An ode to the Embarcadero Freeway, the blight by the bay

Not all “lost San Francisco” monuments are worth remembering.

The Embarcadero Freeway once stood proud — well, maybe just stood — along San Francisco’s waterfront, helping connect the Golden Gate Bridge with the Bay Bridge and creating an elevated, vista-blocking, smog-enveloped scar that many San Franciscans considered an abomination. Recently, while refiling packs of negatives in The Chronicle’s archive, I turned up photos that hadn’t been seen in years showing the loathed freeway’s construction decades ago.

Calls for the Embarcadero Freeway’s demolition rang out before the first stretch opened in 1959. The Chronicle, for its part, was against the freeway from the beginning. An editorial from Nov. 22, 1955, included two photos of a huge roadway in Seattle “to show San Franciscans what a double-decker freeway looks like, so that they can intelligently calculate the aesthetic price as they debate this and future freeway construction.”

After its debut, the freeway, also known as State Route 480, was assailed in another Chronicle editorial, this one from Aug. 28, 1959. The headline: “The boobery goes on and on.” That gem provided a clear view of the piece’s thrust: “We oppose and have consistently opposed the hideous monstrosity which the State Highway Commission built along the Embarcadero in front of the Ferry Building, obscuring the tower and the World Trade Center from view. ... Such an evil is the Embarcadero Freeway, which as we said last Friday and here repeat, should be demolished.”

The Chronicle’s Editorial Board kept up the pressure, applauding in 1961 the “introduction of a bill in the Legislature by Assemblyman Phillip Burton authorizing the use of gas-tax funds to demolish ‘unwanted freeways’ in general, and the Embarcadero in particular.”

The opposition, however, couldn’t topple the giant eyesore along the city’s edge.

The demolition of the freeway was put to a vote in 1986, but San Francisco voters defeated the two ballot propositions to start the tear-down. The measures lost by large margins and were major setbacks for both Mayor Dianne Feinstein and the city’s environmental groups.

Feinstein called the defeat an “anti-environmental vote” and a “victory for the automobile.” The one-sided tallies surprised even Supervisor Richard Hongisto, who had been a leading opponent of the demolition.

“I think what this shows is that the mayor is out of step with the public on these issues,” he said then. “She got in the ring with a gorilla in terms of these issues. And you know you can’t beat a gorilla.”

A “gorilla,” no matter how big, is no match for the full-on fury of Mother Nature.

On Oct. 17, 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, severely damaging the freeway. From the quake’s destruction came an opportunity to start anew along the waterfront, but freeway defenders still nearly saved the elevated Embarcadero.

On Jan. 10, 1990, engineers hired by the state said it would cost between $14 million and $15 million to make the structure sturdier than it was before the quake and that the work would take about four months — quicker than expected.

A heated discussion continued, until finally, on Jan. 2, 1991, state Department of Transportation engineers conceded what local leaders had been saying all along: fixing the Embarcadero Freeway would be nearly as expensive as rebuilding it from scratch.

This renewed assessment cleared the way for the demolition. A gigantic battering ram knocked loose a chunk of the freeway on Feb. 27, 1991, marking the beginning of the end for the massive, much-mocked behemoth.

“Feb. 27 is D-Day for the Embarcadero Freeway,” Mayor Art Agnos declared. Twenty-six years later, the battling and bulldozing are over and the city has an unobstructed view of the bay.

Bill Van Niekerken is the library director of The San Francisco Chronicle, where he has worked since 1985. In his weekly column, From the Archive, he explores the depths of The Chronicle’s vast photography archive in search of interesting historical tales related to the city by the bay.