Out of the Rubble

The Ferry Building in San Francisco stands as a testament to the fact that something good can come out of a natural disaster that leads to human tragedy.

Seventeen years ago today, the Loma Prieta earthquake struck Northern California shortly after 5 p.m. For many people in the region, the day is ingrained in their memories because they were sitting in front of their televisions, waiting for Game 3 of the World Series between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants to begin. One moment, Al Michaels was telling Tim McCarver and Jim Palmer, "you know what!? we're having an earthquake!," and the next thing you knew, Michaels (who was very familiar with the area) was narrating a visual tour of the wreckage that resulted from the 7.1 temblor. The Bay Bridge; the Cypress Freeway across the Bay leading into Oakland; the raging fires in San Francisco's Marina District. It was days before the human toll became fully known; in the end, hundreds lost their lives.

And yet, today San Francisco is a greater city because of something that came out of that dark day. It signaled the beginning of the end of the Embarcadero Freeway, one of the most hated structures in modern American history. Take a close look at the picture, and then imagine, instead of those palm trees, a lovely double-decker freeway that did little to efficiently transport people in and out of San Francisco, but did a wonderful job of completely separating the city proper from its waterfront.

The freeway was built in 1958, probably right around the time that Vertigo was being filmed in the city, and began what came to be known in San Francisco as "the Freeway revolt." San Francisco residents hated it from day one, and over the course of the next decade, began one of the few (only?) successful efforts in the modern transportation era to halt the construction of freeways within the limits of a major city. Had all of the freeways that were planned for San Francisco been built, the Panhandle leading into Golden Gate Park would no longer exist as we know it today, and a freeway would have tunneled under Russian Hill, effectively bisecting several historic neighborhoods. And, the Embarcadero Freeway would have kept on going, right past Fishermans Wharf, all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted to demolish the Freeway a couple of years before Loma Prieta, but had the earthquake not occurred, it is arguable whether the Board would have had the political will to see the demolition to its end. Even after the earthquake, the demolition was strongly opposed by the merchants of the downtown and Chinatown areas, resulting in the defeat of Mayor Art Agnos in 1991. But by that time, the heavy equipment was doing its work, and the freeway was coming down.

Today, the Ferry Building is a wonderful place to shop and gather; the area also hosts a Farmers Market that brings in people from hundreds of miles away. The area stands today as an appropriate monument to those who lost their life in the earthquake.