San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mission Bay neighborhood sign of a new city
San Francisco has changed. Perhaps you have noticed. And no part of the city has changed as much as what we now call Mission Bay. Once a salt marsh with more water than land, it’s now a district that looks like a brand new San Francisco.
Mission Bay keeps changing. It seems to be different every time you visit.
Mission Bay is one of those San Francisco surprises. It has grown up hidden in plain sight south of the baseball park, between the 280 freeway, on the eastern edge of Potrero Hill, and the bay. Three of the city’s flagship institutions, the Giants, the Warriors and the world-class UCSF medical center, make their homes in Mission
Bay, yet the area is barely on the city’s radar.
The new Mission Bay grew up bit by bit over the past 20 years or so — first the baseball park, then an area of blocky glass towers, offices and condos surrounding a new UCSF campus. The old industrial heart of Mission Bay gradually faded away: the railroad yards, the lumberyards, the canneries, the warehouses and the scrapyards closed one by one.
The steam whistle that signaled the change of shifts at the big shipyard at the foot of 20th Street blew for the last time in spring 2017, then the shipyard shut down after 150 years. The change was gradual. An old city died quietly, and a new city is being born.
But the new district is still a surprise to many San Franciscans. It’s all new, all different. “I think most people who live in San Francisco don’t know much about Mission Bay,” said Alex Sagues, vice president of the CBRE commercial real estate firm.
His company is working with the San Francisco Giants on the big Mission Rock development. The first phase is a tower with 600,000 square feet of office space under construction at the corner of Third and Channel streets, just across the Lefty O’Doul Bridge from Oracle Park. Baseball fans will remember this as the site of Parking Lot A.
Across Third Street is the 16-story Luma Hotel with 299 rooms and a rooftop bar called Sky Lounge for registered guests. The hotel, which opened July 4, advertises itself as being in “the new heart of San Francisco.”
It’s hard for veteran San Franciscans to believe that an office tower and a new luxury hotel can be the heart of the city here on the shores of Mission Creek, just upstream from McCovey Cove.
But Mission Creek, which is really a tidal estuary, is an example of what’s new about old San Francisco. The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park has a marvelous picture of Mission Creek around 1910, its shores jammed with docked lumber schooners, hay scows and small steamships. It was the busiest part of the old waterfront. It was also an open sewer, famous for its unsavory air.
New docks were built on the north side of the channel a generation later and used to berth banana boats from Central America. The banana trade carried on loading stalks of bananas into rail freight cars until nearly the 1960s. Old longshoremen remembered unloading the bananas as “dirty and strenuous work” that paid $2.85 an hour as late as 1959.
Now the old banana dock is part of a UCSF medical complex with modern offices upstairs.
I visited the complex myself the other day and stood on the Fourth Street Bridge, the exact spot where the 1910 waterfront picture was taken. It was a rare sunny day between rains, the water blue and placid, like a canal in Holland.
I stopped by Mission Bay Wine and Cheese, a wine bar and bistro just across the Fourth Street drawbridge, and spent part of the quiet afternoon looking out on the creek and the people enjoying the sun.
“People are just discovering us here,” said Debbie Zachareas, the owner. She said she opened the shop a couple of years ago because it was clear the neighborhood was on the way up. “We wanted to get in on the ground floor, so to speak,” she said.
She said business had doubled in the past few months, especially during the Warriors basketball season at Chase Center not far away.
She sees a bright future. “I think this will be a new center of gravity for San Francisco,” she said.
“Look who we have on either side here: a children’s school on one side and a veterinary office on the other. Kids and dogs. That’s what it’s about.”
I took a stroll along Fourth Street, the main commercial thoroughfare of the district. The intersections were unfamiliar: Fourth and Long Bridge Street, Fourth and Mission Rock Street. The assorted condos, banks and shops didn’t look much like you might find in North Beach, or the Sunset, or the Bayview, or Noe Valley. I thought of what Herb Caen said about the old San Franciscan who had just arrived in heaven and was looking around: “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.”
Sagues sees it another way. “It looks different,” he said, “but it’s San Francisco.”