We built this city
Summer of Love hype aside, much of San Francisco’s recent history seems impossibly remote. That’s why there’s an exotic feel to “Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay,” Alison Isenberg’s exploration of how the northeast corner of the city changed — and resisted change — in the 1960s.
As the thorough title suggests, this is an academic book, full of methodical prose and half-page paragraphs. Some of its conclusions reach too far to grasp an overarching theme. But it’s of real value — because Isenberg, a professor of history at Princeton University, dug deep to capture the transitional years when the city’s establishment was on the verge of being altered by cultural forces that it could not control.
The complexity of those forces is conveyed in “Culturea-go-go,” an intriguing chapter on the long-forgotten controversy over Ghirardelli Square’s mermaid fountain.
The former chocolate factory back then was a mecca for both tourists and locals, the Ferry Building of its time, with modern plazas threaded among the shop-filled historic buildings. Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was the designer most closely associated with the project — and when local artist Ruth Asawa in 1968 added a fountain with three bronze mermaids to the central plaza, Halprin ridiculed the result in a two-page public letter.
Halprin, who at the same time was championing the harshly provocative Vaillancourt Fountain for Justin Herman Plaza, dismissed Asawa’s work as better suited to Disneyland. But the public was with Asawa; one letter to The Chronicle compared Halprin’s criticism to “the whimperings of a petulant child.”
For Isenberg, the controversy isn’t just an entertaining yarn. She fits it within a city where topless bars were all the rage, and standards about public decency were in flux. Carol Doda’s neon nipples along Broadway were one thing. A breast-feeding mermaid in chic Ghirardelli Square was another, Isenberg argues: “Through public art, without the explicit acknowledgment of Halprin, Asawa explored and expanded the boundaries of acceptable female behavior in public.”
The fountain fracas illustrates another strain smartly emphasized by Isenberg : The cast of characters shaping our cities isn’t restricted to a handful of well-publicized designers and developers.
Nor are they all male. One chapter is devoted to Marion Conrad, who handled public relations for Ghirardelli Square, Sea Ranch and other key developments of the era; another looks at Leila Johnston and Virginia Green, who ran San Francisco’s top architectural modeling firm. Why was this important? Because Conrad shaped the stories told by the people who wanted to redraw the map. And large physical models were the tangible symbol of what tomorrow might hold — “the leading edge,” Isenberg writes, “for introducing new planning and architectural concepts to the public and for provoking reaction to design.”
In other words, development more and more was something that regular people didn’t simply take for granted. They wanted to know what was going on.
Where Isenberg falters is in some of her attempts to connect the dots — to find larger morals to the story as the 1970s approached and a cadre of San Franciscans went into battle against big buildings and often dubious notions of “progress.”
Consider how she frames the battle over a project that in hindsight would have been truly horrendous: the San Francisco International Market Center at the foot of Telegraph Hill. It was to swallow up portions of Montgomery and Lombard streets; it also passed the Board of Supervisors 10-1 in 1968, only to collapse after being stalled by a lawsuit objecting to the sale of public streets at below-market rates.
Good riddance. Instead of the atmospheric masonry warehouses that have been restored, we’d have megastructures cloaked in bay windows and green roofs. But the suit was a weapon, one of many put to use. It wasn’t a pivotal moment where, Isenberg argues, critics gained lasting traction by emphasizing the protection of public resources rather than more subjective quality-of-life issues.
The idea that land ownership was the defining issue for development opponents also plays out when Isenberg makes the case that 1971’s “The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco’s Mad Rush Toward the Sky” is the unfairly forgotten West Coast counterpart to Jane Jacobs’ classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Yes, the local collection from the Bay Guardian alternative weekly includes vigorous exposes of the hidden connections among large landowners (no easy task in the days before the Internet). But basically, it was a screed against everything related to downtown development.
It’s not an enduring study of what makes successful cities work at ground level, as was the case with Jacobs. It’s an apocalyptic artifact of its time, including a chapter that insisted that the not-yet-open BART system would be a neighborhood-destroying flop.
Still, give Isenberg credit: “Designing San Francisco” has real value. It deepens our understanding of how today’s landscape came to be — and the bullets we dodged along the way.