Monday, November 01, 2010
Tearing it Down: The Road to Unlimited Devotion
The Giants were in the series 21 years ago when a big quake struck, among the results of which is this blog post. We’re still sorting out some of the consequences of those rumbly days. Most visibly, the mast for the new east span of the BGB is only now being hoisted up out of the bay’s swirling waters. That’s a big job; it’s hard to lose sight of it - so much so that it was actually under consideration to put up masking scaffolds so drivers didn’t get too distracted. Easier to overlook are the equally big jobs completed a decade or more ago - the buildings replaced, the roadways demolished But there’s some activity just outside my office building that puts me in mind of a moment that was just too damn exceptional to lose track of. And after all, isn’t that what this whole internet thing was invented for?
The trigger I’m seeing these days is the tear-down of the old TBT. The building itself is not long for this world, but the current phase of the work concentrates on isolating it by taking out the special roadways connecting to it. As a bus - and erstwhile train (well, erstwhile bus too now) terminal, it had some big-league transit connectors - iron-ribbed elevated roadbeds that brought the heavy carriers off the bay bridge and right into the building These were some really solid roads that cast broad shadows for half a century across some fairly significant streets; they sheltered hundreds if not thousands of homeless souls and served as a pissoir en plein aire for the incontinent multitudes. It was hard to imagine Beale Street or First without the sun-obscuring bulks of those overhead roadbeds.
But now such an exercise of imagination is unnecessary, because those roads are rapidly disappearing before my eyes. Every day there’s been less of them to watch being torn down, till now, today, the bus took me up First Street right through where I expected to, but did not, find the Rainbow Tunnel. The rainbow was long gone but the tunnel had persevered, for a while, anyway. But now where it once was, a mere series of iron girders spans the street.
The Rainbow Tunnel is - was - a broad overpass of gloomy girders painted grey and gone black with soot, along the undersides of which had been installed a row of bright hue-changing LED lights, hi-tech and low profile, set in pairs spanning the width of the tunnel, each angled to illuminate the undersides of a few adjacent girders, casting an intense bright light on the iron beams, casting the upper reaches into ever more Stygian darkness. What’s more, the lights were set up to shift colors right through the spectrum, each pair offset by five seconds or so from its neighbors, a ripple of spectral intensity, red and gold and green and blue and purple and red again, beaming like a rainbow on a powersurge, split into strata and left to cycle through its repertoire on the underside of the tunnel through which buses enter the terminal. Really, for something to be experienced from inside a car without slowing down in a rather seedy, stinky area it was an excellent installation.
Needless to say, the area’s now bathed in light of the full-spectrum variety, so colorful all we see of it is colorlessness. The massive iron girders overhead no longer feel permanent and protective and imbued with chromatic fancy. They aren’t the whale’s ribs or the cavern roof anymore. They look washed out, lugubrious, fragile. They no longer underpin a heavy cement roadbed - over them is only the immensity of the sky.
All of which is reason to recall that, in late 1990, I took one last trip on the Embarcadero Freeway, an eyesore that once blocked off the entire historic heart of town from its waterfront. Cars traveling its featureless stacked roadways got amazing views of a city sequestered in the shadowy glum, each street severed from its natural wharfside terminus. At least the mechanistic precipitousness of the era that thought this monstrosity was a good idea (together with countless other misbegotten civic “improvement” projects), was too impatient to do a decent job realizing its own twisted dreams. The design was flawed and got red-x’d during the post-quake assessment. The memory of the 980 pancaked on top of drivers was still fresh in our hearts. The Embarcadero Freeway was just too damaged to serve its automotive overlords any longer. It would have to come down. The city rejoiced.
However, one of the two things that miserable roadway actually ever did well, it still did well even after the quake. Its value as a transit option was null since it had been damaged and closed off, but it was taking a long time to tear it down and so long as it still stood it continued to offer unparalleled views of some of the best parts of the city. Eye-to-eye with the Ferry Building’s clock; Coit tower commanding its opulent little hilltop; downtown’s somewhat modest core of office towers bristling within the writhing arm of the waterfront freeway - even North Beach’s garrish janglebulbs and neon-enhanced strip clubs and bars looked good from the foot of the old freeway at the foot of Broadway.
We rode our bikes there one afternoon to check it out on the eve of its destruction, an easy ride in golden afternoon sunlight. We arrived at an onramp blocked with phlegmatic K bars, half-walls of concrete dropped into place to turn throughways into no-ways. God knows how many other construction zones and re-routes they had been through but to us, facing the broad empty rise of the long-closed Embarcadero freeway, bikes at the ready and the sun at our backs, it was the easiest and most obvious thing to just hop that blatantly ineffectual barrier and do a little exploring. If they wanted to keep out people with bikes they wouldn’t have used a barrier that only works for cars, right?
So we ventured onto the sunbaked upper deck of State Route 480 (of blessed memory), riding slowly up the line of dots demarking the left and right lanes. The road rose and curved; as we followed the worn raingrooves running down its surface we were very cognizant of being in a place meant for cars and not for bikes, a place where speeding multi-ton boxes of fire and metal once held sway, but which at that time was owned by whomever happened to be on it at that moment. It curved like a river, like a glacier, but with an audacity that violated laws of gravity and perspective, an eyeful of sky and then the financial district cradled in the crook of a sinuous concrete arm, Jackson Square sheltering in place amid hulking neighbors built after the ‘06 quake, views along razor-straight streets that climbed right up the sides of hills, the whole waterfront at our feet.
We stopped frequently and just stared out at all the everything, knownig that soon this platform on which we were soaking the sights would go the way of Mandala Parkway and the Franklin Street extension - more rubble than remembrance. In the meantime, after countless cars had sped through the concrete channel we now navigated, we had it all to ourselves. City sounds diminished and shifted beneath us; city smells wafted ambiguously and city breezes scampered on pigeonfeet across our faces. The vistas extended around us in every direction, to a nearby hilltop or to ones a little further away, but even out at Angel Island or across to the east bay’s distant ridge there was a modest fringe of mountain still there, cradling us on our fragile broken roadway through our precious delicate city. Below us the freeway was cracked and weathered and looked eminently ready to give up the ghost. There was only one direction of truly unlimited sightlines on that doomed track and it was directly overhead, where the blue sky stretched out to forever.
That’s the sky that’s now beaming in between the fingerbones of what’s left of the old Rainbow Tunnel, a place of drive-through beauty on a gravely unlively site. The plan is to rebuild the whole area with a three-block-long, five-story-tall, gleaming translucent mushroom of a transit landmark with a rooftop park. Sounds fine to me. in the meantime, it’s good to see the sunlight reaching the ground on Fremont between Mission and Howard. It’s worth remembering how cleansing and illuminating a little of that stuff can be.
And now I discover as I do my petty wiki research for this essay, that the Embarcadero Freeway was in fact tied into the same elevated roadways I’m now seeing pulled down. It’s the same damn project, still rocking my worldview. God I can be such a sucker sometimes.
