99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-39X- The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet

Episode Date: November 18, 2011

United Nations Plaza sits in the center of San Francisco. Most people consider it a complete failure as a public space. Its central feature, at the entrance of the plaza, is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprin … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentury.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the center of San Francisco, there's a plaza with no benches. Its central feature at the entrance of the plaza is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halbrun in 1975.

The water shoots out at various angles from inside, a sunken pit filled with large granite slabs. It's a design that kind of pulls you in and invites you to take the steps down to the water and climb in between the hulking stones. And that's part of the problem. In 2004, radio producer Ben Tempton created a really fantastic documentary at UN Plaza called the biography of a hundred thousand square feet that first aired on a radio program I produced called Invisible Ink in May of 2004. The doc takes this really hard look at UN Plaza when it was at its absolute worst.

And asks, what I think is a really interesting question. Is there a point where good intentions and idealism of a certain design become so removed from reality that it actually borders on negligence? Alright, here's the show. I like to think my pal Ben Tempton for giving me the honor of premiering the piece back in 2004 and then letting me play it for you again more than seven years later as part of 99% Invisible. Things have changed a bit since the stock was produced, so stay tuned and I'll give you

a short update on you and Plaza after the piece. Here's Ben Tempton. This is the biography of a hundred thousand square feet. At the heart of San Francisco, there is a crossroads where Market Street meets the Civic Center. It is called United Nations Plaza or less formally, Urination Plaza. And for most of the past three decades, it has been San Francisco's most public theater of squalor, misery, and sickness. That place you in Plaza was a madhouse.

You could go there any hour of the day, and see needles, liquor bottles, people fighting, people urinating and defecating in that fountain there, that that's unsanitary. I've seen people shoot up at one end and go to the other end and die. I saw that. It's not Italy. People don't stroll down streets and sit and you know, and play bachou, it's just not the mentality to use these big wide open plazas. It's never worked.

I worked in UN plaza for a summer, walked across the brick paving through the wide view to San Francisco's imposing city hall. Pass passed the granite fountain protected by a yellow plastic chain through the thicket of the dull-eyed crack smokers and dealers who circled among the bronze stumps, all that's left to the benches since they cut them out with saws and removed them. I started spending time in United Nations on my days off talking to the people there. The question I was after was, why does a public space fail? Derek Armstrong was there most days I was. Derek was enormous, weighed at least 400 pounds, and he sat on the planter bet walls every day,

eating from bags of cheetos and listening to his radio. I asked him, why do you come down to UN Plaza? UN Plaza is centrally located to a lot of homers' services that are you, the manless and an activist. UN Plaza is on the glide path between two of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, the tenderloin and so much. UN Plaza is on the glide path between two of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, the tenderloin and so much. UN Plaza is on the glide path between two of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, the tenderloin and so much.

UN Plaza is on the glide path between two of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, the tenderloin and so much. UN Plaza is on the glide path between two of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods, the tenderloin and so much. One Saturday, I went down to watch some evangelists preach to the lost souls in United Nations Plaza. One of the preachers used to be homeless there himself. Off, away from the main body of the audience, I saw a man sitting against the black metal poles circling the fountain.

He was behind the preachers and their loudspeakers watching, and I asked him, why are you sitting over here and not over there? Because I don't want to partake in anything right now. I'm pretty much closed myself away from everything. His name is Wendell Edwards. I got arrested for sleeping on the sidewalk and let out the same day. And I lost a lot of love for the United States flag behind that. Because they made me feel like an enemy, like I was part of a Taliban or something.

And my father died fighting for this country. So when I was arrested, that mentally really hurt me against the flag because I could have been breaking in somebody called. I could have been hurting any of these people and taking a wallet at night, catching them coming out of the store or house or anything. And I did none of that. It wasn't in my heart to do that, but it wasn't in my heart to arrest me for sleeping, merely sleeping on the sidewalk, and I'll never forget that.

I still got to take it in my pocket. It was just last week. And the devil keep telling me that, since that happened, don't you see what they trying to do to you? Go out and pay them back. Go rob a store. Because you don't have no flag. You don't have no country, you don't have nothing.

