Second Freeway Revolt – FoundSF

Historic Essay

by Jason Henderson

This intersection of thirteenth and Duboce (Duboce goes west from Mission at left middle of picture) was obliterated by the Central Freeway lower than a decade after this 1951 picture was taken, and at the moment is underneath the curving ramp because it heads towards Market Road.

Photograph: San Francisco Historical past Middle, San Francisco Public Library

Eradicating the Central Freeway (Half 1)

On October 17, 1989, the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake shook down a number of Bay Space freeways. The Cypress Freeway, a double-deck, Sixties-era freeway within the working-class neighborhood of West Oakland, collapsed, and forty-two individuals have been killed. A piece of the higher deck of the Bay Bridge collapsed onto the decrease deck, killing one motorist. In San Francisco the Embarcadero Freeway and sections of I-280 in Mission Bay have been broken, and in Hayes Valley the Central Freeway was shut down.

The lack of life and the destruction have been devastating, however to many individuals in San Francisco the catastrophe had a silver lining. It was a possibility to think about eradicating a number of the vestigial freeways that slipped previous the freeway revolts of the fifties and sixties. Whereas in Oakland the Cypress Freeway was rebuilt, in San Francisco some broken segments have been eliminated in what I name the second freeway revolt. The earthquake so badly destabilized the Embarcadero Freeway that it needed to be razed rapidly. The mayor, a progressive who was open to rethinking the waterfront, expedited the choice to switch the freeway with a floor boulevard. Earlier political efforts to take away the Embarcadero Freeway had failed, however the earthquake redefined the probabilities.(1)

It took longer—ten years—to find out the destiny of the Central Freeway. After the quake, elements of the freeway that have been past restore have been eliminated, however different segments reopened. An acrimonious debate included poll initiatives in 1997, 1998, and 1999 and was resolved with solely partial removing and alternative with a brief floor boulevard. The last decade-long debate about eradicating the Central Freeway represented a cautiously hopeful juncture within the politics of mobility in San Francisco. It signified a political maturing of progressive transportation advocacy and likewise a refined rapprochement with neoliberal actual property and growth pursuits, who shared in selling reurbanization of housing and voiced a number of the ideas of livability.

The town’s conservatives have been much less optimistic. They opposed eradicating the freeway and took the matter to the poll. Their concern was the lack of simple freeway entry to the Fell–Oak and Franklin–Gough one-way couplets which linked to the west and north sides of town. Caltrans additionally needed to rebuild the Central Freeway as a result of, like nineteenth Avenue on the west aspect, it was an important, albeit incomplete, regional hyperlink connecting the Bay Space freeway community to the Golden Gate Bridge. However the finish outcome, partial removing, was an incremental nudge towards livability in Hayes Valley, the place the freeway as soon as ran overhead. This final result is way from good, nevertheless, and visitors stays a serious downside.

Hayes Valley and the Central Freeway

The removing of the Central Freeway came about in Hayes Valley, within the middle of town simply west of Metropolis Corridor and considered one of a number of Victorian-era neighborhoods within the unique alignment of the freeway (map 1, beneath). After the earthquake and firestorm of 1906, which burned down a lot of San Francisco, Hayes Valley densified as a result of it was largely spared by the fireplace and had stable housing that may very well be subdivided. Within the Nineteen Twenties and Thirties Hayes Valley was a alternative space for house growth due to its proximity to downtown. With its streetcars and dense, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, the constructed atmosphere of Hayes Valley mirrored a lot of what’s promoted in livability discourse at the moment.

Due to its central location Hayes Valley was the confluence of main car routes via town. After the earthquake in 1906, Van Ness Avenue (present-day U.S. Freeway 101) was reconfigured as a key north–south car route that bypassed the west flank of downtown. Within the Thirties Van Ness Avenue was prolonged south of Market Road and penetrated the incongruent grid that now complicates motion via town. Later, Gough Road, albeit at a unique angle, additionally penetrated the incongruences. Elements of Hayes Valley have been remodeled right into a bypass for automobiles and a de facto node within the regional freeway system. Many new companies catered to cars, together with car dealerships, service stations, and automobile-oriented retail and industrial institutions. The juxtaposition of dense housing and a thruway for cars is a quandary residents and planners have spent a long time attempting to resolve and displays the paradoxical mobility stalemate described above.

