Presidio’s ‘stunning’ new park ready to take shape
Tunnel Tops project, promising exquisite views, will be 14 acres
“It’s not often you get to create new parkland in a highly urban environment. This is an extraordinary opportunity.”
— Jon Jarvis, who approved the project as director of the National Park Service from 2009 to 2017
In the latest step toward the rebirth of San Francisco’s Presidio from an aging former Army base to a bright light of America’s national park system, crews are set to break ground Thursday on a project to build a new 14-acre public park on top of two freeway tunnels near the Golden Gate Bridge.
When finished in 2021, the unusual project, called Tunnel Tops, will link Crissy Field, on San Francisco’s waterfront, to the Presidio’s Main Post, parade grounds and visitor’s center. That connection was severed more than 80 years ago when the road to and from the Golden Gate Bridge, formerly known as Doyle Drive, split the landscape in half.
The new park, roughly the size of 10 football fields, will stretch over the top of the roadway and be free to the public. Part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, it will include trails, gardens, a campfire circle, community plaza, youth education center and thousands of native plants, trees and overlooks across San Francisco Bay.
“It’s not often you get to create new parkland in a highly urban environment,” said Jon Jarvis, who approved the project as director of the National Park Service from 2009 to 2017. “This is an extraordinary opportunity.”
The project’s cost is estimated at about $110 million. It will be funded largely by the private donations raised by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, a non
profit group based in San Francisco.
Work is being overseen the Presidio Trust, a federal agency created by Congress after the Army base closed in 1994 and the land was transferred to the National Park Service. The Trust runs most of the Presidio and is responsible for restoring its historic buildings and keeping the site financially self-sufficient through rents and other revenues.
The Presidio opened in 1776 as a Spanish Army post overlooking the bay. It was transferred to Mexican control in 1822 and U.S. ownership in 1847.
Tunnel Tops is the latest example in the historic landscape's ongoing transformation.
“A lot of thought has been given to making it not artificial, to giving it native plantings and trails that are a pleasure to walk on,” said Amy Meyer, a former Presidio trustee board member.
She, along with the Sierra Club and other groups, helped convince Congress to establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in 1972.
“The views from there are just stunning,” she said. “The public should get a lot of pleasure from this.”
The new park follows the dramatic restoration of Crissy Field, a former military airstrip covered with concrete, chain link fencing and ugly corrugated metal buildings.
In 2001, the area reopened as a massive green expanse, with a 1.5-milelong beachfront and restored wetlands. Roughly 1.2 million people a year visit Crissy Field now to fly kites, jog and stroll along the bay with families and friends.
Ten years later, in 2011, the Presidio's main parade ground was transformed from a huge parking lot into a vast new green space. In 2014 the officer's club was renovated and in 2017 the visitor's center opened.
The Tunnel Tops project was first envisioned in the early 1990s by Mill Valley architect Michael Painter.
Doyle Drive, which had been built in 1936 as part of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, was corroding and dangerous. Its lanes were narrow and head-on collisions were not uncommon. It was built on unstable soil, at risk of collapse in an earthquake. And it scored only 2 out of 100 on a federal highway safety scale.
Originally, Caltrans wanted to build a similar road to replace it. But Painter, who died last year at age 83, convinced San Francisco leaders to instead construct a “Presidio Parkway,” a road built much more in tune with the national parkland surrounding it and featuring two sets of tunnels to minimize noise and visual impact.
Painter told the Marin Independent Journal in 2015 that he remembered standing on top of the Palace of Fine Arts and envisioning something better.
“You had this beautiful view of the bay and the bridge and I wondered how come we couldn't see it from the roadway,” he said. “That's when I got the idea of lowering the roadway and the elevated viaduct.”
The project moved slowly at first, coming to fruition only after receiving more than $100 million in federal funding from the Obama administration as part of recovery efforts from the Great Recession. Construction began in 2009 and the Presidio Parkway opened in 2015.
“The Presidio was cut in half by Doyle Drive,” Meyer said. “Now the landscape will be reunited.”
The project, which is being designed by James Corner Field Operations, the designer of the High Line, a wildly popular elevated park on former railroad tracks in New York City, has not been without controversy, however.
It has faced numerous delays. In 2010, billionaire “Star Wars” filmmaker George Lucas proposed building a $700 million museum on Crissy Field near where the Tunnel Tops project was planned.
Lucas, a Marin County resident, hoped to house his collection of more than 15,000 paintings and drawings — including works from Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton, Beatrix Potter, Maxfield Parrish and others — along with posters, early comic art and pieces of film memorabilia in the new museum. But the building he proposed was 69 feet high, well above the Presidio's 45-foot-height limit.
Although Lucas won the support of former Gov. Jerry Brown, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, director Francis Ford Coppola, former 49ers quarterback Joe Montana and others, historic preservation groups, environmentalists and other opponents said the building was out of place and too big. In 2014, the Presidio Trust rejected his plans. The museum is currently under construction in Los Angeles.
“It was a tough process, but it has come out in the right place,” said Neal Desai, senior program director for the National Parks Conservation Association, a parks advocacy group. “This is some of the most valuable real estate — not just from a monetary standpoint, but for recreation opportunities, and access to nature for an urban population — and the trust has treated it with respect.”