Streetsblog San Francisco

City planners often get very little public recognition for the work they do, and can sometimes take the heat on a project if it doesn’t prove politically popular. In the case of San Francisco’s revolutionary Pavement to Parks program, the early resistance to reclaiming public space from cars to create convivial spaces for people has gradually subsided and parklets are now in heavy demand. None of it would have been possible without the hard work and determination of Andres Power, an urban designer for the San Francisco Planning Department.

As the manager of the P2P program, Power has spent tireless hours managing the city’s initial plaza and parklet projects and moving them through the vast city bureaucracy. He deals regularly with merchants, neighbors and community groups. He’s worn a hardhat on many a Saturday and is the guy who gets called at midnight if something goes wrong.  Power’s unwavering dedication, even in the face of fierce opposition, has made him one of the unsung heroes of San Francisco’s livable streets movement.

Along with some of his colleagues at the Planning Department, Power is working from within to change the dysfunctional and old-school culture of city government with an eye to then transform our streets. The Pavement to Parks program is now catching the attention of cities all over the U.S. Last week, San Francisco issued a new request for parklet proposals, which means they’ll be spreading to even more neighborhoods.

Power was born in San Francisco and grew up in the East Bay city of Albany. I sat down with him recently to find out more about his interest in urban planning, and his involvement in the Pavement to Parks program.

Bryan Goebel: What sparked your interest in city planning?

Andres Power: I’ve always loved cities. Being in a place that’s dynamic and changing and exciting has always been something that has intrigued me. I’ve tried to think back and to figure out what my motivators were and I think I just landed in the right place, to be honest. I had some great professors in undergrad at Brown University that really were forward and progressive thinking and inspired me. Then, after undergraduate, I went and worked in New York at the Department of Housing and Preservation doing economic development for the city and it was just an amazing place to be. It was so crazy and frantic, such a huge and complicated bureaucracy, but still, individual people could make amazing changes.

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(Editor's note: This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed. In Part 1, we examined a radical new daylighting proposal in Berkeley; and in Part 2, we looked at the changes that SF streets may face under a bold plan by the Public Utilities Commission.)

Although the daylighting of underground urban streams has its roots here in the Bay Area, it's a practice that's spread around the country and the world in the last few decades.

Early daylighting projects like the Napa River, Strawberry Creek, and Codornices Creek formed the basis for a worldwide shift in the possibilities presented by urban watersheds. Now, a series of best-practices has begun to emerge from the ever-growing number of daylighted streams around the world, which could inform the proposed transformations of creeks here in San Francisco.

The SF Public Utilities Commission is now studying the feasibility of daylighting Yosemite Creek, Islais Creek, and Stanley Creek. While their research is underway, Streetsblog decided to take a closer look at successful urban water projects around the world from which planners might draw inspiration.

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San Franciscans don't often spend their days contriving ways to spend more time near freeway off-ramps, especially when proximity to freeways can be a risk to your health, but the city's newest park along the I-280 exit at Sixth and Brannan Streets may make you think twice about it.

City leaders officially launched the park with an opening ceremony this afternoon, and with the success of the Pavement to Parks program, which reclaimed underused street space for public parks and plazas, the Department of Public Works and Caltrans have now embarked on a series of upgrades across the city on what we'll unofficially dub, "Off-Ramps to Parks."

"Creating beautiful, livable, vibrant, and sustainable spaces is an important part of our work, however, we cannot do it alone," said DPW Director Ed Reiskin. "These types of partnerships are critical in an era when we are seeking the most efficient way to clean and beautify the city."

On this sunny Wednesday afternoon, it appeared the demand for green space was strong -- even along a freeway off-ramp. Several groups of people lounged along the paths, and the hum of the exiting cars could almost be mistaken for the babbling of a creek (the exhaust of the cars was less mistakable, though a strong breeze and the trees helped mitigate that.) The park includes walking paths, new trees, flowers, and other landscaping upgrades like boulders, which serve as the only seating at present.

