BACKGROUND

Before we can address the solutions, it may be useful to reflect a little on the history of U.N. Plaza, its location along Market Street, San Francisco's central spine, and mid-20th century modernist planning. In 1961, concerned about the conditions on Market Street, and recognizing the opportunity presented by the proposed construction of the BART subway system, SPUR prepared a report, What to do About Market Street, incidentally coauthored by Halprin. Quoting from that now 43 year-old report:

"Market Street is a paradox. It is San Francisco's most famous street. It is wide, busy, and important. But it is also congested, dirty, and unattractive. In places Market Street is bright and cheerful; in other places it is ugly and depressing. Market Street is San Francisco's main artery; a wide river of traffic flows from Twin Peaks to the Ferry Building. But Market Street also is a barrier between north and south in downtown San Francisco. Market Street lies at the heart of San Francisco's office, retail, and cultural life, and at the doorstep of the City government. But Market Street also houses penny arcades, risqué movies, and cheap merchandising outlets."

"Something must be done about Market Street, but it must be something that strikes at the basic issues. No single element alone is responsible for Market Street's condition. No simple solution will solve its problems. The plan of action must be comprehensive. But to devise such a plan, we first must know Market Street and understand its peculiarities and troubles."

Unfortunately 43 years later, much of the first paragraph is still true, particularly in the mid-Market area that houses U.N. Plaza. However, today, local citizens and leaders alike, are united over the seemingly intractable homeless problem, are looking for quick fixes – out with the fountain – not comprehensive plans of action.

In response to “What to do About Market Street,” a comprehensive landscape plan was done for Market Street, the Market Street Design Plan, prepared for Planning Director Allan B. Jacobs by a team led by architect Mario Ciampi, with Halprin as a special consultant. The plan was a broad-reaching comprehensive plan that looked not only at Market Street but at many pedestrian connections on former alleys and at "leftover" triangular spaces where the diagonal Market Street intersected with the 45 degree streets to the north. In order to rationalize traffic flow, certain streets that dead-ended into Market were closed, and a series of beautiful mini-parks proposed in their place. Thus Leavenworth Street was eventually closed and turned into Leavenworth mall, as was Fulton Street, creating the Fulton Street mall westward into the Civic Center and U.N. Plaza where the intersection of Fulton and Leavenworth had been.

When Market Street and its plazas were actually designed, Halprin won the contract, and a quite beautiful series of brick and granite sidewalks, sycamore allées, small plazas, historic light fixtures, and modern street furniture resulted, eventually completed in the early 1980s. To see exactly what Halprin had in mind, however, one only has to go to Portland, OR, or Charlottesville, VA, to see where a similar design response resulted in the fabric that knits together a community and creates a sense of place. In these other cities a commitment has been made to maintaining the designer’s intent: brick sidewalks are washed with hot water on a regular basis, the trees that are arching over the street are pruned and fertilized, and there is an active street life.

While Halprin's design of Market Street is coherent from one end to the other, the result is very different as one travels along its length. On the eastern, downtown end, high rise office buildings attract thousands of middle-class pedestrians out onto the sidewalks several times a day. A little farther west, a new Nordstrom was constructed a decade ago, and complex containing a new Bloomingdale's is now under construction. But, west of there, the street life changes. Instead of busy office workers and mothers with strollers, we have the shopping cart brigade, open drug dealing, public defecation, and worse.

Where Halprin's Villancourt Fountain in Justin Herman Plaza at the east end of Market Street is surrounded by office workers having lunch (even as the city has allowed the pumps to deteriorate and no longer fills the fountain), U.N. Fountain is surrounded by squalor. Where the office buildings at the east end of Market steam clean their brick sidewalks at their own expense, there have been two decades of neglected maintenance by the city in mid-Market.

While U.N. Plaza was built virtually in sight of the City Engineer's office, with its hundreds of civil engineers, they seemingly never had the interest in operating the fountain correctly. Intended for the water level to rise and fall like the tide, an ever-changing symphony of sight and sound, U. N. Fountain has almost never been properly operated. When it is run, it is always at a static minimal water level, with a static spout pattern. So what should have been an attraction, what William “Holly” Whyte would have called triangulation, a feature which attracts strangers and causes them to interact with each other, became merely an artfully arranged series of granite slabs, with a shallow pool of water several feet below sidewalk level.

The sycamores along Market Street once had uplights, which the city failed to maintain, and removed when they deteriorated. The trees themselves have suffered in the ravages of our cold foggy winds, but a complete lack of irrigation and regular fertilization has contributed to their bedraggled appearance. Once beautiful bronze trash receptacles were removed when city workers complained they were difficult to empty. Magnificent cantilevered bus shelters were removed when bus stops were moved, and replaced with stock off-the-shelf models. Handsome polished granite benches were removed because the homeless sat on them.

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