Francisco’s waterfront. A new ballpark has been built along the waterfront and the first season has been successfully concluded. An exciting process is beginning that will benefit the entire urban environment, including the emergence of the new Gap headquarters, the new Muni hotel, the renovation of the Ferry Building and Pier One, and the evolving South Beach neighborhood.
South Beach gradually became established and now thrives with the ballpark. Similar success stories are envisioned with the upcoming cruise terminal and renovation of the Ferry Building.
The Port of San Francisco Waterfront Land Use Plan that came about in January 2000 was a breakthrough. The Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), the Port of San Francisco, the State Land Commission, the environmental community, the business community along with others collaborated on this plan which was designed to provide a context for planning and development along the San Francisco waterfront. It consists of some very general criteria and policies that each of the organizations brought to the table. For example, BCDC head Will Travis wanted "the Bay to be a little bigger and (have more) public access to the waterfront. (With this plan) we have something that provides the flexibility and will allow those individual visions as they come forth and the waterfront to be dynamic and change over time".
The participants agreed that no single project is responsible for the exciting changes happening along the waterfront. Rather, a series of planning efforts coupled with the earthquake set the stage. Added to this is the involvement of the community and its push for diversity. Such community involvement made the process take longer than many would have liked but all agree that the result is a lot richer and worth the extra effort.
Following are excerpts from the discussion:
Community Process Leads to Diversity
Boris Dramov: From a strategy point of view, this waterfront was not created by one thing. Its diversity is what distinguishes it. I was in Bilbao recently, which was a phenomenal project that the Guggenheim did in that industrial city. They were really looking at transforming this industrial riverfront and came up with a great idea which was to join with the Guggenheim and build a phenomenal structure. And to the greatest degree, it’s been that single act that helped start things off. That’s not what happened in San Francisco. In San Francisco, we have housing. We have some offices. We have a ballpark. We have historic buildings. It’s been a very different process. And as much as I do think that the ballpark has been a phenomenal addition to the waterfront, consider if you had built a ballpark with nothing around it in the middle of an industrial area. Instead, the Giants came into an area that already had many things going on and added to it. San Francisco, from the beginning, didn’t go for the single fix, for example with a convention center on the waterfront, the Sydney Opera House on the waterfront, the Guggenheim on the waterfront, the festival marketplace on the waterfront. Diversity takes longer but the result is a lot richer. South Beach took a while and we see that South Beach works really well with the ballpark. The cruise terminal will come in and the freeway removal and all of that but what distinguishes San Francisco to a great degree has been this process that has allowed a very significant amount of diversity to be built in.
Pierless
Boris Dramov: In 1980 I helped the City when they did the northeast waterfront plan and we agreed on everything except the piers. We could not reach consensus on the piers… there was still the hope that maybe maritime would come back. I remember sitting with many people who said, "The City has enough on their plate to do inland. Let them do a good job at that."
Will Travis: We agreed on everything in the waterfront plan except what would happen to the waterfront.
Jim Haas: The planning that’s been going on has been uncoordinated and messy and we’re very fortunate that it’s come out so well …
Boris Dramov: It wasn’t necessarily bad that way. I think there are lots of ways of doing it. There are waterfronts that are very "thin". Our waterfront isn’t thin, in fact, leaving the controversy of the piers for a period of time allowed development to move forward on inland sites first. The basic premise of the Northeast Waterfront Plan was to extend the amenity of the waterfront inland and share it more democratically with the community as a whole.
Historic District – Limited Development
Will Travis
Will Travis: Of course, that’s one of the challenges that we have. People are worried what’s happened it’s just the tip of the iceberg. And I think that a lot of people love the San Francisco waterfront but they love it the way it used to be. They really felt that if they could just keep it looking the way it used to look, that it would go back to the way it used to be. And I think that institutionally, we have a lot of laws in place that also reflect the past and not the future. I think a breakthrough came with the notion of the historical district because I think that people are in some way afraid of designers. They’re afraid of change. They know what’s there now. They know how it looks. They know they like it. They know they like the way it used to be. And the future is unknown and they get frightened of it. When we talked about the historic district, I think it gave people a sense of comfort and confidence that we could have a changing waterfront and yet it would fit within a scale and context that they were comfortable with and liked. So I view that as a remarkable breakthrough where we now have an overlay of what can happen and a lot of change can take place within that context.
