Above new parkway, a scenic green space is coming to town
You wouldn’t know it whizzing through the tunnels of the Presidio Parkway, or motoring to or from the Golden Gate Bridge, but above you, San Francisco’s next great green space is starting to take shape.
For now, it’s just Caltrans workers installing fencing, stabilizing soil, carting off refuse — mop-up work from the construction of the Presidio Parkway, the $1.1 billion roadway that replaced the seismically unsafe Doyle Drive.
But by October, the landscape architect hired by the Presidio Trust — James Corner Field Operations, which trans-
formed New York’s High Line from train trestle into pedestrian park — will have taken over. And the area above the parkway’s tunnels will start to take on new life as the Tunnel Tops, a park expected to open in early 2021.
“We are standing in what will be the largest of the three play meadows,” Michael Boland, the Presidio’s chief of park development and operations, said on a recent walk over the tunnels. “And over there is where that first overlook will be — it’ll have a deadon view of the tower of the Golden Gate Bridge. That will be the selfie spot.”
It’s perhaps too early to bust out the selfie stick, but Boland is understandably excited about the construction, given how long it has taken to get started. For the past three years, the Presidio Trust, which oversees the 1,491-acre Presidio, has been in a complicated bureaucratic shuffle with Caltrans and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority over the ownership and development of a number of parcels that were impacted by the development of the 1.6mile-long Presidio Parkway.
The deal amounts to a swap of 75 acres of Presidio land that Caltrans took over for the new, wider, six-lane roadway in exchange for 40 acres the transportation agency no longer needs, including 32 acres in and around sensitive wetlands.
This spring, three public agencies — Caltrans, the County Transportation Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission —agreed to pay a combined $54 million to the Presidio. For that money, the Presidio agreed to take over the expense of transforming land Caltrans had used for storage and staging into national park-quality acreage.
In addition to the Tunnel Tops, the property includes an area by Girard Road that will become a new entrance to the Presidio and Quartermaster Reach, an 8-acre stretch of wetlands and coastal scrub that is part of the Tennessee Hollow “springs to bay” watershed restoration program.
Negotiations over the Tunnel Tops and other areas were bogged down for a year over disagreements about the quality of soil and the landscaping that would cover the former Caltrans land, Boland said. The Presidio wanted soil without weed seeds or construction debris in it, soil rich enough to support native plants.
“The heart of our conflict had to do with the disconnect between national park standards and freeway standards,” Boland said. “The soil issue was a big issue. You can’t change the soil once you put it down. I was talking about soil for a year or more — soil quality and soil depth. It’s not that anyone was right or wrong, but there was a difference of perception what it means to work in a national park.” The voices calling for rich soil won out.
James Davis, Caltrans’ acting director for the Bay Area, said the agency and the Presidio “have been working diligently to reach project closeout so that final landscape design work can be completed.”
Eric Young, spokesman for County Transportation Authority, said the agency is happy that the negotiations have concluded.
“We are excited that this project is moving forward,” Young said. “The Presidio is really one of the jewels of San Francisco, and the work to bring the project to a conclusion is only going to make it better.”
While Presidio officials are excited about the land it will acquire as a result of the Doyle Drive rebuild, by far the most spectacular will be the transformation of the tunnel roofs, which sit just below the former Army base’s Main Post.
Roughly the size of Dolores Park, the Tunnel Tops will become one of the Presidio’s most-visited attractions, Boland believes. It will sit between Crissy Field and the Main Post — home to the Visitor Center, which attracted 130,000 people in its first year — and adjacent to the Transit Center, where Muni buses and the Presidio’s free shuttles stop.
“The Main Post and Crissy Field were always imagined as the most public parts of the Presidio,” Boland said. “This will reconnect those halves.”
Another 4 feet of rich soil will be added to the site above the tunnels. Workers will build “play meadows” for picnicking, a fire circle for warmth, and a “bluff walk” with overlooks for admiring Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and the city skyline. There will be native dune strawberries, wild irises, European fan palms, aloes and the blue flowers of the Ceanothus bush.
The project will be funded through a $100 million fundraising campaign: $10 million from the trust and $90 million from private philanthropic sources. So far, $64.1 million of the $90 million has been raised from 82 individuals and organizations, said Greg Moore, executive director of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
The deal between Caltrans and the trust will make fundraising easier, Moore said.
“It’s good to finally have clarity about how we are proceeding and what the timeline is,” Moore said. “It’s a landmark site with the best of Bay Area history, scenery, nature and culture all wrapped in one.”
The Tunnel Tops park will be about not just great views but also education.
In addition to the open space, the project will include about 4 acres at the bottom of the bluff that will become an expanded youth education center. One historic building will be renovated and turned into classrooms. Two new buildings will be constructed: one for an art and science lab, the other for a drop-in environmental education facility.
The Presidio currently works with 64 schools and another 121 organizations that serve children, Moore said. This will triple the number of children served, from 30,000 to 100,000.
“I think cities need great places to work and great places to play,” he said. “If there is anything that our work at the conservancy has showed us, it is that from the moment you cut the ribbon on these places, they are loved. And over time their value just grows.”
Amy Meyer, one of the original board members of the Presidio Trust, the autonomous federal agency that manages nearly all of the 1,491-acre park, said, “We are aching for progress to begin” on the Tunnel Tops.
“I am relieved and pleased to hear we are going ahead,” Meyer said. “Doyle Drive was not a good road. Now we have a beautiful road, but we are supposed to get 14 acres of parkland. This has been stalled and stalled for many, many months. It’s time to get down to business.”
This summer, as Caltrans wraps up work, the Presidio Trust is busy growing plants from seedlings and cuttings. It is also looking for dirt fertile enough to handle all the species the trust wants to plant, because once it’s there, it’s not going anywhere.
“We are looking for good soil; that is what we are doing right now,” Boland said. “Good soil is hard to find.”