"Before, it didn't have all the greenery. All it had was a bum," said Megan Bluxome, an art student who used to live nearby, but hadn't returned to the area recently. "It looks like it's not part of the city, a very short natural walk -- right next to the freeway."

"It's an escape," she added.

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(Editor's note: This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on the Bay Area watershed)

The proposal to convert Center Street in Berkeley from an asphalt thoroughfare to a park-like promenade -- revealing a long-hidden underground creek -- is the latest twist in the interesting and often-controversial story of the Bay Area's heavily-modified waterways.

The Center Street project is a striking reversal of a century-old trend towards burying Berkeley's creeks below ground. It's also an example of the relatively new practice of "daylighting" forgotten waterways, a trend said to have been unintentionally sparked forty years ago in nearby Napa.

In the 1970s, as part of the redevelopment of its downtown, the City of Napa stumbled upon a new way of thinking about the urban watershed: Instead of leaving the Napa River buried, engineers removed its cover, exposing it to daylight.

"In the 70s, there was the redevelopment," Barry Martin, Napa's Public Information Officer explained to Streetsblog. "and a number of buildings were taken down. The creek ran underneath some structures, so as they were designing this urban renewal project, [daylighting] was part of that."

"I don't think there was any environmental thinking going on at that time," he added.

Some urban planners debate whether Napa's construction in the 70s constitutes the country's first daylighting project. In 2003, Steve Donnelly, then co-director of the Urban Creeks Council, dismissed the project as the nation's first, saying, "all they did was take the top off a concrete channel."

Uncovering the waterway didn't fix Napa's watershed problems, either.

Forty years after its restoration began, Napa still struggles with the health of the Napa River: Frequent flooding plagued the city during the past decades, and engineers are only now getting the water flow under control, in part thanks to tactics similar to those employed by the settlers of 200 years ago.

In the 1800s, residents recognized that the east side of the river's oxbow was too wet to use in winter, and set aside the land as a summer fairground. An amphitheater now sits on the land, but there's more to the park than meets the eye: It serves as a buffer during floods, redirecting overflow away from more vulnerable areas.

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Throughout San Francisco's history, from the early street grid to the more recent expansion of freeways, slivers of land that don't fit into the master plans of architects and designers have been cast aside, lumped into a category the Department of Public Works (DPW) refers to as "unaccepted streets." These "paper streets" are mapped but not maintained by any agency. As Chris Carlsson so beautifully chronicled in his Ghost Streets tour, many of these alleys and street stubs are cared for by neighbors and transformed into small gardens or pocket parks.  Many more, however, are forgotten urban scars and latent public space.

Berkeley Professor of Architecture Nicholas de Monchaux estimates that there are 529 acres of unaccepted streets, just over half the land area of Golden Gate Park. In Local Code [PDF], one of six finalists in UCLA's WPA 2.0 design competition ("Whoever rules the sewers, rules the city"), de Monchaux details his vision for replenishing 1514 of these unaccepted streets by linking contemporary geospatial planning tools with existing public processes through the DPW to implement  "a range of local infrastructural gestures, from soil remediation, to victory gardening, to playgrounds and pastures."  

Local Code borrows from the work of  "anarchitect" Gordon Matta-Clark, who in the early 1970s discovered that New York City auctioned off pieces of unusable land that resulted from surveying anomalies and public-works expansion, so called "gutterspaces," fifteen of which he purchased and developed for Fake Estates, an architectural intervention meant to dissect notions of materiality, property ownership, and prestige.

With Local Code, de Monchaux hopes to accelerate the pace of converting streets into green spaces, particularly in the underserved neighborhoods in the shadows of freeways, where unaccepted streets are abundant.  "If you look at the unaccepted streets, it is like heat map of all the areas with health problems, pollution issues, and neglected spaces," he said.

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When Joshua David formed Friends of the High Line in 1999 and started raising money to transform abandoned train tracks in mid-Manhattan into an elevated urban park, more than a few people thought him nuts. With the opening of the High Line in June and the warm reception it has received by the public, however, planners who have their eyes on other abandoned rail infrastructure are feeling emboldened and hopeful their projects will receive more serious consideration, including a new proposal to preserve the existing east span of the Bay Bridge for a park and development.