Ballpark – The Big Kahuna
Will Travis: We owe the Giants. I greatly thank the Giants organization because I think if someone had suggested that it would be possible to build essentially an enormous several square block structure along the waterfront and design it in a fashion that would be friendly to the surrounding communities, that would have a scale that is welcoming, that is not oppressive or overwhelming and that really does open up the waterfront: well, I think if it had been a church or a hotel or housing or anything else but a ballpark it would have been a much harder sell. It allowed an example of it is possible for designers to craft, something that meets these criteria on a very human scale.
Jack Bair: I’m relatively new to this effort. I’ve been working for the Giants for eight years and my responsibility from the beginning was to select a site for the ballpark and look at the ballpark development. And so I wasn’t really a player here in the olden days that people recall fondly. For a long time, the San Francisco waterfront was a waterfront that was sort of broken down, run down and not particularly attractive or charming or something to preserve.
When I started working for the Giants, you couldn’t walk along the water. It was all walled off and I had to call and get special permission to go there to take photos and sort of imagine what the ballpark would look like on that location and what people staring over the right field wall toward the water would see. We had to all sort of imagine these things because the way it was before was not somewhere where anybody from the public could even go. Now, the walk behind the park is open all the time for people to stroll and you go there right now and you see people on skateboards, roller blades, people walking and using the area for recreation and it’s a place for people to show their friends from out of town, "Hey, come let’s look at the ballpark and let’s stroll around the area." I think that’s a great thing.
Now, I am actually proud of taking people down to the waterfront. I had a friend that was in from Sydney, Australia over the weekend. He hadn’t been here in five or six years and we went down to the waterfront. He had much appreciation for how much improved the area was starting at the ballpark and moving up and even past the Bay Bridge to the northern waterfront as well with the walking pier that exists out there. I pointed out the area for the planned park that’s opposite the Gap Building, the cruise ship terminal that slated to go in. It’s just very attractive and it opens up to me the waterfront as something to be proud of not only for tourists to enjoy but for a citizen to enjoy. I mean there are a lot of fine restaurants that are all located along the Embarcadero Roadway where people patronize. There’s housing that’s going up to take advantage of the views.
The speed with which the ballpark was developed had a lot to do with the fact that it was on the ballot and that it received a two-thirds vote. Had we not gone through the ballot and instead had gone through the normal approval process that a developer would go through, I don’t think we would have ever built it. So my point is that, on the one hand, the process that exists in San Francisco, while ferreting out bad projects, has ferreted out a tremendous number of good projects because people look at how much money you have to spend and how much effort it takes, particularly on the waterfront. In fact, we felt that if we won with only 51 or 52% of the vote that we didn’t necessarily think we could get through the process and finance-able and build-able at the end of the process.
If you are a project in San Francisco that has a determined even though small group that is dead set against you, it is very, very, very difficult to succeed. So the ballpark was in a lot of ways an aberration in that it was not like any other development project that’s going in down at the waterfront. But I do think the success of the ballpark and the roadway and many of the other things that have happened is making it easier for other developments because people can see the fruits of it. They can look at the drawings with what the ferry building might look like, what the cruise ship terminal might look like and they can say, "Hey, that’s nice. I think I might like that." And so people’s eyes are a little more open to it now but there is no way we could have built the ballpark going through the traditional process.
