[Carfreeliving] Let's rubble -- longing for next Big One

[Andy Thornley]

Don't know if you caught it, but Tim Holt's musings on possible 
improvements brought by the next Big One ran in last Sunday's 
Chronicle (front page of the Insight section), he sends thanks to all 
for your suggestions . . .


	--Andy--

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Let's rubble -- longing for next Big One
Quakes have a way of reshaping things

by Tim Holt
SF Chronicle, Sunday, November 27, 2005

    <http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/27/ING2HFML0R1.DTL>

Another Big One is coming: U.S. Geological Survey says an earthquake 
on the order of Loma Prieta, or greater, is likely to shake the Bay 
Area by 2032.

What many view as an inevitable disaster scenario -- toppled 
freeways, crumbled buildings, cracked pavement -- others see as an 
opportunity.

In this view, the San Andreas and Hayward faults are agents of urban 
renewal, their destructive force having a positive impact on the 
urban landscape. For starters, look what Loma Prieta did to open up 
San Francisco's waterfront.

"You're lucky you've got those earthquakes." That's what one San 
Francisco city planner says he hears when he goes to conferences 
around the country and tells fellow planners about the improvements 
made after the 1989 quake.

Nearly every major U.S. city has a legacy of neighborhood-gouging 
freeways from the 1950s and '60s, structures now universally 
recognized as monuments to bad planning.

In an earthquake-prone city like San Francisco, as Loma Prieta 
proved, they don't have to be permanent scars on the landscape.

When the next Big One hits, Robin Levitt is among those hoping a few 
more of the city's freeways crumble. Levitt is the architect and 
neighborhood activist who led a successful campaign in the late 1990s 
to replace the quake-damaged Central Freeway with an open, 
pedestrian-friendly boulevard just north of Market Street.

Today, Levitt proudly points out that what had been a "no man's land" 
under the old freeway has been transformed into the four-block-long 
Octavia Boulevard, what Levitt grandly describes as a "Parisian 
boulevard" treatment where cars share space with cyclists and 
pedestrians.

The cars are separated from the slower traffic by 5-foot-wide median 
strips landscaped with trees and plants -- another step in the 
"greening" of the city.

"In Europe, you don't have freeways running through cities, cutting 
up neighborhoods, the way they do here," Levitt notes. "In this 
country, we're finally learning that we can move people through 
cities without running freeways through them, that we can start to 
give the city back to the people who live here."

When the next earth-shaker hits, Levitt would like to see more of the 
Central Freeway go down, so that Octavia can be extended and Van Ness 
Avenue and Mission and Valencia streets can emerge from under the 
shadow of the existing overpass -- an idea that the Board of 
Supervisors itself has tentatively endorsed.

And let's be honest, don't some of the city's drearier edifices -- 
the institutional slab known as the Hall of Justice on Bryant Street, 
or the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue -- make you yearn for 
the next earthquake? If so, you can take heart from the fact that 
they both sit on soggy, unstable ground.

Author Grey Brechin ("Imperial San Francisco") is among those who 
think the next earthquake could improve the city's landscape. He 
points out that key parts of the city -- including the Civic Center, 
the Financial District, South of Market, and the Mission District -- 
sit on long-buried bay inlets, creeks, marshes and lakes.

Buildings sited over these underground bodies of water are sitting on 
unstable infill materials -- soggy, shaky foundations referred to as 
"liquefaction" zones by seismologists. They not only tend to form big 
sinkholes during an earthquake, but also amplify ground motion.

In the aftermath of the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, you could identify 
the location of these subterranean water sources by noting the 
pattern of toppled and badly damaged buildings, especially South of 
Market. That region lost a lot of brick warehouses in 1989, many of 
which have since been replaced by live/work lofts.

The next time around, Brechin suggests, don't repeat this futile 
pattern of rebuilding on unstable ground. Instead, follow the path 
suggested by nature and open up the creeks and develop parkways along 
them.

This would have the added benefit of avoiding development in areas 
prone to flooding. And, as Brechin points out, any clearing of these 
generally low-lying flood zones will help prepare the city for the 
gradually rising ocean levels associated with global warming.

There is one major problem with this idea: The city's underground 
creeks are used as sewage trunk lines, so that any creek restoration 
program would require a major investment in new sewer lines. It's 
also unlikely that San Franciscans would support restoration of one 
creek in particular, Hayes Valley Creek, which flows under Civic 
Center.

As for other likely targets of urban renewal, what about that Lego on 
steroids, Sutro Tower? If that topples, Brechin suggests resurrecting 
sculptor Benny Bufano's idea of a monumental statue of St. Francis of 
Assisi on Mount Sutro. Or architect Bernard Maybeck's proposal for a 
copy of the Acropolis -- a symbol of wisdom and civilization 
replacing the structure that currently beams us "Desperate 
Housewives."

Although he'd hardly want to go on record favoring a San Francisco 
earthquake, at least one of Mayor Gavin Newsom's programs could get a 
big boost from the next Big One.

As part of his new $11 million "Better Streets" initiative, the 
mayor's aides have been pointing out that there is ' a lot of 
underutilized pavement in the city -- isolated, undeveloped dead-end 
streets, for example, or those extra-wide streets out in the Sunset 
District -- some 560 acres by current City Hall estimates.

The pocket parks and community gardens the mayor wants to create 
could, with a little pick-and-shovel work, replace some of the 
pavement that cracks in the next earthquake.

One Planning Department employee also mentioned the idea of 
redesigning earthquake-damaged streets to create "slow streets," or 
what the Dutch call "woonerfs."

These are resident-friendly streets that restrict traffic to narrow 
thoroughfares, while giving pedestrians wide sidewalks with natural 
landscaping and street furniture -- along the lines of Octavia's 
"Parisian boulevard" treatment. These more sophisticated street 
revamps don't come cheap however, costing on the order of $500,000 
per block.

Then again, why wait for the next Big One? Boston didn't wait for a 
natural disaster to underground two miles of waterfront freeway and 
begin replacing its former route with a long swath of parks, public 
plazas, shops and housing. Seattle is considering a similar project 
along its waterfront.

San Francisco may well have to live with its ugly buildings, at least 
until the next big shaker, but the transformation of public spaces -- 
the liberation of neighborhood streets, the opening up of urban 
vistas, the tearing up and greening of superfluous pavement -- can 
begin immediately.

Thanks to the last major earthquake, there are positive examples of 
this kind of improvement on both sides of the bay. (Loma Prieta's 
shaking also helped heal the neighborhood around the damaged Cypress 
Freeway in Oakland.)

Not only would such projects help return the city to the people who 
live here, as Levitt advocates, but they could also make it safer in 
the next earthquake.

For one thing, there would be fewer elevated freeways to come 
tumbling down. And when was the last time anyone was buried in the 
rubble of a community garden?