Bay Area Brawl
Presidio Battle Pits Prominent San Franciscans Against Preservationists.
By Therese Poletti | Online Only | Aug. 22, 2008
San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge
Credit: Will Elder/NPS photo
SAN FRANCISCO – It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon in the Presidio, the lush national park in the northernmost tip of this city. Fog horns blared, the soundtrack of a typical San Francisco summer. Bikers sped by, locals walked their dogs and fragrant eucalyptus trees scented the air near Funston Avenue, lined with rows of restored Civil War era officers' cottages. This is where San Francisco was born.
This bucolic scene, though, masks an epic feud over a proposed contemporary art museum and other plans for the 1,490-acre former military garrison. After 220 years guarding the city under three different flags, the Presidio is now a national park in a city that will fight to protect its beloved, forested acres.
The ongoing battle, however, seems more ferocious than those in the past. On one side is Donald Fisher, the founder of the khakis-and-jeans empire, the Gap Inc., and his wife Doris, who want to build a massive 100,000-square-foot contemporary art museum on the Presidio's hallowed ground, the Main Post. On the other are preservationists, historians, environmentalists, and 48 neighborhood groups, who want to preserve the Presidio's historical, natural, and architectural integrity.
In the middle is the Presidio Trust, the government-appointed board that oversees most of the land in the park, named a national historic landmark in 1962. The Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) in congressional legislation in 1972. After the U.S. Army decided to close the base in 1989, the Presidio was transferred to the National Park Service in 1994 as part of the GGNRA Act.
Formed by the Presidio Trust Act of 1996, the group has a mandate to protect "the Presidio from development and uses which would destroy the scenic beauty and historic and natural character of the area and cultural and recreational resources." But it has another mission as well: to make the Presidio, now reliant on government funding, self-sustaining by 2013.
The Fishers' proposed museum, the Contemporary Art Museum of the Presidio (CAMP), would house their vast modern art collection. Many well-heeled San Franciscans, including Mayor Gavin Newsom, have sided with the Fishers, saying the museum - with more than 1,000 masterworks by artists like Alexander Calder, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein - will bring much-needed culture, revenue, and more visitors to the often-sleepy area.
Many opponents are up in arms not about the museum itself but the proposed location. The glass-and-white-concrete museum would sit at a prominent crest of what is called the Main Parade, lined on one side by a series of red-brick barracks built in the 1890s.
Proposed CAMP museum, as illustrated in Draft SEIS
Credit: CAMP 2008
"In both scale and design, it is awkward and not at all compatible," renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who designed the grounds for the nearby Letterman Digital Arts Center, wrote in a letter to the Presidio Trust. "The design sits poorly in the landscape. In fact, it seems to resist its site and appears to have been simply plunked down on the main parade ground without any sensitivity."
The clash recently reached a fever pitch. Last month, during a public hearing about the plans, which include a separate park lodge, over 500 people crammed into an auditorium on the Presidio grounds, and an overflow estimated in the hundreds spilled outside. Many were ready to fight. Some accused the Presidio Trust of ignoring its own legislation.
"I'm really sorry to be standing here tonight to shake my fist at you," said Doug Nadeau, now a landscape architect after 30 years with the National Park Service. "Although I'm very pleased at what the Trust has accomplished so far and I'm thrilled at the prospect of housing the Fisher collection somewhere in the Presidio, I'm genuinely horrified at where you're proposing to put it."
At the July 14 meeting, Mayor Newsom, riding high politically after the State Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in California, was uncharacteristically booed for supporting the museum. Ellen Magnin Newman, one of the Magnin retailing family descendants, argued for the modern building at the site. She compared the public reaction to the sleek museum designed by New York architect Richard Gluckman to the initial outcry in 1968 over the now-iconic Transamerica Pyramid, the most notable skyscraper in San Francisco's skyline.
"I speak to you tonight as the wife of a former head of the planning commission during the controversy over the pyramid," Magnin Newman said. "If you think this is a controversy, when the pyramid was proposed for the historic Jackson Square district ... there were pickets in front of our home."
But those arguments don't wash with local historians and neighbors, the "nimbys," as Fisher has called them, who note that the Presidio is where the first Spanish settlers arrived in 1776 and established El Presidio. The Main Parade is the most important location in the Main Post, the heart of the Presidio, the birthplace of San Francisco.
"This was where San Francisco was founded," said Gary Widman, president of the Presidio Historical Association, a nonprofit that had its own alternate proposal for a history center on the site. "The most important part of the Main Post is the area where the de Anza expedition started in 1776." Widman said the idea of two large new buildings in the Main Post "completely destroys the district as a site which can historically appreciated."
The Presidio Trust argues that the Main Post is meant to be a lively center but instead is more often like a ghost town. Its plans to revitalize the Main Post include transforming an asphalt parking lot at the center of the Main Parade to a green park space for the public, adding a nearby lodge, and rehabilitating a 1930s movie theatre. The trust noted in an early document last year that in 1907, the grand plan for the Presidio was to have support structures at the head of the Main Parade ground, which was never fully realized.
The Fishers' museum would lease its space, providing another revenue stream, much in the same manner as Lucasfilm Ltd. leases its corporate campus. Filmmaker George Lucas built the $300 million Letterman Digital Arts Center for Lucasfilm at the site of a former Letterman military hospital on the eastern edge of the Presidio. Lucasfilm leases the 23-acre site back from the trust.
But Tia Lombardi, a spokeswoman for the Presidio Trust, insists that this revitalization plan is not just about generating revenues. "We are not doing these projects simply for financial consideration," she said. "It's about making it a public place."
