Urban Renewal Revisited: A Design Critique
by Eric C.Y. Fang
This article
first appeared in the February,
1999 SPUR Newsletter.
Mention the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and you are likely to think of 1960s-style
"urban renewal." For the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, this association is unfortunate not
only because urban renewal has been indelibly linked with less than enlightened, sometimes
repugnant, social policies, but because urban renewal is also associated with less than enlightened,
sometimes repugnant urban design and modern architecture. But a closer examination of the
Redevelopment Agency's projects reveals a far less monolithic approach than these associations
would suggest. In the period spanning from the Redevelopment Agency's earliest projects, which
were initiated in 1956 and 1957, to its later projects like South Beach, the Redevelopment Agency's
ideas about city-building have evolved in important ways. Indeed, to walk through the urban renewal
projects undertaken by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is to experience firsthand the
physical manifestations of the planning fads and theories of the last 40 years.
THE AGENCY'S EARLY PROJECTS
The Redevelopment Agency's first projects, Western Addition-A1 and Golden Gateway, display the
influence of modernist planning theories on American planners and architects after World War II as
they wrestled with the realities of the modern city like the automobile and the tremendous need for
housing. These theories, which included separating land uses, segregating pedestrians and
automobiles, and a preference for high widely spaced housing blocks were, as many commentators
have noted, rooted in a deep antipathy toward cities. This was seen in their reliance on wholesale
rebuilding and large projects rather than incremental change. In cities such as New York and
Chicago, urban renewal projects executed by zealous administrators like Robert Moses demolished
acres of established neighborhoods and replaced them with bleak and intimidating rows of
repetitious housing slabs. These projects were often stunning in their willingness to ignore and
indeed, obliterate not only the details, but the framework of the American city. It was as if, as Jane
Jacobs later observed, the medical profession had decided to throw away its medical books and
adopt the practice of bloodletting.
In San Francisco, the brand of urbanism employed by the Redevelopment Agency seemed less
dogmatic and ideologically driven than the rigid and relentless modernism seen in other cities.
Whether it was the bureaucratic inertia that plagued the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in its
early years or the sheer number of years it took the Agency to develop projects, by the time San
Francisco Redevelopment Agency really got under way in the early 1960s, reactions against the
radical visions that fueled the early modernists had already started emerging. And it was perhaps
this delay that allowed the Redevelopment Agency's first projects to escape the rigid orthodoxy that
was responsible for the most pathological projects undertaken elsewhere.
Consider the plan for Western Addition-A1 which was approved by the Board of Supervisors in
1956 to clear what was at that time deemed one of the city's most blighted areas. The Redevelopment
Agency's original plan for Western Addition-A1 by Vernon Demars followed classic modern
planning principles starting with the creation of Geary Boulevard - an expressway-scaled roadway -
through an area which had been occupied by Victorians. A minimal landscaping concept for Geary
Boulevard - which ended up as neither a grand urban boulevard nor a landscaped parkway - limited
use opportunities for the blocks that were left on both sides of the new roadway, most of which were
combined and developed as superblocks. Following modernist doctrine, Demars' plan populated
these superblocks with high-rise residential towers set within landscaped plazas. Unfortunately, to
accommodate parking requirements, these plazas were set atop parking garages called podiums.
These projects, designed by Stone Marraccini and Patterson and Daniel Mann Johnson and
Mendenhall and completed in the mid- to late-60s, not only introduced a new scale to this part of the
city but demonstrated the deadening effect this type of urbanism could have on the streets and
spaces in between the buildings.
But Demars' plan also provided for low-rise housing on the western portions of the Western
Addition-A1 area. This was developed in 1961 by the ILGWU into the St. Francis Square housing
project. In their design of St. Francis Square, architects Marquis & Stoller clearly expended far
more energy on the interior of the blocks than the street side, displaying an indifference to the street
typical of the time: buildings fan out in a pinwheel fashion, refusing to meet at their corners while
parking is pushed out to the perimeter of the site along the streets. However, St. Francis Square
anticipated the comeback that low-rise prototypes would make later in the 1960s, a sign that
architects were beginning to look again at what was lost in the head long rush towards modernizing
the city. Indeed, Oscar Newman hailed St. Francis Square as proof that medium-density housing
could be developed using low-rise prototypes in his famed primer on urban design, Defensible
Space.
Golden Gateway, a project devised in the 1950s to allow the financial center to expand into territory
occupied by a wholesale food market on the northeast waterfront, encompassed an even greater
range of urban design ideas in the thirty-odd years it took to develop. The original plan, by
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, was true to that firm's reputation as an avatar of modernism.
Residential buildings were segregated from commercial uses and were housed in towers set back
from the street within broad areas of landscaping that flowed across two- and three-block
superblocks. Offices, located in tall buildings on the southern half of the project area were sited atop
landscaped parking podiums, while a system of pedestrian bridges connected the podium level to
allow office workers and high-rise residents to walk unencumbered above the noise and fumes of
the traffic below. Golden Gateway's first developments, the high-rise apartment buildings by
Wurster Benardi & Emmons and the Alcoa Building by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, adhere
closely to this vision creating a realm of silent, controlled and sometimes elegant plazas at the
podium level but leaving the streets below devoid of activity.
