New design of Castro’s memorial to Milk sought
A push to create a major memorial to Harvey Milk in the Castro is under way — again.
The neighborhood group that since 2016 has pursued the idea of honoring the slain gay supervisor in the neighborhood where he lived has hired a new design team to craft a vision for what could be done at Castro and Market streets. But first there will be an extensive community outreach — in part to avoid the dissension that scuttled the first proposed design.
“Some good things happened, but we didn’t end up up where we wanted to be,” said Brian Springfield, the interim executive director for the Friends of Harvey Milk Plaza. “Everybody’s in favor of a memorial, and we’re going back to that aspiration.”
The new design team will by led by SWA, a landscape architecture firm with offices in San Francisco and Sausalito. While the firm’s work is varied — one recent project is the plaza at Chase Center — SWA is also working on a memorial to victims of the Sandy Hook elementary school shootings in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
The corner already includes Harvey Milk Plaza, a name given to the landscaped entrance to the Muni subway station in 1985, seven years after Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by ex-supervisor Dan White. But in 2017 the group, now headed by Springfield, held an international design competition to remake the plaza and create a more demonstrative memorial that would convey the story of Milk and his legacy.
That competition resulted in a design that essentially would rebuild the aboveground portion of the station and add a gathering space uphill to the west. The scale of the proposed makeover stirred criticism, as did the idea of pulling the grand memorial away from Castro Street, where Milk owned a small camera store after moving west from New York City in search of personal freedom.
The new effort is likely to produce a more modest design, with tweaks to the station rather than a makeover.
“We want to bring Harvey Milk and his memorial together with the environment where he was so powerful, the streets of San Francisco,” said Rene Bihan, a managing principal at SWA.
According to Springfield, virtual meetings will be scheduled for the coming months. Any memorial will need private as well as public funding, though some details could overlap with upgrades to the station being planned by the city’s Municipal
Transportation Agency.
“The site is really interesting, almost two halves,” Springfield said. “The Castro Street side is very urban, while the west end is very quiet” and meets a residential street.
“Everything needs to be considered as part of a whole,” Springfield said. “A functioning transit center, and a gathering space better integrated into the community, and a memorial with elements that can evolve over time.”