City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco

10. Yerba Buena Gardens, Todco’s Housing, and the South of Market Neighborhood

213 10 Yerba Buena Gardens, TODCO’s Housing, and the South of Market Neighborhood Yerba Buena Gardens Building the underground convention center was one piece of work. What was to go on top of it was a whole other story. The first significant step toward developing the Central Blocks atop Moscone Center was taken in April 1984, at a splashy luncheon presentation for seven hundred people, to announce tentative agreement on a land disposition plan for the aboveground development, now named Yerba Buena Gardens. The process of creating a multicultural space on these two dozen acres was not an easy one, either in concept or execution. And the fall of Olympia & York as developers of this complex that began around this same time slowed the process, but, ironically , also wound up creating opportunities, as a combination of forfeited earnest money and letters of credit that the Redevelopment Agency consequently was able to collect on yielded some $26 million that has been used to fund many cultural and recreational activities on Central Blocks 2 and 3 that make up Yerba Buena Gardens. O&Y’s option on this acreage formally terminated in February 1993, allowing the Redevelopment Agency and City to bring in another developer, Millennium Partners/WDG Cos. The Yerba Buena Gardens cultural amenities plan is firmly rooted in Richard Gryziec’s original Tivoli Gardens scheme and the work of Mayor Moscone’s Select Committee on Yerba Buena Center. It hasn’t been anywhere near a straight line from then until now nor a trouble-free process, but the cultural-recreational complex—almost fully developed as of early 2002—is an impressive public works project and piece of urban design, one that owes its existence to the persistence of a range of community activists, 214 / Chapter 10 many from the arts and cultural community, who, for two decades, pressed to see that this central downtown space would be creatively and imaginatively used—by San Franciscans as well as outside visitors. Among the key features are:· the Center for the Arts, a two-building complex containing a 750-seat theater, multipurpose forum, galleries, media room, and gardens.· the Children’s Center, a complex containing the wonderful carousel formerly located at Playland-at-the-Beach, a twelve-lane bowling center, a thirty-two-thousand-square-foot ice skating rink, a child care center (for residents of the area and employees working nearby), a studio for technology and the arts, and a learning garden.· a five-and-a-half-acre esplanade with an outdoor theater and a moving Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, approached via a twenty-two-foothigh , fifty-five-foot-wide waterfall.· the 350,000-square-foot Metreon super high-tech entertainment center (a “swank, city-wise mini-Disneyland,” as the New York Times characterized it),1 courtesy of the Sony Corporation: fifteen movie screens, an IMAX theater, Microsoft’s first store, a Discovery Channel store, a Moebius shop, “Where the Wild Things Are” fantasyland, food court—the works, marrying technology to business and entertainment . “A more obsequious monument to global capitalism would be hard to find,” as Rebecca Solnit aptly characterizes it.2 On sites adjacent to and surrounding Yerba Buena Gardens are, or soon will be, the new Museum of Modern Art, the Ansel Adams Center for Photography , the California Historical Society’s new offices and museum, and lots of new hotel rooms, offices, apartments and condos, and even a new 259unit single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel. A Jewish Museum is forthcoming in the historic Jesse Street Substation, and the Mexican Museum may eventually relocate from Fort Mason. In 1999, Yerba Buena Gardens received the prestigious biannual Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence (which carried with it a fifty-thousanddollar prize).What seemed most to impress the selection committee in this national competition, which focused on “the complex process of urban placemaking ,” was the process that led to creation of the gardens, as well as its inclusiveness in terms of the population it serves and the neighborhood of which it is now a part.“The mixed-use development,” asserted the news release announcing the award, “enables cultural, social justice, and economic development agendas to coexist within a network of collaborative manage- The South of Market Neighborhood / 215 *Letter to the author, dated 6 April 1999, from Simeon Bruner. As noted in the text, the results were achieved despite considerable resistance. TODCO’s John Elberling , a major force in...