The San Francisco Civic Center: A History of the Design, Controversies, and Realization of a City Beautiful Masterpiece - Hardcover

Haas, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1948908158 ISBN 13: 9781948908153

Publisher: University of Nevada Press, 2019

Synopsis

San Francisco is known and loved around the world for its iconic man-made structures, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Transamerica Pyramid. Yet its Civic Center, with the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, is often overlooked, drawing less global and local interest, despite its being an urban planning marvel featuring thirteen government office and cultural buildings.

In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago.

Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends.

Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.
 

About this title

About the Author

James W. Haas is an author, attorney, and expert on San Francisco’s Civic Center history and politics. He has lived in San Francisco most of his life and spent more than forty years engaged in civic projects, including the restoration and completion of San Francisco’s Civic Center.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The San Francisco Civic Center is a grouping of monumental publically owned buildings that are clustered between Market, McAllister, Hayes and Franklin Streets about two miles up Market Street from the Ferry Building. The area today contains thirteen government office and cultural buildings, among them City Hall, the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library, the Asian Art Museum, the War Memorial Opera House and Veterans Building, Davies Symphony Hall, Department of Public Health, the Supreme Court and State offices, the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the federal office building at United Nations Plaza, and the headquarters for the city’s Public Utilities Commission. It is located in the nerve center of San Francisco’s major streets grid with the domed City Hall anchoring the area. The area is classified as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. It has been the central site of San Francisco’s government for more than a century, and the civic and architec­tural philosophies undergirding its design have been a driving force in San Francisco’s urban design since the time the 1906 earthquake forever altered San Francisco’s city planning. Because of its long and central history in San Francisco, and its extraordinary architectural heritage, the Civic Center has been discussed as a possible candidate for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Despite this remarkable history, the Civic Center in San Francisco and its status as the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States suffers from a lack of appreciation among the public, specifically relating to its original design philosophy and its intended function within San Francisco’s municipal and civic cultures—ultimately drawing limited global or local interest. The promotion of San Francisco in the media, advertising and posters at the International Airport show pictures of well-known San Francisco places such as Coit Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Transamerica Pyramid. Rarely is the Civic Center and its imperial City Hall included. The goal of this book is to provide readers with an understanding of the background of the Civic Center that will elevate the public appreciation of this unique place.

The concept of a “civic center,” a grand central seat of local democratic government, is a major component in town and city planning in the United States. However, even though many cities today lavish funds on building or enhancing these centers of municipal and public activity, city officials and the general public often have limited knowledge of the origins of the city planning or architectural concepts underpinning the civic center idea. The San Francisco Civic Center, originally planned in 1912, is one of the most complete civic cen­ters contemplated by any American city. It is often considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a cen­tury ago. After one hundred years, those urban design concepts which inspired its original construction still guide the city’s efforts to add to and improve the Civic Center in the spirit of the original plan set down in 1912 by its designer, John Galen Howard.

The centerpiece of San Francisco’s Civic Center is the magnificent domed City Hall, about which the architectural critic Henry Hope Reed Jr. wrote, “In the just quality of ornament, in the play of space, in the total overwhelming effect, the San Francisco City Hall is the best that American art has produced.”1 The Civic Center complex is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of the nation’s most dynamic and creative cities.

The San Francisco Civic Center, like many great monumental city spaces and architectural works around the world, is a work in progress. As so fre­quently occurs in San Francisco history, the Civic Center’s story is character­ized by great inspiration and leadership, but also by controversy, feuds, in­action, negativity, and failures. Nevertheless, it is a paradox that, for all of its grandeur and despite the extraordinary effort it took to build, the San Francisco Civic Center not only fails to garner significant public attention, but very lit­tle has been written about it. The San Francisco Civic Center: A History of the Design, Controversies, and Realization of a City Beautiful Masterpiece addresses this gap by telling the 150-year story of San Francisco’s city halls and its sur­rounding Civic Center, providing answers to many important unanswered (and frequently unasked) questions about this historic site. For example, where did the idea of a municipal and arts center first come from? How did it become central to the urban planning initiatives in San Francisco in the early twentieth century? Why was it built, and by whom? How did the city hall fit in the plan? In what ways has the site held onto its founders’ vision throughout the past cen­tury amidst heated public debates about the site’s function and achievement? What is its current status and its future?

