Art: New Shape

For years San Franciscans have been smugly proud of their city’s beauty. Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, offered a view of the Ferry Building at one end and the Twin Peaks at the other, and they scarcely noticed that a visitor could drive the length of it and rarely see a new or interesting structure. In the street’s lower reaches, the financial district slumped off into a slurry of newsstands and war-surplus stores. Beyond them was the produce area, where vegetable wholesalers and butchers allowed their scraps to drop into the street.

Three years ago, San Francisco’s James D. Zellerbach decided on a new building for his Crown Zellerbach Corp., to be designed by the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill with the local firm of Hertzka & Knowles. Scouting the city for a site, Zellerbach (now U.S. Ambassador to Italy) boldly picked one on lower Market Street itself. But his tour impressed him with the decay of the city’s most vital area. Enlisting the aid of Financier Charles Blyth (who died last week—see MILESTONES), the two formed a committee to stir San Francisco into reshaping itself.

Quick Action. Results were impressive. The committee commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to draw up a redevelopment plan. Goaded to action, the city approved an elaborate $150 million Golden Gateway redevelopment plan that calls for landscaped office and apartment buildings to replace the decaying produce area. Other civic leaders urged the San Francisco Port Authority to turn over to commercial development the huge, disused wharf areas that lie between the produce area and the bay. Plans are now in motion to transform a waterfront area the equivalent of 90 city blocks into a development that will include at least ten apartment buildings, auditorium, school, maritime museum and yacht harbor.

Last week San Franciscans were happily inspecting the first two new buildings in what they confidently expected was a long overdue renaissance. One is the $6,000,000, 14-story John Hancock (life insurance) Building, which S.O.M. had placed only one block from Crown Zellerbach. Handsomely faced in gleaming brown granite, it is supported by massively sweeping arches that form a sheltered area for the pedestrian. Zellerbach’s own $10 million, 20-story building, set on a sloping triangular site edged by Bush, Market and Sansome Streets, is a stately box of green-tinted glass.

Ramps & Moats. Its most spectacular feature is its plaza. A moat of pebbles separates it from the street, and pedestrians cross to the building on gracefully curving ramps. Paths wind among olive trees, converge on an abstract bronze fountain by David Tolerton. In one corner stands a branch of the American Trust Co., a garden house whose roof of steel beams forms a rose-shaped ceiling.

To celebrate the new buildings and show off plans for newer ones to come, the Museum of Art mounted a handsome show of models and photographs. Already, wrote Critic Allan Temko, with proper civic pride, “lower Market Street has been utterly transformed.”