Through the Second World Battle, African People moved into the world, and Hayes Valley skilled white flight and declining upkeep of the housing inventory. After the struggle, planning was biased towards incremental conversion of the world into a serious car thruway. By the mid-Nineteen Fifties, streets like Fell, Oak, Franklin, and Gough have been transformed into main one-way couplets, whereas metropolis planners thought-about the neighborhood blighted, pathologically disorganized, and in want of “social surgical procedure.”(4) Freeways might do extra good than hurt, the logic adopted, and so town and state agreed on constructing the Central Freeway in Hayes Valley, with the corollary community of widened one-way couplets additionally radiating outward. The alignment of the Central Freeway paralleled Van Ness Avenue, linking the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge and to the Bayshore Freeway to the south. Just like the Western Freeway, the Central Freeway was a strategic regional freeway hyperlink.

In 1959 the Central Freeway was accomplished from the junction of the Bay Bridge Viaduct and thru Hayes Valley north to Turk Road, however the the rest of the route was canceled throughout the freeway revolts. Hayes Valley was thought-about marginal and had little voice within the freeway debates, however the neighborhoods to the north, together with Pacific Heights and the Marina District, have been lively within the revolts and objected to the northern extension of the Central Freeway. This meant that freeway visitors was delivered to the floor streets in Hayes Valley. As on nineteenth Avenue on the west aspect of town, this created an intractable visitors mess, making Hayes Valley a much less fascinating a part of town.

The Central Freeway because it swoops in the direction of its dead-end at Franklin and Gough and Turk Streets, August 2, 1965.

Photograph: San Francisco Historical past Middle, San Francisco Public Library

Including to this, in 1955 visitors engineers established the Hayes–Fell–Oak Z configuration (see map 1 beneath). Briefly, the Z configuration shifts the Fell and Oak Streets one-way couplet north by one block to Hayes Road, using the perpendicular Franklin and Gough one-way couplets. The Z jog successfully aligned the east–west visitors move to the South of Market grid, enabling massive volumes of visitors to cross Market Road on the ninth and tenth Road one-way couplets, which additionally fed the 101 Freeway to the south. Moreover, the shifting of the couplet northward to Hayes Road enabled elimination of the five-point intersection at Oak Road, Van Ness Avenue, and Market Streets. The Z configuration solidified Hayes Valley as a conduit for automobiles.

Map 1

Cartography: Michael Webster

In 1966, as famous earlier, San Francisco’s freeway revolt lastly ended with the cancellation of the Panhandle Freeway, which might have prolonged from the Central Freeway westward alongside the Fell–Oak axis. Landing ramps constructed on to Fell and Oak Streets grew to become everlasting, feeding the freeway to the cross-town one-way couplet. By the late sixties greater than 150,000 autos per day have been touring via Hayes Valley.(5) The extraordinary visitors, large one-way streets, and complicated Z jog led to the additional decline of Hayes Valley, and by the Nineteen Seventies the underside of the Central Freeway was infamous for prostitution and drug dealing.

Regardless of the neighborhood’s historic decline, elements of Hayes Valley underwent restricted residential revitalization within the Nineteen Seventies. Gentrification spilled into elements of Hayes Valley from neighborhoods additional to the west, such because the Castro and Duboce Triangle. Within the Eighties the opening of Davies Symphony Corridor stimulated small enterprise and new eating places alongside Hayes Road. This gradual revitalization lay the muse for organized advocacy for freeway removing after the earthquake in 1989. New retailers have been significantly keen on the thought of daylighting Hayes Road, and plenty of residents skilled what it was prefer to see visitors density plummet, because it did instantly after the earthquake. They didn’t want for it to return.