Although this book focuses on San Francisco, it also discusses related na­tional trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends. The primary major conceptual foundation for the Civic Center comes from the City Beautiful movement, the influential planning and landscape architecture movement that began near the end of the 19th century. The first chapter examines the origins of the City Beautiful movement and how the civic center concept grew from it and how it was implemented in American cities. Subsequent chapters discuss how these ideas arrived in San Francisco and how they endured as a defining architectural philosophy in the develop­ment and improvement of the Civic Center for decades.

In the United States, the major event that launched the City Beautiful movement was the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. This Exposition was a landmark event in American urban design. With its elaborate landscape and architectural creations, the Exposition introduced a vast number of Americans to the idea of a well-organized and beautiful planned urban space and helped stimulate interest in what would become the City Beautiful move­ment. In the first years of the twentieth century, a number of cities, including Washington, DC, Cleveland, Chicago, and San Francisco, undertook major city planning projects, while Seattle, Denver, and Dallas began large-scale park and parkway beautification projects. The City Beautiful movement fostered the concept of groups of public buildings that became known as “civic centers.” Seventy-two American cities engaged in civic-center planning from 1902 to 1920, but construction was only undertaken on a few of those centers, and, of those, most were only partially built.

Although City Beautiful was a homegrown American movement, it was also influenced by the neo-classical styles emanating from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris as well as German engineering and municipal administration. From a political standpoint, the movement was tightly connected to the progressive reformist ideas prevailing in the United States near the end of the 19th century and that were a reaction to the excesses of post—Civil War industrialization and the resulting Gilded Age of flaunted wealth, self-interest, and corruption. Seeking changes across civic and economic sectors, reformers called for honest and efficient government, healthy and safe living and working conditions, and services for the poor and needy. The nation’s cities, in particular, suffered from poor sanitation, tenement housing, and weak and corrupt governments. Anxious urban middle- and upper-class residents of cities and towns at­tempted to bring order and, in their view, rectitude to disparate populations through such reform measures as Sunday schools, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), settlement houses and other charitable institutions, prohi­bition and other anti-vice efforts, as well as kindergartens and playgrounds. The City Beautiful movement was a culmination of this broader progressive social agenda prevailing through the later part of the nineteenth century.

Rather than exhort or coerce urban dwellers to conform to a model of good citizenship and behavior, City Beautiful reformers took an indirect approach. If cities were rebuilt with tree-lined boulevards, grand parks, clean water systems, and palatial public buildings (libraries, schools, opera houses, and government offices) open to all, they hoped that people would respond by adapting positively to the healthier, uplifting environment. To bring about these changes, reformers needed experts to prepare grand city plans, something that led to the establish­ment of the planning and landscape architecture professions. Additionally, the reformers knew cities would need honest and forward-thinking governments, so campaigns were organized around the country to replace the boss-domi­nated mayors with new ones who would help advance the new reformist ideas. These political efforts were often helped along by “muckraking” journalists, such as Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker, who exposed many corrupt political bosses and city officials. President Theodore Roosevelt was also active in supporting good government at the state and local level.

But City Beautiful proponents were not only concerned with the idea of in­tegrating and controlling new and growing urban poor populations; they were also motivated by the optimistic belief that good planning and beauty could help city residents reach other more personal goals, such as better lives for their families and the rest of the community. Many proponents of City Beautiful values were competitive businessmen who wanted to help their cities prosper. The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 had been organized by such advocates.