By the time design began on the commercial projects for the southern half of Golden Gateway in
the 1960s, American and European architects had begun toying with the ideas that critics opposed to
modernism's functional segregation started proposing in the 1950s. These critics proposed the
notion that the city could be developed as a large, multi-level, interconnected building or
"megastructure." This idea manifested itself in the Embarcadero Center's multi-level shopping mall
linked across four city blocks by bridges. The decision by the Center's architect, John Portman, to
bury the parking garages below grade and put retail space on the street level, has been recounted by
former Redevelopment Agency planner Herbert Lembcke in a recent issue of the American Institute
for Architects quarterly, LINE. But what would, in other less benign climates have been an
internalizing gesture, siphoning energy off the streets, here not only enlivened the streets but
prevented Clay Street from becoming a no-man's land between a canyon of blank parking garage
walls. While the Embarcadero Center did not produce that one single symbolic urban space that
would have allowed it to live up to its advanced billing as "Rockefeller Center West," it did help
revive the idea that tall buildings could be set within a matrix of pedestrian-oriented uses that
actually could contribute to the street.
SIGNS OF CHANGE
The second phase of Western Addition-A2, which extended Western Addition-A1 west past
Broderick Street and south to Grove Street, did not get under way until 1966 due to legal challenges
to the social policies of Western Addition-A1. By this time The Life and Death of Great American
Cities by Jane Jacobs had been out for five years. The influence of Jacobs' now classic attack on
urban renewal and modern city planning as well as a rapidly changing political climate can perhaps
be seen in Western Addition-A2's more tempered approach toward redevelopment. In Western
Addition-A2, there was an increased reliance on rehabilitating existing housing, building
neighborhood institutional buildings, and low-rise housing that aligns, roughly, with the street."
But it would be many years before architects could free themselves of the still dominant anti-urban
dogma of modernism and embrace a more civil approach to the street. In the projects located in the
superblocks between Webster and Laguna Streets, Western Addition-A2's least successful area,
many buildings face away from the street, sometimes adding to this insult with backyards enclosed
by fences, while others present a giant saw-toothed edge to the street. In Western Addition-A2 you
see few towers, and none of the gargantuan changes in the scale of the city fabric that you encounter
in Western Addition-A1. What you encounter instead are just a series of smaller but systematic
insults that as a whole add up to a degraded public environment and a precinct that feels distinctly
different from the rest of the city-. And despite the Western Addition-A2's preservation efforts, most
traces of what was known as the "Harlem of the West were effectively eradicated.
The third phase of Golden Gateway was begun in 1978, a time when architects were actively
searching for alternatives to modernism. Here, in four of the blocks slated for high-rises in the
Redevelopment Agency's original plan, Fisher-Friedman Associates developed a highly effective
low-rise housing prototype that managed to hide cars altogether by burying them in the interior of
the block and surrounding them with street-friendly retail and office uses that actually turn the
corner. Instead of open, undefined plazas, Golden Gate North's open space, Sidney Walton Park,
was created as an urban square, much in the manner that open space in San Francisco has always
been developed. Fisher-Friedman's arrangement of housing along the perimeter of the podium and
return to the original grid layout foreshadowed to some extent the renewed interest in the perimeter
block and defined urban spaces by post-modern theorists like Leon and Rob Krier and Josef
Kliehaus.
AFTER THE MODERN
South Beach, initiated in the 1980s, took these interests several steps further. South Beach was
intended to transform a section of the northeastern waterfront occupied by warehouses, and storage
yards into a mixed-use residential district. Projects like Steamboat Point and the Delancey Street
Foundation by Backen, Arrigoni & Ross, as well as South Beach Marina and Bayside Village by
Fisher-Friedman not only employed perimeter block housing types, but a full set of the architectural
elements that address and reinforce the street as a public space: entrances face directly out onto the
street; facades are broken-up into regular, vertically orientated sections, while bases provide scale
and anchor the buildings to the ground. The Redevelopment Agency complemented the more civil
manners of these buildings with a rare, but obvious attention to the spaces between the
developments, producing streets and pedestrian walks that are among the best to be found in a
redevelopment area.
But South Beach's large scale of development and lack of continuity with neighboring districts
makes it feel different, much in the same way that New York's Battery Park City feels different from
the rest of Manhattan. For just as Battery Park's scrupulous attention to the superficial urbanistic
conventions of New York residential architecture do not quite make a convincing New York
neighborhood, South Beach's lack of variety and connection to the rest of San Francisco can
sometimes impart a feeling of being in a simulation of the city rather than the real thing. And as we
have begun to appreciate the importance of maintaining an awareness of change in establishing a
neighborhood's sense of place, South Beach's block-by-block development allows precious-few
connections to the district's past
CONCLUSION
The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency's approach to urban design has clearly evolved since the
days when Lewis Mumford's call to take parts of the city and "cart it away and begin all over" was
its rallying cry. Projects like Golden Gateway North and South Beach have demonstrated that the
San Francisco Redevelopment Agency is able to bind redevelopment areas to the rest of the city. But
they also show that good architectural manners are not enough. Indeed, to give these areas a sense
of place and make them truly a part of San Francisco, a more appropriate model may now be (to
borrow a phrase from James Traub of the New York Times) "the artful and intricate
superimposition of the new upon the old." As the Redevelopment Agency enters a new era of
city-building, a key question remains: can fundamental change to the city be implemented without
destroying its essential qualities?
Eric Fang is an urban designer with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; a member of SPUR's Urban
Policies Committee; and is chair of editorial board of LINE, the quarterly publication of the San
Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
