Grandiose San Francisco

Always with the grand ideas, San Francisco – some suitable (or not) for its glorious setting, most proposed and defeated, some occasionally built.

The blog Urban Life Signs explores some of the projects that never came to fruition:  Unbuilt San Francisco: The View from Futures Past.  In particular: “… the San Francisco Ferry Building has seen a plan for its redevelopment virtually every ten years.”

Here it is today:

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And what could have been:

Below, the 1951 World Trade Center proposal eliminated the historic Ferry Building and replaced it with an office tower with a big clock looking down Market Street. Note the very popular grand open plazas of the 1950s and 60s.

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The 1961 San Francisco Downtown Plan proposed to keep the Ferry Building clock tower, shear off its wings and replace them with two tall office towers.

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While the 1950s and’60s had more than their share of grand (and often awful) proposals, architects of every era had their schemes.  Like this one from 1933:

Suggested “Illuminated Water Effects of a Monument and Cascade at Twin Peaks.” Designed by Bernard Maybeck who is better known for designing the Palace of Fine Arts.

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Maybeck’s Palace of Fine Arts, done for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition (right), is still a well-loved neoclassical folly, a symbol of The City that had aspirations to be a Paris or Rome of the west coast.  Occasionally examples of this style can be found in the most curious places – notably where engineering was combined with high art with an intent to impress for commercial purposes.  The eye candy of its age.  Like this:

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Above is the Sunol Water Temple (map here).  It marks the confluence of three sources of water that, in private hands prior to the construction of the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, supplied half of San Francisco’s water.

Designed by Willis Polk and constructed in 1910, it is  modeled after the ancient Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy.  Damaged by earthquake in 1989, a community effort led to the temple’s restoration at a cost of $1.2 million.  You can go for a picnic, and perhaps find food at the adjacent Sunol Ag Park.