Progressive and City Beautiful values were channeled to San Francisco by James D. Phelan, who served as mayor from 1896 to 1901. After he retired as mayor, Phelan would become a major proponent for the City Beautiful ideas and urban planning. San Francisco’s urban development in the 19th century had been haphazard and the city suffered from a lack of effective public investment and oversight. In the years just before the 1906 Earthquake, Phelan recruited Daniel H. Burnham of Chicago—the most influential City Beautiful planner in the United States—to prepare a comprehensive city plan for San Francisco. Although Burnham’s plan did in fact include a proposal for a civic center, and despite the tremendous need for development after the earthquake, for a num­ber of reasons, the city would not go on to develop that plan. But it was an important precursor and it helped lay the groundwork for such a project in the future. It would not be until Congress, in February 1911, backed San Francisco to host the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915 that the city would be galvanized to proceed with construction of a new city hall (the old city hall had been destroyed in the 1906 earthquake)—and to build it within a monumental civic center.

The development of City Hall and Civic Center in the years surrounding the 1915 Exposition would be led by mayor James Rolph Jr., a progressively-minded mayor first elected in 1911 who was also backed by the city’s business commu­nity and who had been voted into office by an overwhelming margin. Rolph had the leadership and energy to make building a civic center and new city hall the first priority of his new administration. He recruited John Galen Howard, the most prominent architect in the San Francisco Bay Area, to design the civic center complex and oversee construction of three monumental public buildings including City Hall, the Exposition Auditorium (now known as the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium), and a new Main Public Library around a huge landscaped plaza—all based on City Beautiful design values—to be ready by the time the Exposition opened in 1915. Construction on the Civic Center would continue apace in the years following the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and during his five terms as mayor, Rolph pushed for the construction of additional Civic Center buildings.

After World War II, new public attitudes in San Francisco began to disparage old City Beautiful ideals, and people began to view City Hall and the other Civic Center buildings as overbearing and undemocratic, designed with foreign-influenced architecture. The modernist attitude—whose aesthetic priorities were far different from the neoclassical ones which had defined the Civic Center’s design—had become pervasive in the city, but city government inertia and fiscal restraint spared the existing complex of then eight buildings from demolition or drastic change. By the early 1970s, the historic preservation movement had taken hold in San Francisco, and eventually Civic Center was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and made a city landmark, thus protect­ing its original Civic Center plan and City Beautiful design values. But these designations did not automatically lead to new improvements to the area, nor enhance the Civic Center with any additional buildings. There would not be a focused effort to enhance the Civic Center more fully until the administration of Dianne Feinstein in the 1980s. Feinstein, reacting to pressure to build a new public library on the vacant block at Larkin and Fulton Streets, organized and published in 1987 a comprehensive development plan for the area that strongly underscored the original civic center concept. This plan would become the road map for further development and improvements.

The timing of the creation of this comprehensive development plan would turn out to be oddly fortuitous. Two years later, when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged all of the Civic Center buildings, San Franciscans re­sponded by voting for hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds to restore the buildings to their original designs and conditions. In addition, a new library was financed and built, along with a courthouse and, recently, an office building for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. The old library was converted into the Asian Art Museum, bringing the total number of grand public buildings in the area to thirteen.

Although a billion and a half dollars would be spent on structures during this major renovation of the Civic Center buildings, little or no attention was given to exterior public areas, and the empty plaza remained a wasteland and the surrounding streets, rough. Area agencies and institutions were so charged with fulfilling their own missions that they gave little attention to the surrounding environment, even though it adversely affected their activities. Citywide planning and preservation groups likewise paid no attention to the problem. When Gavin Newsom was elected mayor in 2004, he recognized the need for a renewed focus on the Plaza and surrounding area and authorized a new Community Benefit District designation for the area. In 2014, for the first time since Feinstein’s 1987 plan, Mayor Edwin Lee included in the planning department budget funds to undertake a public realm plan for Civic Center, more than one hundred years after the complex had begun.

The Civic Center’s long journey is a both a story of perseverance and dys­function. The record shows that the Civic Center was, despite being at the heart of the city government’s operations, frequently underfunded and overlooked by the community and by city officials. But it is also true that moments of great leadership, tremendous creativity, and courage among San Francisco’s residents, architects, and off...

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1948908158
• ISBN 13: 9781948908153
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240