The thought of eradicating the freeway was difficult by the controversy over the Embarcadero Freeway. In 1991 Mayor Art Agnos, a progressive, confronted a political backlash from service provider organizations in Chinatown that believed the Embarcadero ought to have been rebuilt to maintain freeway entry to Chinatown.(6) They charged that Agnos acted too swiftly and with out their enter. Whereas most of the retailers lived exterior of Chinatown, previous to the earthquake they drove into Chinatown by way of the ramps from the Embarcadero Freeway, which additionally fed automobile-oriented vacationers right into a five-hundred-stall parking storage. The Chinatown backlash slowed early political momentum for eradicating the Central Freeway. Agnos misplaced his reelection bid in November 1991, partially owing to political organizing in opposition to him from Chinatown. For progressives, the second freeway revolt had political prices.

Nevertheless, simply earlier than Agnos failed in his reelection bid, the section of the Central Freeway north of Fell Road was dangerously unstable, and engineers concluded it needed to be eliminated and rebuilt later. Agnos and the Board of Supervisors concurred, and it was demolished, thereby daylighting Hayes Road and attracting extra funding. Hayes Road remodeled right into a hip bohemian purchasing and artwork studio enclave, whereas the remaining part of the freeway to the south was braced for interim seismic assist and stored functioning. By 1992 the quantity of visitors utilizing the remaining section of the Central Freeway dropped from 100 thousand autos per day to eighty thousand.(7)

View southwest in 1991 from Gough and Grove the place the broken freeway nonetheless stood.

Photograph: SFHistorian by way of Twitter

The post-earthquake visitors was distributed inconsistently, and a few elements of Hayes Valley have been overwhelmed. For instance, the newly truncated configuration elevated visitors by 70 p.c on the Fell and Oak couplet as many automobiles that after proceeded north to the Franklin and Gough couplet now exited there.(8) There have been rumblings of dissent from that part of Hayes Valley. Furthermore, everybody within the neighborhood noticed the advantage of freeway removing over Hayes Road, and the thought of additional removing unfold among the many native residents. The Board of Supervisors established a residents’ advisory activity drive to advise the board on what to do in regards to the remaining segments of the freeway, and the San Francisco Planning Division (SFPD) investigated the potential for city infill on the previous freeway parcels north of Hayes Road. Members of the duty drive referred to as for the remaining freeway to be torn down. But by the point the nascent activity drive made its advice, the political pendulum of town had swung in a extra conservative course, and the advice was ignored.

Agnos misplaced the mayor’s race in 1991 to the conservative Frank Jordan, a Republican who ran on a law-and-order platform and who was the previous police chief of San Francisco.(9) To Jordan, the Central Freeway was an annoyance and a political third rail. His constituency was on the west aspect of town, and so he didn’t need to see it eliminated, however his lack of political capital (he was thought-about dysfunctional and bumbling) meant he couldn’t push the rebuilding of the freeway aggressively. Doing nothing grew to become the non permanent default place — a mobility stalemate. The hope was that Caltrans would sidestep native political debate and easily rebuild the freeway.

Nevertheless, state regulation restricted Caltrans’s capability to resolve the last word destiny of the Central Freeway. This was important as a result of Caltrans, viewing the freeway as a strategic regional roadway, would have probably rebuilt the complete broken freeway no matter native objections. As an alternative, state regulation obliged Caltrans to cooperate with town and discover varied alternate options to completely rebuilding the freeway. This course of required each public enter and environmental analysis of air and noise and spelled out that Caltrans might proceed on the Central Freeway undertaking provided that town accredited. Within the early Nineties it grew to become obvious that the query of what to do in regards to the Central Freeway would grow to be a chronic political battle. The delay allowed extra time for Hayes Valley residents and retailers to arrange and for progressive transportation concepts to tell the controversy.

Two themes characterised progressive organizing round freeway removing within the Nineties. First, the demographics of the world modified because of gentrification. Hayes Valley was being remodeled by a brand new stratum of well-educated middle-class residents from exterior of the neighborhood who have been in search of cheap city housing or have been prepared to take a position some sweat in renovating properties. Many of those new residents have been renters, not householders, and most of the householders weren’t speculators. Later waves of gentrification centered extra on hypothesis and commodification of neighborhoods, reflecting a pronounced neoliberal perspective on mobility moderately than a progressive one.(10) In the meantime, accompanying the primary wave have been small companies that lined Hayes Road with arts and crafts, clothes, and different retailers. Lots of the new residents and enterprise homeowners self-organized to advertise removing.