Ronald Rael, Principal at Rael San Fratello Architects and Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley's graduate program, has developed a plan that would preserve the existing cantilever and truss section of the Bay Bridge and transform the span into a park and mixed-use development. In homage to the High Line, Rael's project is dubbed The Bay Line (PDF).

Rael and Berkeley have submitted their proposal to a design competition sponsored by UCLA, but have not made a formal proposal to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) or Caltrans, both of which are not likely to support any more changes to construction of the Bay Bridge.

Though MTC spokesperson Randy Rentschler hadn't seen the proposal, he called any attempt to preserve the old span a "pipe dream." "We won't leave it up for the same reason we are taking it down. That is, there is a real chance this bridge segment won't stand up in a quake. Also, keeping it maintained is cost prohibitive."

He added, joking, "Past that, it would be a great permanent location of the Summer X Games."

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A coalition of community volunteers, pro-bono landscape architects and personnel from several city agencies this weekend swooped in to North Beach to transform the roadway of Mason Street between Columbus Avenue and Lombard Street into a temporary park in conjunction with the two-month street closure for a traffic study. The resulting open space combines elements from various city agency supply yards to bring trees, plants, and picnic tables into an area that just last week was exclusively used by cars.

The Mason Street trial closure is meant to test in real time what the traffic models and transportation engineers predict will result in minimal traffic disruptions should the city decide to close the street permanently. The traffic studies are required for environmental review of the expansion plans of the North Beach Branch Library, with one of the build options compelling the removal of the roadway to transform it into park space.

"Everyone thought there would be a real advantage from moving away from computer models and theories," said Julie Christensen of the Friends of Joe DiMaggio Playground, a public playground that abuts Mason Street here. "We said if you are going to have this road closure for two months, and there is so little public space in the area, why not create a new public space?"

"I think we had three weeks to prepare once they decided on the closure date," said Christensen. "What do you do with a tight deadline, you look to your strengths. Rec and Park and DPW bent over backwards to put their staff at our disposal to get this done."

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When Mayor Gavin Newsom dedicated the trial pedestrian plaza at 17th Street and Castro last week, he took a significant stride toward improving his record on livable streets issues. He demonstrated engagement with local community groups and advocates by taking symbolic and institutional steps that incrementally nibble away at the paradigm of streets that gives primacy to the movement of cars.

When he announced that the city was considering three other underutilized intersections that could receive similar treatments, transforming excess street space into pedestrian sanctuaries, he signaled that the 17th Street plaza was merely the beginning of a process that could continue throughout the city over the next few years. While it's still very early in the game, at least two of the three new plaza locations have strong stakeholder support and could happen in very short order, should the transportation and engineering conditions pass muster.

Astrid Haryati, the Mayor's Director of Greening, should feel good about the speed with which they were able to design and install the plaza at 17th Street, which was one of her most visible tests since moving to San Francisco from Mayor Daly's administration in Chicago. The subsequent trial plazas will reflect her work and will need to be well organized for success.

At 8th and 16th Streets in lower Potrero Hill, the first of the three new projects Mayor Newsom announced, most of the pieces are in position to make the plaza a triumph, said Tony Kelly, President of the Potrero Boosters Neighborhood Association, assuming the community is brought to the table at subsequent steps of the planning process.

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A portion of 17th Street in the Castro is being closed to cars at Market this weekend, marking the beginning of San Francisco's first trial street closure. The two DPT workers installing the new signs late this afternoon were a little taken aback by my excitement at first, but they happily directed me around. The street will be transformed into a pedestrian plaza by Tuesday afternoon, according to DPW. A press conference with Mayor Gavin Newsom is scheduled for Wednesday morning and a community celebration is planned for next Saturday. It will include a speech by Supervisor Bevan Dufty and a blessing by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

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