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10 “LAND AND VALUES, ALUES, HUMAN UMAN VALUES, AND THE ALUES, AND THE CITY ITY’S S TREASURED REASURED APPEARANCE PPEARANCE” The Freeway Revolt I n January 1959, neighborhood preservationists and land use reformers convinced the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to rescind its approval of seven of nine freeways scheduled for construction by the state highway department.1 Extensive consultation then took place involving the supervisors, city planners, design consultants, landscape architects, and state engineers. In 1966, after having rejected a plan to run a new freeway through the so-called Panhandle part of Golden Gate Park two years earlier, the board met again, this time to consider both a second revised Panhandle freeway and a redesigned Golden Gate Freeway. The Panhandle Freeway would have run through part of Golden Gate Park; it would also have displaced hundreds of residents, many of them African American, in the city’s Western Addition. The Golden Gate Freeway would have cut through part of the Fisherman’s Wharf area and run alongside the city yacht harbor in the Marina District. The new plans included major changes in design and landscaping meant to reduce housing displacement, improve aesthetic quality, and lessen environmental damage. The Board of Supervisors rejected both of the new plans, leading the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads to withdraw funding for any additional interstate highways in the city and county of San Francisco.2 The vote in 1966 dismayed Mayor John F. Shelley, as well as Governor Edmund G. Brown, who had both urged supervisors to approve the new plans. Brown and Shelley regarded the redesigned crosstown freeways as necessary for the future progress of the city in the region and fully compatible with their city’s special peninsular character (both were native San Franciscans). The mayor maintained his sense of humor, remarking, “There will be a freeway on 200 CHAPTER 10 the moon before we get one in San Francisco.” Governor Brown, however, made no secret of his disappointment and declared, “I can’t think of anything that’s happened in San Francisco or California that I regret more than the failure of the Board of Supervisors to come up with a plan to move traffic in and out of San Francisco.”3 Two years later, the city had a new mayor. Joseph L. Alioto, a former member of San Francisco Redevelopment Agency who, like Shelley and Brown, was a city native and shared with them their enthusiasm for downtown development and economic growth. At the same time, the new mayor regarded freeways as a desecration of San Francisco’s landscape, and he was on record as having demanded the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway. In May 1968, he declared victory in another freeway fight. The city had won its five-year battle with the state over the routing of a four-mile section of the Junipero Serra Freeway (Interstate Highway 280) that ran through city-owned watershed land in San Mateo County. The engineers insisted on putting the freeway on the shoreline of Crystal Springs Reservoir. The city wanted to avoid water pollution and preserve the shoreline area for recreational use, and it enlisted federal assistance on its behalf and forced the state to move the highway one mile east along a ridge overlooking the reservoir.4 By end of the 1960s, journalists routinely characterized the city’s refusal to cooperate with state highway engineers as “the San Francisco freeway revolt.” In addition to its hills and views and reputation as “the city that knows how,” San Francisco now could boast of having won the first victory in what Business Week magazine in 1967 called “The War over Urban Expressways.”5 For twenty-five years, freeway building occupied an important place in urban policy considerations in San Francisco. In their debates over how to accommodate the automobile age and preserve the city’s amenities, San Franciscans expressed their determination to exert local control over air and water quality, neighborhood integrity, safe and healthy housing, the physical beauty of the landscape, and unique and historic features of the built environment, as well as land use decisions that affected property values, the local tax base, and business opportunities . On August 26, 1963, the Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring that all future transportation plans had to be compatible with the preservation of “land values, human values, and the preservation of the city’s treasured appearance.”6 A genuine grassroots movement played a key role in the success of...

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