Second, a newly invigorated, citywide progressive mobility discourse, led partially by a vocal bicycle advocacy motion, was gaining traction and by the mid-to-late Nineties had achieved political parity with different progressive causes. Most pronounced within the metropolis’s Victorian belt, this new progressive discourse about livability, urbanism, and mobility strengthened the arguments of Hayes Valley residents who have been in search of freeway removing.

Useless finish at Haight and Octavia streets, 1961.

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Uber ordered to pay person $35,000 and supply accessible rides in B.C.

Photograph: San Francisco Historical past Middle, San Francisco Public Library

The Hayes Valley neighborhood activists who finally took down the freeway first started to arrange across the prostitution and drug dealing going down beneath the freeway.(11) The place the freeway crossed over Haight, Web page, and Waller Streets two small teams coalesced in early 1994 and started to develop a management construction with officers, committees, and common conferences. Considerably, many of those Hayes Valley residents didn’t secede from their house in response to the general public security considerations. As an alternative, the activists have been wanting to develop options that have been sensible and believed that merely pushing prostitution and crime out of the neighborhood wouldn’t suffice. They held security outreach occasions for prostitutes, labored with the police in figuring out pimps, and lobbied for group policing. The group advocated that prostitutes obtain remedy and reform moderately than jail.

The Hayes Valley activists would progressively achieve a repute amongst metropolis bureaucracies as being constructive and proactive moderately than reactive law-and-order or not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) activists. This was necessary over the subsequent decade because the neighborhood confronted main transportation and growth points. The group interacted positively with the native media and received favorable press protection on the way it approached prostitution. It additionally labored with a broader, citywide group referred to as the Coalition of San Francisco Enterprise and Neighborhood Communities Impacted by Prostitution to make sure that the issue was approached holistically and never merely moved from one neighborhood to a different. The Conference and Guests’ Bureau and downtown lodges supported the coalition as a result of it additionally centered on the Tenderloin, which was adjoining to the downtown resort district. The coalition supplied some useful networking between the neighborhood group and bigger political forces and put activists in Hayes Valley on the political map, not less than on problems with social service and public security. By 1996 neighborhood crime had been diminished by 85 p.c, though a persistent security downside beneath the freeway accentuated neighbors’ assist for removing.(12)

Whereas organizing round public security, Caltrans put forth a plan for a brand new alternative freeway viaduct from Mission Road to the remaining Fell and Oak Road ramps. In a nod to Hayes Valley, the Board of Supervisors adopted a decision urging Caltrans to delay the retrofit course of till different alternate options have been studied. The board then appointed a number of Hayes Valley residents to a newly reconstituted Central Freeway Residents’ Advisory Job Power (CFCTF), which grew to become the formal platform for shaping native rethinking of the freeway. Members of the CFCTF requested that an possibility of full freeway removing be included among the many alternate options Caltrans would examine. The CFCTF additionally prompt that if there was to be a rebuilding, a brand new freeway landing ramp needs to be positioned someplace south of Market Road moderately than on the Fell and Oak Road couplet.

The CFCTF met often in 1995 and 1996 and held a number of citywide public conferences. It drafted pointers for a way it might method the freeway query, together with most of the tenets of livability, similar to selling town’s transit-first coverage and emphasizing walkability and reasonably priced housing. The CFCTF pointers additionally had a clause stating that no single neighborhood ought to take in the burden of freeway visitors. These pointers hinted of progressive values, together with a powerful sense that authorities ought to guarantee environmental and social justice as a part of the general public curiosity.

Hayes Valley’s organizing round freeway removing shared within the broader zeitgeist of rethinking mobility in San Francisco, the Bay Space, and nationally. Through the mid-Nineties congestion and sprawl grew to become main political points within the Bay Space.(13) Congestion and sprawl have been additionally nationwide considerations. From Atlanta to Portland and throughout the nation new urbanist and smart-growth advocates organized to supply another imaginative and prescient of cities that invoked a lot of the livability discourse.(14) Even in Southern California, lengthy considered a area the place the automotive was idolized, residents bemoaned smog and protested the final section of I-710 via Pasadena.(15) Neighborhood activists succeeded in halting a brief section of freeway that may have break up cohesive neighborhoods east of downtown Los Angeles.

