Ferry Park, 20 Years Gone
Twenty years ago this summer, back in 1987, a group of folks, most of whom were working for MCI at the time, went out after work and set up a volleyball net on the dirt under the freeway on-ramp next to the Embarcadero Center and started to play twice a week. In 1989 the earthquake came and shut down the Central Freeway, but they kept playing. In 1991 the city finally tore down the Embarcadero Freeway, and the folks kept playing in the dirt where the on-ramp used to be. Eventually the city managed to get grass to grow there (it took a couple tries). In 2001 the city Park and Rec department adopted the space and named it "Ferry Park." All this time the same, more or less, group of folks went out there after work twice a week, every week during the summer when there was enough evening daylight to play. That's twenty continuous years.
It's a beautiful spot in the evenings. The pleasant temperatures and lack of wind make it one of the best microclimates in the city. As the sun goes down the lights come up on the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge and the surrounding office buildings.
For the first part of that time, their relations with the authorities were pretty good. The local police appreciated them because they were a stable and dependable presence in a neighborhood that gets completely evacuated every day at six o'clock, when the office workers flee the Financial District and go back to their homes. The city administrators didn't mind because the volleyball folks never caused trouble and always cleaned up after themselves. They might get loud for a bit after a particularly spectacular point was scored, but not much more than that. And for the locals, the games were always open, passerby were often encouraged to join, and it was nice to see the park being used for something.
But now apparently the equation is changing. When city Park and Rec department first took over, being a government bureaucracy, it needed to justify its existence, and put up a Sign, with Rules:
But the Park guys at the time took a kindly view of the volleyball folks and grandfathered them in behind the rules. But now Park and Rec, possibly in response to their problems with the homeless encampments in Golden Gate Park, is clamping down on usage of parks across The City. They've put up another, bigger Sign, with more Rules, and they've started enforcing the rules, to the point of having a groundskeeper turn sprinklers on the volleyballers to get them to clear off, and sending in Park Rangers to enforce the edicts. Twenty years of volleyball is no more.
I'm sure all the City people involved have read Jane Jacobs city planning classic The Death And Life of Great American Cities. Her thesis, if I may be so bold to summarize, is that for a neighborhood to survive, to keep it from becoming a blight, it requires a mix of different uses, different people using the neighborhood for different things at different times of the day. The kind of neighborhoods that become wastelands are most often monoculture, single-use neighborhoods, like municipal office complexes or office parks or subsidized housing developments that are unable to support more than one activity. Not only do mixed uses make a neighborhood vital and interesting, they make it feel safe, being able to walk down the street and see different people doing different things at different times of the day is crucial to draw in foot traffic.
Can it be that S.F. Park and Rec hasn't read Jacobs, even her chapter on "The uses of neighborhood parks"? It's not impossible:
Here The City has been given what most city planners beg for, a consistent, dependable, approvable use of a neighborhood park when it is otherwise deserted. Why are they making it into a confrontation?In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.
More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy? But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would.
Jane Jacobs uses the old town squares in Philadelphia as a case study. Rittenhouse Square is successful, thriving, safe. Why?
So why is Park and Rec so intent on kicking these people out? What do they think they're going to gain by achieving an empty park? This is the adjoining Justin Herman Plaza, a vast expanse of empty brick, what it looks like in the evening, is that what they want Ferry Park to look like?In short, Rittenhouse Square is busy fairly continuously for the same basic reasons that a lively sidewalk is used continuously: because of functional physical diversity among adjacent uses, and hence diversity among users and their schedules.
Philadelphia's Washington Square--the one that became a pervert park--affords an extreme contrast in this respect. Its rim is dominated by huge office buildings, and both this rim and its immediate hinterland lack any equivalent to the diversity of Rittenhouse Square--services, restaurants, cultural facilities. The neighborhood hinterland possesses a low density of dwellings. Washington Square thus has had in recent decades only one significant reservoir of potential local users: the office workers.
Does anything about this fact affect the park physically? Yes. This principal reservoir of users all operate on much the same daily time schedule. They all enter the district at once. They are then incarcerated all morning until lunch, and incarcerated again after lunch. They are absent after working hours. Therefor, Washington Square, of necessity, is a vacuum most of the day and evening. Into it came what usually fills city vacuums--a form of blight.
I'm leaving town for four days, but when I get a minute I'm going to write some letters:
Mayor Gavin Newsom
City Hall
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
Supervisor Aaron Peskin
City Hall, Room 244
1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
San Francisco, CA 94102
S.F. Park and Recreation, General Manager
McLaren Lodge & Annex
501 Stanyan Street
San Francisco, CA 94117
(415) 831-2700
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