Process Until it Hurts
Richard Springwater: There’s a way we do things here in San Francisco, which is a very messy, very political, very ideological. And it might take place under the auspices of BCDC hearing or waterfront design hearing or port commission hearing and any number of other groups but it’s the same process having to do with the fact that the waterfront is a public trust. It’s a valuable resource and before you do anything, you need to think very carefully and it’s going to take a long time and you have to be cautious and everybody’s not going to get everything that they want. The best decision was for the Giants to say, "40,000 seats is okay. We can pencil a ballpark at 40,000 seats." Believe me, there are a lot of baseball owners that would say, "I can’t do it." But the Giants were brave. There are those kinds of decisions where the economics and the public interest come together quickly. Developers who want to succeed on the waterfront meet the community where the community wants to be. One must understand that it’s not an adversarial process but instead trying to get to reasoned judgment, not necessarily that of the fringe, but to the reasoned judgment of the entire community, you’ll get a lot of support.
Turning Point
Diane Oshima: We have found that when you create an opportunity for an honest exchange of views that people want to try to actually work together toward positive change on the waterfront. Compromises and trade-offs are more easily rendered in the process if people see that something’s real. The waterfront plan created a venue for the community to express all of its different views. We have found that when you create an opportunity for an honest exchange of views that people want to try to actually work together toward positive change on the waterfront. Compromises and trade-offs are more easily rendered in the process if people see that something’s real. I really give a lot of credit to the Giants because they didn’t have any of the process infrastructure. They had to invent it for themselves and in fact now the Port’s trying, with these advisory committee processes that you’ve all been involved in, to stimulate this involvement for every major project so that from the community’s standpoint they understand what the tradeoffs are but from the developer’s standpoint, they understand how touchy an issue can be before they go investing themselves in a multi-year entitlement process.
Ferries and the Waterfront
Will Travis: One of the reasons I’m excited about the ferry system on the Bay is with exceptions like San Francisco and Jack London Square and a few other places like that, we don’t have really rich waterfronts around the Bay. In most places, the shoreline of the Bay is simply where the filling stopped in 1965 when BCDC was created. Having a ferry system and using those sites as potential for mixed-use development, I think really provides us with a fantastic opportunity to, not revitalize, but vitalize portions of the waterfront where there really is nothing now. In a lot of the places that have been spotted and sited as good locations for ferry terminals, you don’t have existing single-family houses nearby so I think as design professionals and planners we have wonderful opportunities to really have a renaissance on the waterfront of San Francisco Bay in places like Oyster Point Marina, that nobody ever though of, or San Leandro, as great places for wonderful vibrant urban waterfronts.
Jim Haas: That, of course, is the focus of, Bay Crossings. I think the expanded ferry service and the Ferry Building itself will play an important role unifying the Bay. We need more ferry stops around the Bay.
Jim Chappell: We still seem to regard the Bay as negative space when in fact it could and should be the positive space. When more of us use the Bay to commute on ferries there will be a different view of all of our communities around the Bay.
Peter Victor: When the Embarcadero Freeway came down the downtown community lost significant access. Granted, it was not pretty, but it was functional. Right now, it is a nightmare getting out of downtown San Francisco to the Bay Bridge on the surface streets. We should do everything we can to encourage the ferry usage.
Jack Bair: I had ferry statistics pulled and Golden Gate Transit service from Larkspur is reaching record numbers, of which about 10% are people going to the ballpark, which is pretty amazing. We’re getting up to 40% of the people coming from Marin to take the ferry.
Will Travis: Especially bay-front properties with views of San Francisco.
Boris Dramov: The more the Bay gets unified as transformations occur in all these different places - Vallejo, Oakland, Alameda and so on, the Bay becomes really that unique element in enhancing the potential of what’s there.
Richard Springwater: Opening up the waterfront at potential ferry terminals down in the South Bay and East Bay is a great idea and obviously it calls for a large scale planning process that would overcome some of the hurdles that anyone interested in a private development of those sites would want to see cleared before they’d invest.