Mistrust of freeway engineers and the freeway foyer was widespread. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired Taken for a Trip, a documentary which contended that Basic Motors destroyed a once-extensive and viable transit system in an unlimited conspiracy.(16) Whatever the accuracy of the movie, it resonated strongly amongst sustainable transport activists, and outstanding figures within the livability motion propelled the concept that one thing sinister had produced the system of automobility. In Hayes Valley, as activists circulated the video amongst themselves, mistrust of the freeway foyer unfold and bolstered enthusiasm for tearing down freeways.(17)

In suburban San Mateo County, the so-called Satan’s Slide freeway and tunnel controversy fed into the Central Freeway debate and prompt to Hayes Valley activists that Caltrans bullied communities into accepting freeways.(18) On this case Caltrans was discovered to be withholding proof from opponents of an inland freeway bypass, whereas diluting proof of the advantages of a tunnel possibility alongside the San Mateo County shoreline. Ultimately citizen activists put the tunnel possibility on the poll and gained. The high-profile Satan’s Slide controversy reminded most of the long-standing stress between Caltrans engineers and native management of transportation, which in San Francisco went way back to the primary freeway revolts within the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties.

In San Francisco, Critical Mass bicycle rides challenged not solely automobility but additionally capitalism and compelled many to rethink the position of automobility in cities. Initiated in September 1992, Essential Mass had typically been a relaxed affair till the mid-Nineties, when it began to get standard, bigger, and extra disruptive to car visitors.(19) Indignant motorists complained to native politicians, and the police started to steer Essential Mass to streets the place there can be much less of a visitors affect. Bicyclists protested, and a violent upheaval adopted in the summertime of 1997. The crackdown on Essential Mass received ample media consideration, and the bicycle protest motion grew to become conflated with the anti-freeway motion, little doubt as a result of the 2 teams weren’t solely sympathetic however shared members. Notably, the controversy over Essential Mass attracted much more cyclists to subsequent rides, with 1000’s of members on heat summer time evenings within the late Nineties, simply because the Central Freeway debate would come to a crescendo.

On this broader context Hayes Valley activists fashioned the Affiliation to Simplify Site visitors and Abate Congestion (ASTAC). ASTAC tapped into the broader politics of mobility of San Francisco’s Victorian Belt and used political connections to foyer for full or near-complete removing of the Central Freeway north and south of Market Road. ASTAC’s members had appreciable linkages to progressive advocates exterior of the neighborhood, together with the Sierra Membership, San Francisco Tomorrow, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (SFBC), the Harvey Milk Membership, the American Institute of Architects and City Ecology. The group additionally had connections and assist from retailers in Hayes Valley and different close by neighborhood organizations.

ASTAC activists proposed to completely take away the complete size of the freeway and prompt not changing it with something. They confirmed their removing proposal to numerous group teams and organizations across the metropolis and received a largely optimistic response, implying that this selection ought to not less than get a good listening to. But the full-removal proposal was dismissed outright by the advisor employed by Caltrans and town to check the choices. Metropolis visitors engineers and town’s consultants actually laughed on the Hayes Valley activists. The town due to this fact by no means had the data or information to adequately take into account a full-removal various. A good listening to on the full-removal various didn’t occur, and this instantly narrowed the politics of prospects.

Whereas progressive transportation advocates similar to ASTAC couldn’t get the whole lot they needed — full removing with no alternative floor boulevard funneling automobiles via their neighborhood — they have been capable of contribute to eradicating a part of the freeway. Their primary contribution was to attain a political redefinition of the probabilities away from the opposite excessive of absolutely rebuilding the freeway. However the battle for freeway removing was removed from over. Complicating progressive visions was a conservative motion to completely rebuild the freeway.