The Presidio Trust has been down this road before. After signing a lease in 2001, Lucas' plans raised the ire of neighborhood groups, and the building designs were reduced in size to allow for more views. By the time of completion in 2005, the four red-brick and white stucco buildings with terra cotta roofs and the surrounding landscape of lawns, fountains and shrubs were lauded in the San Francisco Chronicle not as fresh architecture but as part of an enclave that is about "casting a spell and creating a mood."
Widman said this battle is much more fierce. "By far, it's a much more serious situation."
Kicking it Up a Notch
In a rare move, this week the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation requested guidance from the National Park Service in the form of a "Section 213 report." That document, due in October, will assist the council in its review of the proposed museum by recommending ways to "avoid, minimize, and mitigate" harm to the Presidio National Historic Landmark District. The council's sparingly used request is a direct result of a July 8 letter from National Trust President Richard Moe, who explained the need for an objective review of the proposal's impact on the park.
Just last week, the Presidio Trust released a document on its Web site that many in the preservation community were waiting for. Prepared by a consulting firm for the Presidio Trust, the nearly 90-page document, called a "Draft Finding of Effect," concluded that the current proposal by the Presidio Trust for the new contemporary museum, lodging, and other new construction, combined with the demolition and loss of archaeological resources, would have an "adverse effect" on the National Historic Landmark District.
"The document doesn't bind them to change their course of action, but it sounds a warning call that what they are embarking on would have a pretty dramatic impact on the Presidio," says Brian Turner, an attorney with the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Western Office.
The other proposed alternatives by the Presidio Trust, with the exceptions of building the museum at the site of an old Army commissary on Crissy Field and no new construction, were also seen as having a cumulative adverse effect to the historic landmark district.
The National Park Service has warned that the projects, as proposed, could put the Presidio at risk of losing its national historic landmark status. Representatives of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said at the hearing that the Presidio Trust's proposal to demolish 11 buildings and add 265,000 square feet of new construction "would have a severe adverse effect on this historic character of the Main Post and the entire Presidio National Historic Landmark District."
The Presidio's Aloha Festival
Credit: Will Elder/NPS photo
At least one group is looking at legal options. The National Parks Conservation Association reminded the Presidio Trust of a legal battle 22 years ago, when the U.S. Army tried to build a new post office on the Presidio. A 1978 amendment to the congressional act creating the GGNRA states that new construction is limited to buildings that "replace a demolished building by one of a similar size." The army did not have one building of a similar size to tear down, and argued that it had credits from prior demolished buildings. A federal judge ruled in 1986 that the army could not build its proposed post office.
Now the Presidio Trust is also proposing a new 90,000-square-foot hotel and the expansion of a 1930s theatre. "Nowhere does the Trust point to any building proposed for demolition as large as the proposed Art Museum and Park Lodge," wrote Deborah Reames, an attorney with Earthjustice, on behalf of the National Parks Conservation Association. She also quoted a 1979 National Park Service document summarizing restrictions on new construction in the GGNRA that states: "A number of smaller buildings cannot be demolished to accumulate credit for one large building." Judge William Schwarzer agreed in his February 1986 ruilng.
The Presidio Trust said it is seeking as much public input into its proposals as possible and has extended the public-comment period until Sept. 19. "No decision has been made," Lombardi says. The trust is conducting a rigorous environmental impact statement analysis, including the impact to the Presidio's historic resources. "In San Francisco, there aren't too many projects that just sail through without a lot of opinions."
It is not clear how committed the Fishers are if the proposed site on the Main Parade is ultimately rejected. In a draft environmental-impact statement, the trust presents five different options, but none as commanding as the Main Parade site. In an interview with the New York Times in March, Fisher said he does not want the museum "to be stuck in a corner someplace with the collection we have and the investment we're making."
Anthea Hartig, director of the Western Office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, believes the public-review process and the Presidio Trust's enabling legislation can help reshape the project. "We hear from partners and friends that this is fait accompli," she says. "We have to hope that that's wrong."
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Comments
Submitted by Ray at: September 8, 2008
The Trust has already ruined so much of the Presidio with their grand developments that I am tempted to say go ahead and build it, but I won't. It would be best to build it elsewhere. It's sad that the Presidio has become a playground for the rich - at least when it was operated by the Army and then the Park Service there were, for example, places I could afford to eat in the Presidio with my family and friends. Now, except for the old bowling alley (which is going to disappear for the Fisher's private collection) I can't afford the upscale establishments so favored by the Trust.
Submitted by PresidioVet at: September 2, 2008
Frenchjr25, re-read the article. This art museum is not located anywhere, as it is not yet built. The Fishers propose to build it smack in the middle of the Main Parade, right in the Presidio's heart. To do so would be to utterly destroy the historic relevance and ambiance of the place where SF was born. If it does get built there, I, for one, will never set foot in it.
Submitted by Mary at: August 28, 2008
When I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I visited the Presidio many times, both when it was a military installation and after it became part of the National Parks system. Please, oh PLEASE do not let this gray concrete and glass monstrosity which is so out of place among the other buildings be built. There are plenty of other places where such a building would be suitable, but NOT the Presidio. If the Gap interests insist on building their museum for their art on the Presidio grounds, let them submit another design that would be more in keeping with the local architecture.
Submitted by frenchjr25 at: August 25, 2008
The Palace of Fine Arts is not in the Presidio. It is a park that is owned by the City of San Francisco and is across a freeway from the Presidio. The two are not connected.