Will Travis: I think we’ll look at this in five years and we will look at that statistic and say, "Why in the world would 60% of the people not take the ferry?" This is where the Water Transit Authority is going to be just a fantastic asset. Looking at the statistics on ferry ridership, it’s important to understand the Vallejo example: when the ferry was running two trips and added another trip ridership went up 105%. The reason is because once people know that if they miss the 5:00, there is a 6:00 and a 7:00, they’ll use it everyday. Once we get to that critical mass on all ferry lines I promise that we will look back and ask, "Why in the world did it take so long to do this?"
Jack Bair: And 50% of the people that come to the games do not drive. They take transportation means other than car, which exceeds our expectations. I believe that if public transportation is reliable and convenient, that people will choose to use it.
Will Travis: I think the F line and the Vallejo ferry do something for public transportation that we don’t normally do in this country and that is we try to get people to use public transportation by making driving such a miserable experience that they’ll reluctantly use public transportation. And both the F line and the Vallejo ferry, they’ve taken the approach, "We’re going to design this and operate in such a fashion that even if it isn’t as convenient as driving, you’re still going to use it because it is such a pleasant experience."
Jim Chappell: It’s clear that we’re not going to build any more urban freeways. We’re not going to build any more automobile lanes across the Bay. We’re not going to widen city streets and narrow sidewalks and take out street trees and if the economy is going to continue to grow, there’s only one way that people are going to get around and that is on transit. The one opportunity that is least developed is water transit. We don’t have to build tubes and it’s infinitely flexible. It can go anywhere you want it to go between various points. You have to develop landing points but it’s a tremendous untapped opportunity. I’ve been terribly disappointed to see some factions of the environmental community take issue with ferries
Will Travis: Well, some of those concerns are very legitimate. When you look at the actual ridership, it isn’t that people are switching from cars to ferries, they’re switching from buses to ferries and the buses are cleaner than the ferries. Ferries, depending on where they are operating, can have impacts on wetlands and cause erosion. They can have significant impacts on wildlife. All of that has to be taken into account. But I keep looking at it from the big picture and I think we should do an overall regional analysis of the environmental impacts of operating a ferry system. You would find the overall environmental impacts of not operating a ferry would be greater than of operating one. If it’s designed to use clean fuels, minimize wakes, avoid wetlands in siting the terminals, it can be done.
Peter Victor: I came here 13 years ago downtown was not really happening, especially on weekends. Now you have the Farmers Market drawing people on Saturday mornings and the development of the Ferry Building and I think it’s going to benefit the entire feeling of the downtown, urban environment.
Will Travis: For a period of time, every community was closing their main street and making it a pedestrian mall. They found that didn’t work. Then every community had to have an aquarium. Then every community had to have a farmer’s market and one of the people said, "I think every community’s going to want to have a waterfront."
Boris Dramov: Once the Ferry building is renovated and activity comes to the area I think it will ripple back to the Embarcadero Center because it’s still a bit isolated out there. One does come down but not that often. If there were more things that would attract residents…for example the Music Concourse that is proposed.
Jim Chappell: Look at the Metreon…I go down there on a Friday or a Saturday night and it really is like Times Square. It’s really unbelievable. I think Boris is right, we haven’t quite hit that density of development that we need around Embarcadero Center. I think the Ferry Building will help. I think we need even more.
Diane Oshima: Particularly on the Port’s properties, how do you do more 24 hour oriented kinds of development that is not tourist oriented that engages San Franciscans. You have to do something that not only is acceptable to all of those people who live around it but something that attracts the locals because then the tourists will come along with it.
The Bay Area Perspective
Boris Dramov: I think that whole Embarcadero Center area is still waiting for the synergy to happen between the Ferry Building. One Market Plaza is not done. Pier One is not done. The hotel on MUNI is not done. The Music Concourse is still being planned. In order to really enjoy the synergy for all of that, it’s going to take all those things being done. One of the things that we’re lucky here is that we have a very attractive area that people are willing to come to. Other places in the Bay area are tougher to sell. When we work with different cities, we urge them to think of their proximity to the Bay, and the advantages this could present.