Notes

1. Elimination of the Embarcadero Freeway was thought-about in 1963, and within the Eighties town studied demolition. In 1986 a poll initiative over removing did not get citywide voter approval. See Carl Nolte and Reginald Smith, “S.F. Votes to Save the Freeway,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 4, 1986.
2. American Society of Engineers, “2009 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure,” www.infrastructurereportcard.org/report-cards (see esp. the sections on bridges, 74–81, and roads, 98–105).
3. Congress for the New Urbanism, 2012 Freeways with out Futures (Chicago: Congress for the New Urbanism, 2012).
4. John H. Mollenkopf, The Contested Metropolis (Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1983), 17, referring to the entire Western Addition, of which Hayes Valley is a component.
5. Volumes calculated from “Map of Twenty-4-Hour Site visitors Flows on Principal Streets and Highways, 1966–1968,” in SFPD, Transportation: Situations, Issues, and Points (San Francisco: SFPD, 1971), 74.
6. Kandace Bender, “Loyalty Up for Grabs in Mayoral Free-for-All,” San Francisco Examiner, April 28, 1995; Warren Hinckle, “The Final Freeway Battle,” The Impartial, April 1, 2003; Zusha Elinson, “Within the Bay Space, Trains Are Powered by Myths,” New York Occasions Bay Space Version, July 2, 2011, www.baycitizen.org/transportation. There’s additionally a lot political intrigue in regards to the promise of a subway to Chinatown in alternate for the Embarcadero removing(see chapter 7).
7. FHWA and Caltrans, San Francisco Central Freeway Substitute Challenge: Environmental Evaluation (Washington: FHWA, 1997), 17. This didn’t embody visitors on Franklin, Gough, or Van Ness, which remained considerably excessive.
8. Ibid.
9. For the narrative of the Agnos defeat, see Richard DeLeon, “Postscript, the 1991 Mayoral Election and Past,” Left Coast Metropolis: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975–1991 (Lawrence: College Press of Kansas, 1992).
10. Martin Danyluk and David Ley talk about the ideological variations present in separate waves of gentrification, “Modalities of the New Center Class: Ideology and Conduct within the Journey to Work from Gentrified Neighborhoods in Canada,” City Research 44.11 (2007): 2195–2210.
11. Patricia Walkup, private interview, December 2005. Walkup led the general public security organizing in Hayes Valley, led campaigns to take away the Central Freeway, and helped discovered the Hayes Valley Neighborhood Affiliation (HVNA).
12. Elizabeth Crane, “Neighbors Arrange—Everybody Advantages,” Castro Star, August 1996.
13. Jonathan Marshall, “Site visitors Supplants Crime atop Bay Ballot, Packed Freeways Are No.1 Concern,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 23, 1997.
14. An excellent overview of the sprawl debate of the Nineties may be present in Reid Ewing, “Is Los Angeles–Type Sprawl Fascinating?” Journal of the American Planning Affiliation 63.1 (1997): 107–26, and, in the identical problem, a counterpoint argument by Peter Gordon and Harry Richardson, “Are Compact Cities a Fascinating Planning Purpose?” Journal of the American Planning Affiliation 63.1 (1997). For examinations of the sprawl debate in Atlanta, see Jason Henderson, “The Politics of Mobility and Enterprise Elites in Atlanta, Georgia,” City Geography 25.3 (2004): 193–216, and for Portland, see Carl Abbott, “The Portland Area: The place Metropolis and Suburbs Speak to Every Different—and Usually Agree,” Housing Coverage Debate 8.1 (1997): 11–51.
15. Martin Wachs, “The Political Context of Transportation Coverage,” in The Geography of City Transportation, second ed., ed. Susan Hanson (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 269–86.
16. Jim Klein and Martha Olsen, .com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html Taken for a Ride, New Day Movies, 1996.
17. Walkup, private interview.
18. Mitch Reid, “Satan’s Slide Dilemma: Save Our Coast or Pave Our Coast,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 1996. Patricia Walkup had an intensive file on the Satan’s Slide controversy, together with poll language and authorized papers from environmentalists who sued Caltrans.
19. The early evolution of Essential Mass is described in a quantity edited by Chris Carlsson, Essential Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration (Oakland: AK Press, 2002); see additionally Aaron Golub and Jason Henderson, “The Greening of Mobility in San Francisco,” in Sustainability in American Cities: Creating the Inexperienced Metropolis, ed. Matthew Slavin (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2011), 113–32.

Conservative Fight to Save Central Freeway (Part 2) / Dueling Ballots: The Central Freeway’s Fate (part 3)

This text is excerpted, with permission, from Henderson’s e book “Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco”‘, 2013