Bold new city lurks beyond fraying center
It’s possible to visit two different cities in the same day in San Francisco: one old and a bit frayed around the edges, the other new and not quite born.
It was one of the last warm days of the season, so I started with the old city. That would be the corner of Market, Post and Montgomery streets.
To the writer Charles Caldwell Dobie, San Francisco was a pageant, and there is no better place to see his city than sitting in the sun at Montgomery and Market. There is a little plaza there, and steps to sit and watch.
The setting is oldschool San Francisco. Down Market, toward the Ferry Building, is the Native Sons monument, celebrating that great day in 1850 when California was admitted to the union. A gold miner cast in bronze stands at the foot of a tall white pillar. Atop it is the figure of a woman with the wings of an angel.
The buildings all around the intersection represent the great names of the San Francisco pageant: Crocker, Mills, Willis Polk, Wells Fargo, the Palace Hotel. There is even a sidewalk flower stand.
Back in the day, this was where Montgomery — the Wall Street of the West — met Market, the main street of what civic boosters called The City.
An architecture class from Chabot College was there the other afternoon, on a field trip for a look at the city. “This area is loaded with history,” Keary Kensinger, the teacher, told them.
There are two subway stations at Montgomery and Market — BART and Muni. And Market itself is crowded with clanking surface street cars and growling buses, cars, trucks and streams of bicycles. I imagine 100,000 people pass by here most weekdays.
But it’s not the pageant it once was. The center of the city is fraying, and the steps on Market are full of scruffy-looking bike messengers and occasional homeless street people sitting in the sun.
There is a beggar on one corner with a sign that says something about love, and a man behind him, shouting. There is another man sleeping on the sidewalk of the Wall Street of the West, and a woman going through the trash bins on Market, looking for cans to recycle.
It was time for a look at a different part of the city, so I ducked into the subway and took a TThird Street Muni car south. The T line runs out of the subway just south of Mission Street, and into the sun on the Embarcadero, past the ballpark, rumbling over the old drawbridge that crosses Mission Creek. A good place to get off is the Mission Rock Station on Third Street.
Walking in the afternoon through the big box apartment houses in the Mission Bay neighborhood seemed a bit odd. The streets were empty, no kids out playing, nobody walking the dog, hardly any traffic.
But just south of South Street, the machines were grinding away, and the two tall cranes were swinging pieces of steel. It’s the new arena that will be the home for the basketball Warriors, a development that will change this part of the city the way AT&T, the baseball park, transformed the blocks around Second and King streets
There are piles of dirt around the new construction zone and the whiff of money in the air. But it is still possible to stroll behind the pedestrian barriers on the bay side of Terry Francois Street.
Back in the good old days, maybe three years ago, this little stretch between the Mission Rock Resort and the south shore of Mission Creek was empty and a bit forlorn, like the seacoast of nowhere. There were falling-down docks and the tiny Aqua Vista Park, with a fishing pier. SF Weekly once voted it “Best Melancholy Place to Fish.”
But it’s a pretty little area, with the blue bay on one side and UCSF’s campus on the other. There are still tugboats running out of Pier 50 and two gray ships docked. On a clear day you can see all the way to Oakland.
But you had better hurry. The Warriors are coming, and a big new development by the Giants on what is now a huge parking lot just south of the ballpark is in the works. And a few blocks away, past the big empty shipyard, the port and Forest City, the big developer, are going to transform what is now Pier 70 into yet another new neighborhood.
A whole new San Francisco, only 20 minutes or so away from the heart of the old city. It’s just over the horizon.