Glen Park BART station: ‘Sad’ or ‘magnificent’?
The San Francisco structure is being considered for historic recognition
SAN FRANCISCO >> With its imposing exterior of gray, unfinished concrete, the Glen Park BART station isn’t every patron’s favorite. But to admirers of Brutalist architecture, it’s akin to a cathedral. And soon, it could be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
California’s State Historical Resources Commission will consider on Thursday whether to recommend the designation, which must then be approved by the National Park Service. The honorific title has little legal weight other than to commemorate its architectural significance, said Jay Correia, the coordinator for the national register program in California. Once approved by the state commission, the applications are rarely rejected, he said.
“There’s prestige for a commercial property,” he said. “It’s a way to commemorate (the building) and honor it.”
The importance of the design, though, wasn’t exactly obvious to a number of BART riders.
Ken Kitahata of Glen Park uses the station daily. He described it as a bit oppressive and “sad.” He prefers the Mission stations, he said, which are more colorful. Others just looked puzzled and shrugged.
“It’s fairly utilitarian,” said Colin Sebestyen of San Francisco. “I can’t say I love it.”
Leon Deng of San Francisco, however, got it right away.
“It’s magnificent,” he said. “I actually really love the way the escalators take you out of the darkness and into the light. It’s a really significant experience for me as a passenger.”
One thing to note about Deng: He’s an architect by trade. And it’s in this world that devotees of urban design speak with a reverence reserved for holy spaces when referring to the Glen Park station. Chris VerPlanck, the historic preservation consultant who wrote the application for the national register, describes the station as the “crown jewel” of the BART system and “one of the finest examples of Brutalism in San Francisco.” VerPlanck couldn’t be reached for comment before publication.
“Streams of sunlight pierce its dark recesses, playing off the rough-textured stone cladding and board-formed concrete walls,” VerPlanck wrote in the application. “With no apparent means of support, the stair and the escalators seem to drop down from the heavens, creating a temple like atmosphere.”
The station’s architect, Ernest Born, helped BART with the conceptual design of all 33 of its original stations and even crafted the system’s signage and graphic identity, VerPlanck said.
Born, a native San Franciscan, graduated from San Francisco Polytechnic High School and received his master’s degree in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1923.
But despite Born’s contributions to the system’s design, BART opposes the designation, asking it to not be placed on the national register. In an April 26 letter, Chief Planning and Development Officer Val Menotti refuted the idea that the station is the “singular jewel” of the system.
“There were a number of stations that were designed with input from notable architects of the time, as was Glen Park,” Menotti wrote, “and we consider it premature to say that Glen Park was or is the singular jewel of our transit system.”
BART would rather take a comprehensive look at all its stations for consideration on the national register, Menotti said, than register them in a piecemeal fashion. BART identified funding in its 2019 budget to study which stations might be eligible for the register, Menotti said.
The station is unusual because it so easily mixes the Brutalist style with regional influences, said Waverly Lowell, the curator emeritus of UC Berkeley’s Environmental Design Archives.
Although the station’s exterior is dominated by its muscular massing and formidable angles, there’s a delicateness to its pergola-like roof that speaks to the influence of the Bay Area, she said.
Station guests entering from the plaza are greeted by a wall of windows as they pass through the fare gate, with a canopy of glass overhead, both of which allow an abundance of light to stream in. Artificial lighting is used meaningfully, with metal grates casting delicate shadows on the ceiling and concrete support beams hiding utility lines.
“Yes, it’s concrete,” Lowell said, “but it’s warm inside. It’s lovely.”
BART passengers ascending from the station platform are met with a marble mural covering an entire wall that’s awash in shades of green and blue. A strip of white marble frames a “red door” that patrons see as they ride the escalator. Polished stone on the platform level, which is juxtaposed against a rough cladding surface on the walls, serves to reflect light in different ways, said Andrew Shanken, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley who wrote an encyclopedia article on the station for the Society of Architectural Historians.
“There is a quiet drama to the way he uses light and also the way he uses certain materials to absorb and reflect light,” Shanken said of Born. “It’s quite lovely.”
The station opened in 1973, just a year after the system began serving the public. It was a time of immense change in the Bay Area, which grew by 33% between 1950 and 1960, according to U.S. census data. Anti-development sentiment led to the imposition of 40foot height limits in Glen Park as community members rallied against the “Manhattanization” of the city, VerPlanck wrote.
The station speaks to that insular sentiment by maintaining a human scale with a public piazza that buffers the station from the neighborhood, Shanken said, while simultaneously shielding the low-slung Victorian homes and storefronts from the web of freeways that cut through the community.
“The piazza, which he might call an outdoor room, is scaled to the village, but the rest of it is scaled to the infrastructure,” Shanken said of Born. “He makes it seem like a small building.”
It was Born’s crowning achievement as an architect to design both the Balboa Park and Glen Park stations, VerPlanck said. Born closed his shop at the age of 76, shortly after the station finished construction.
Designation on the national register isn’t binding, said the commission’s Correia. It wouldn’t prohibit BART from making changes to the station, he said, but it does serve as an entreaty to preserve the aesthetic aspects of the site as much as possible. Sometimes there are tax credits or grants to preserve buildings on the national register, Correia said, and it would allow BART more leeway in meeting building codes, so long as deviations from the code don’t compromise safety.
“We’re simply suggesting, or encouraging” the preservation, he said. “The national register is the list of our nation’s historic properties that deserve to be protected.”