When you look down upon the Richmond District from the tower of the de Young Museum — a vantage that justifies my monthly pilgrimage on foot from Alamo Square where I live — that neighborhood, inner and outer, looks like a precinct of The Peaceable Kingdom: orderly, benignant, heavenly.
This illusion dissolves at street level, of course. Still, the Richmond, with nearly 80,000 people according to the 2010 U.S. census, remains a low-rise, light-filled, park-rich, distinctive San Francisco neighborhood, charming in places if not quite paradise on earth.
Here’s what could make the Richmond better, improve transportation, add housing, and claim even more open space: Put the stretch of State Highway 1 between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, long known as Park Presidio Boulevard, underground, liberating the surface for all kinds of benefits to neighborhood and city.
In stages organized to minimize disruption, dig a trench, drop precast tunnel sections into it complete with traffic lanes and emergency shoulders, limited entrances and exits, signals and lighting, fans and exhaust portals — the whole shebang — and cover it up.
Presto! A lot of precious and valuable land suddenly becomes available on top for other purposes. As a cut-and-cover project, this part of my proposal can be done for a fraction of the cost of underground boring, the method used for the Central Subway now under construction.
Completely rethink the surface. Undergrounding Park Presidio Boulevard opens up seven long blocks of land, nearly a full mile, from Lake Street in the north to Fulton Street in the south and between 14th Avenue and Funston Avenue — even more if the project continues and the odious Crossover Drive, which snakes through Golden Gate Park from Fulton to Lincoln Boulevard, is forever buried too.
So what to do with the new land? It could be as much as 33 acres, minus the cross streets running through to maintain the Richmond grid.
Three main things: housing, greenery, and public transportation.
Thread new Muni rail tracks through the reclaimed wasteland of Park Presidio, moderately meandering rather than shooting through in a straight shot.
Housing must be dense (no detached single-family dwellings allowed!) and consist of low and midrise condo and rental buildings, and a mix of market-rate and affordable units, the former subsidizing the latter as it does elsewhere in the city. (I’d throw in a few widely spaced 20- to 30-story towers, but I don’t think this will fly with the neighbors.)
All residential buildings should be clustered to allow for abundant parks, gardens, playgrounds, walkways, and other public amenities. Because this new sliver of development would already be steps away from the dense Richmond’s public schools, libraries, firehouses, stores, and other and commercial services, the project could be mainly devoted to a rich mix of housing.
Finally, thread new north-south Muni rail tracks through the reclaimed wasteland of Park Presidio, moderately meandering rather than shooting through in a straight shot. Continue the tracks through the Presidio with a plan to connect eventually to an extension of the T-Third line through North Beach, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Marina.
Extend the new service south to intersect with the N-Judah, ideally crossing Golden Gate Park in the vicinity of its most popular attractions, the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum. This would provide a new light-rail loop allowing people downtown to use public transportation to get to Golden Gate Park, the Richmond, and the Presidio, and vice-versa.
If it proves too onerous to reroute or rethink the current 28 bus line, a Muni workhorse that extends south down 19th Avenue to Daly City, install bus-only lanes instead. We can work with that.
I can imagine all kinds of objections to this vision: disruption, noise, crime, congestion, loss of existing trees, and so forth. But most of these problems already exist. We don’t readily see them because their familiarity makes them invisible to us. I’m referring to the disruptive, dangerous, polluting, deafening freeway traffic of Highway 1 on surface streets through San Francisco.
Love means being open to change.
Criminal behavior already abounds in the form of speeding, drunk and reckless driving, and hit-and-run incidents. Congestion is built in; ask anyone who has to use or cross Park Presidio during ever-expanding rush hours, by car, bicycle, or on foot.
As for trees, my proposal would result in a forest of new ones for San Francisco; many more would be planted than sacrificed. Residents of 14th and Funston Avenues who currently have a “green screen” between them and Park Presidio Boulevard would eventually have a view of even more trees, as well as playgrounds, gardens, and (we can only hope) tastefully designed residences.
This plan, if thoughtfully conceived and executed, would reduce pollution, noise, and crime in the neighborhood. It would add housing and parks. It would improve transportation. True, it would cause headaches and disruptions during construction (although some cut-and-cover projects have managed to keep at least partial flow of traffic).
Disruption is part of most ambitious improvements in the city. We must not allow the prospect of temporary inconvenience to prevent significant positive public change.
Beyond the pushback from locals and commuters, there would be bureaucratic challenges. Because Park Presidio is a state highway, the city of San Francisco is not at liberty to act autonomously. But the state is not necessarily implacable. Caltrans originally sought to slice a deep, scarring road cut through a mountain to detour around the no-longer-maintainable Devil’s Slide section of Highway 1 south of Pacifica. A passionate, sustained, well-organized “Think Tunnel” campaign persuaded the powerful agency to alter this environmentally destructive plan.
I first came to San Francisco as a toddler on a visit with my parents from the San Joaquin Valley 60 years ago. In this my second stint as a resident, I’ve lived here nearly 30 years. I love my city. I love that San Franciscans are protective of our shared home. I also love the city’s throbbing dynamism, its diversity, its constant appeal to people, including young people, from all over the world.
Love means being open to change.
