San Francisco plaza becomes eyesore, embarrassment

By Dean E. Murphy
The New York Times

ERIC RISBERG / AP, 2001 John Denton stands with a cart full of belongings outside City Hall in San Francisco. Homeless people and drug dealers have been blamed for the deterioration of the city's United Nations Plaza.

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The plan called for transforming San Francisco over 50 years into what some described as the Paris of the Pacific. It envisioned tree-lined boulevards, hilltop monuments and a spacious civic center with classical buildings fronting a European-style plaza.

Commissioned by city officials, the plan was tossed aside after the earthquake in a rush to rebuild and dissuade businesses from fleeing to nearby Oakland. In the end, the pressing interests of commerce took precedence over the aesthetic ideals of the City Beautiful movement, which the Burnham vision exemplified.

But one aspect of that vision endured, at least piecemeal, when City Hall was rebuilt in the Beaux-Arts style around an oversize square and, in the 1970s, was connected to the main downtown thoroughfare, Market Street, by means of a pedestrian promenade.

Now that promenade, named for the United Nations, is the source of great consternation, as beautiful has turned ugly and a city that long has cherished its connection to the organization is feeling ashamed about the tribute to it.

The promenade, nearly 3 acres of red bricks, granite and grass laid over what had been Fulton Street, was named United Nations Plaza to recognize the founding of the United Nations in 1945, several blocks away in what now is the Herbst Theater.

The plaza included a fountain by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. A series of granite pillars honoring U.N. members was added to the plaza over the years, as were the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, engraved on a black obelisk, and a blue-and-white U.N. flag, hoisted aside a U.S. flag.

"It worked for a long time," Halprin said of the plaza. "A lot of people used it in a wonderful way."

Today many San Franciscans would agree that United Nations Plaza is not working. Halprin, immersed in other projects, including one in Yosemite National Park, is among those quietly trying to save the plaza — for the sake of both the city and the organization.

"The U.N. needs strengthening all around the block, as far as I am concerned," said Halprin, 88. "The first thing is to get the hell out of Iraq. The second thing to do is this."

The problems at United Nations Plaza are manifold, having their origin in the harsh realities of a neighborhood overrun with vagrants, homeless people, petty thieves and drug dealers.
 
From a historic perspective, the deterioration reflects a broader failing in the Burnham-era vision, namely the idea that the Market Street corridor running northeast from the Civic Center to the Ferry Building at the waterfront would develop into San Francisco's pre-eminent commercial address, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Instead, beyond the intersection at Fifth Street, the street turns into a seedy mix of sex shops and vacant storefronts, where it is not uncommon to find mentally ill or drunken people carrying on conversations with themselves or stumbling bleary-eyed across the sidewalk.

Halprin, who has worked on plans over the years to revitalize Market Street, said no one had come up with a good explanation for the street's stubborn resistance to greatness.

Lynn Valente, who lives and works on Market and headed the committee that wrote a report on the deteriorating conditions to the county board of supervisors, said most explanations, at least in recent years, laid some of the blame on United Nations Plaza.

"When you say Market Street to people, they don't think of the Ferry Building to Fifth Street, which is lovely; they think of Fifth Street to the Civic Center, which is blighted," said Valente, the associate director of the Market Street Association, which represents property owners and merchants. "When you walk through United Nations Plaza and it smells of urine and defecation, that is bad for Market Street. The perception of Market Street is 'Ugh, don't go there.' "

For many of the plaza's detractors, Halprin's fountain has become the most visible manifestation of what has gone wrong. In the report last year, the U.N. Plaza Working Group, the citizen and business committee headed by Valente, called for its removal.

Situated at the Market Street entrance to the plaza, the fountain, an imposing collection of granite slabs from the Sierra Nevada meant to represent the continents, eventually became a public toilet, shower, washing machine, brothel, garbage can and drug market all in one. City officials turned off the water for a while and erected a cyclone fence.

"There is a feeling that it hasn't worked architecturally," said Nancy Peterson, president of the United Nations Association of San Francisco and a member of the committee. "There was wide consensus to take it out."

Defenders of the fountain, including Mary Millman, who runs an open-air antique and artisan market on the plaza, persuaded the board of supervisors to reject the idea and a number of other recommendations in the report. Millman, who was also a committee member, said the answer to the plaza's problems was more activities like her market, not drastic changes to its landscape.

Millman ropes off a section of the plaza twice a week for her market and has private security guards keep problem guests at a distance. Encouraged by the results, she has extended the market to a third day. "We've had to fight for every brick," she said. "But it is really paying off. Things are 50 percent better."

City officials removed the fence around the fountain last year, but it has been replaced with "no trespassing" signs and a circle of chains hanging from concrete tubs. Halprin said he was helping to design a permanent barrier that city officials hope will be less of an eyesore while still keeping people away.

"Yes, it offends me to be doing this," Halprin said, penciling a rough sketch of the nautical-looking barrier on a drafting table in his studio. "But it is better than taking the fountain out or doing it damage."

Halprin's other ideas include improving the lighting and restoring seating to the plaza, which had been removed in years past because of the sordid activities it attracted. The city has a federal grant for more than $900,000 to pay for improvements, which Peterson, the United Nations Association president, says she hopes will be in place by June.

That is when the city plans to celebrate its role in the 60th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. A ceremony is planned at United Nations Plaza.