San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Life around tiny cove a scene Steinbeck would have loved
When we were kids in San Francisco, my brother Frank and I thought the city was full of adventure just over the hill. So we’d go exploring on the eastern slope of Potrero Hill, where there was a wonderland full of railroad tracks, lumber dealers, junkyards, iron foundries, factories, dirt, noise and smoke, full of life and hard work. There was a shipyard at the northern end, and Butchertown was the southern frontier. The eastern border was San Francisco Bay, always full of ships.
It was industrial San Francisco, a great place for neighborhood kids to explore. Dangerous, too, in the way industry is dangerous. “Get outta here you kids,” the watchman would yell. “Go home. Or I’ll call the cops.”
Now, of course, almost all that has vanished. But not quite. So last week I set out to explore again. It’s only 15 or 20 minutes from downtown on the K-T Muni streetcar, south past the baseball park, south on Third Street through Mission Bay and past Chase Center to the 23rd Street stop. I walked east on 24th Street, toward the bay to Warm Water Cove, which has to be San Francisco’s most hidden waterfront park.
The entrance is hard to see, obscured by some stored utility equipment and a construction zone, but the park just behind is a flash of green amid industrial gray. Warm Water Cove Park is as small as a gemstone, only 2 acres in all. It has picnic tables and benches and dozens of trees. In winter and spring the grass is green and there are yellow wildflowers. Best of all, it faces blue San Francisco Bay.
Back in the day, when we kids roamed the area, the little cove was a dump. The warm water that gave the place its name came from a sewer outfall. The locals had a name for it:
Toxic Beach. It was also a place where people dumped old tires, and at low tide you can still see them. The place was cleaned up some years ago and had an underground reputation for graffiti art and punk rock shows.
There is really no such thing as an unknown place in San Francisco, and sometimes there are secret concerts at Warm Water Cove. You have to know.
I had the place pretty much to myself the past couple of times I’ve been there. There were two geese, four feral cats and one other human the other sunny afternoon. The man left before I could talk to him.
The view was impressive: pieces of the past scattered around on the edge of the bay — broken bricks, remains of an old dock, a stairway that leads nowhere, a stop sign at the end of a dirt road. There are container cranes and warehouses, surrounding the park. The principal landmark is a 300-foottall smokestack of a closed power plant.
There were seven cargo ships anchored in the bay, which was blue and calm as glass. At the end of the day, the setting sun lights up Alameda and Oakland and Hayward just across the bay.
Warm Water Cove Park is part of a developing string of bayside parks called the Blue Greenway that run along the southern waterfront. Soon they will change the whole face of the city’s bayfront.
But not quite yet. The area is still part of a frontier, and home to people such as Teag McCormick, who lives in a battered Toyota not far from Warm Water Cove. It’s a good place, he said, a peaceful place. Nobody bothers him.
“Where else am I going to live?” he said. He answered his own question. “Sometimes I live in Minnesota, where I have friends and I can work. I do masonry work. Sometimes I stay with friends in the city, and sometimes I go camping in parks. I move around.
“You know,” he said “I’m a native San Franciscan and my family has lived in California since 1826. It’s true, 1826.”
He has a literary bent and talked about California writers including Frank Norris and John Steinbeck. They had a feel for the country, he said.
“Take this place,” he said. “Steinbeck would have liked this place, the scene, the life, the people. The women who feed the cats here every day. The guy who comes by at night, the people who stay. Steinbeck stuff. Maybe I’ll write it myself. I’ll call it ‘The Cats of Warm Water Cove.’ What do you think?”
He’d better hurry. Construction crews are at work only a block or two from the car where McCormick lives and talks about Steinbeck country. The construction is part of the Power Station project, which will transform 29 acres of former industrial land — 2,600 units of new housing, 1.8 million square feet of commercial space, a 250 room bayside hotel, even a new waterfront park. The city is moving south. When the Power Station is finished in five or six years, places like Warm Water Cove won’t be a backwater any more.
They will be the backyard of a new San Francisco.