San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
This spot gives a snapshot of S.F.’s past — and future
It’s hard to tell what the new year will be like. It’s beautiful one day and rainy the next. There are giant waves on the ocean and flat calm on the bay. It’s as if the season can’t make up its mind.
San Francisco is a bit like that — it’s old, it’s new, it’s changing, it’s the same. So on the first rainy day of the new year, I decided to take a walk where I could see the best mixture of the old and new city.
I picked the central waterfront, from the southern frontier of Dogpatch to Chase Center on the edge of Mission Bay. I don’t know any part of the city that has a mix like this.
I started at Warm Water Cove Park where 24th Street runs into the bay. It’s pretty there in the winter, when the grass is green and the bay is blue. But it’s a kind of a nowhere place, with feral cats and a community of people who live in their cars, a place where people are down, but not quite out. “There is a spirit there,” said Teag McCormack, who spent his winters there in an elderly Toyota.
There is a different spirit that emerges walking north on Illinois Street. You can see it through a fence — crews working on construction of the Potrero Power Station development, a $2 billion bet on the future of San Francisco. It will include 2,600 new residential units, around 1.6 million square feet of commercial space, retail space and a hotel, all centered on Michigan Street, a street most San Franciscans have never heard of.
The area used to be a big power plant, spewing smoke into the sky. The smokestack will remain, a landmark. Think of it: a new neighborhood east of Dogpatch.
If you know San Francisco, you know the past is always with us. And through a chain-link fence at 22nd and Illinois streets is what’s left of Irish Hill. In the 19th century, it was a small neighborhood of working people — small houses, shacks and boarding houses. Some say Irish Hill was once 250 feet tall, but there’s not much left, only a small cliff and a scraggly tree. The rest has been bulldozed and chewed by progress, an ex-hill.
In the shadow of Irish Hill is the real gem of the city’s central waterfront — the Union Iron Works Historic District. It wasn’t that long ago when the shipyard there, 66 acres and 38 buildings, was the heart of an industrial San Francisco. The Union Iron Works and Bethlehem Steel began building ships there in 1885, and the yard operated until 2017, only yesterday in the history business.
The yard began with wooden ships and transitioned to steel. The yard could build anything in metal. It built ferryboats, barges, cargo ships, destroyers, submarines, everything in steel from the famous battleship Oregon to the BART tube under San Francisco Bay — 57 sections, each 350 feet long, built at the Potrero Plant and sunk into the bay.
At its peak during World War II, the shipyard employed 18,000 workers and ran 24 hours a day.
The yard built close to 500 ships. The last one was the U.S. Navy frigate Bradley, launched in 1965. Eventually, even the ship repair business was no longer viable. When the yard finally closed, seven years ago, the district turned into an urban wilderness of broken windows and abandoned buildings.
Now it’s being transformed: new tenants, a new look. The centerpiece, I think, is the old shipyard administration building now turned into a RH (formerly called Restoration Hardware) gallery, five floors of luxury home furnishings and a high-end restaurant. Caviar is on the menu, and two stone lions guard the entrance. There’s valet parking. It’s not your grandfather’s shipyard.
Just up the street is Crane Cove Park, an open space alongside a facility where new ships were built. There’s even a little beach. In the distance, the old shipyard cranes stand, empty and silent, to remind visitors of another San Francisco.
If you listen on a quiet night and the wind is right, you might hear the echo of the old plant whistle that used to blow for important moments: the start of work, lunchtime, quitting time.
I walked north, toward downtown, past a working boatyard, past the Ramp Restaurant, past the Mission Rock resort and a fishing pier. There were apartments and condos on the shore side, and farther inland, offices and labs of UCSF where biotech rules.
It started to rain, so it was time to turn back outside Chase Center, the arena that has brought even more life to the area. The east entrance to the arena is graced by five steel-andglass spheres designed by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. They are objects for the curious: They reflect both back and forward, like seeing the past and the future at the same time.