They don't want you to be a part of it. That's just a nice word of saying, nigga, get out of San Francisco. How did it get this bad? How did a space commemorating one of the great institutions in human history? At the heart of the richest city and the richest country in history, a place of so much promise turned out so wrong. My assignment was to develop Market Street over again as a new promenade from the ferry building to the city hall. This is Lawrence Halperin.

My idea and the whole idea for the city and our team and design was to make a formal entrance to City Hall that people would admire and would perceive as an important part of the formal quality of the downtown area, like Paris. Have you ever been to Paris? In 1972, the city spent $24 million beautifying market street, which had been torn up for the installation of a subway system. The final section of the redesign was United Nations Plaza.

The city hired Halperin to make the design. There is this quality of formality that we were after, and expressive the culture of the city. That was what we were thinking about. The importance of linear visual experiences. The linking of one place to another, instead of the kind of informality of neighborhoods where little streets go wandering around and you don't get any long views. Lawrence Halperin is one of the most celebrated landscape architects alive today. He has

been awarded the Presidential Medal of the Arts, he designed the FDR Memorial in Washington, DC, he designed the promenade around Jerusalem. He has designed some of the most noted and famous public plazas in the country. We wanted to make a statement there in a Greek sense. The visual qualities have to express what the politics of something are. Not a little sort of political, this is, and that's, it's a major quality of what a city ought to be like and what it stands for as a government.

Was it called United Nations President? Hell no, there wasn't anything like that. City planners designated the space UN Plaza after the decision was made to close the intersection. The intersection was closed because of a unique aspect of the city's urban design. Peter Bosselman, chair of the Department of Urban Planning at the University of California explains. There's a peculiar geometry about San Francisco. Market Street was lined up to connect the waterfront with a set of hills called Twin Peaks.

But it is not a aligned to the city grid. Market street runs at a 45-degree angle, creating all kinds of strange intersections where streets enter Market Street never 90-degree angles, always 45-degree angle. And even for San Francisco's is very confusing to find the connection between the south of Market Grid and the north of Market Grid. Very few streets line up. The design Halpern came up with for United Nations was a stately gateway for marches to pass through. The marchers would be funneled from the wide edge of the plaza

that runs along Market Street between two lines of trees and raised planar beds, and then out through the space between the library and the Asian Art Museum to the vast green lawns of Civic Center Plaza. This centerpiece is the 165-foot-long fountain. It contains 673 blocks of granite, weighing somewhere between 3 and 4 million tons. I took the idea of the high seara surrounding the bay itself, and down in here you can see the bay.

And I even developed a system of the tides coming in. There was an hour-long tidal action where the tide was out and then it lardged in, grew, and grew till it was up on these peaks. What you see in other words is a three-dimensional plaza, which is unique as an idea. Does that happen now? This tidal system no longer exists because maintenance was so terrible and it's going to hell. Pumps are a lot like relationships between people unless you take care of them, they go to hell. The fountain design was not immediately popular with city planners. In December 1970, the chairman of the Civic Design Committee said it was awful, flamboyant, an example of a designer's egotism being passed on to the people as a piece of art.

Ruth Asawa, an acclaimed San Francisco sculptor, said, As corny as this may sound, you have to design places in the city for people to sit on the grass, sit under trees, for flowers and birds. Even Herb Cain got into it when he called the fountain a monstrosity that must be stopped. But after five years of planning and arguing, it was built anyway. Chris Adams has worked in the plaza for more than 20 years.

When that fountain blew water, it was supposed to work with the wind. If the wind blew too far, the water was supposed to go down. I've been here since that fountain was put in and I've never ever seen it work correctly. It's blowing 50 feet in the air in the winter and the water is just pouring and the fact that it did start to stink. The chemicals that were put in there killed all the trees that were around it. Children wanted to play in there and of course you don't want kids in that water.

Many of the worries expressed by critics of the design quickly came to pass. In June of 1979, less than a year after the fountain was completed, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner wrote an article about the Vandals, derelicts and social misfits who were turning the space into a garbage strewn graffitioned graffiti-de-faced mockery of Civic Granger. Kevin Star wrote, what should have been the new triumphant entrance to our Civic Center is a resort for derelicts and bombs. Merchants.

All along Market Street, how great hope that the transformation of Market Street would occur. And it never happened. Things went the other way. Bob Prentice was the director of Homeless Services under Mayor Art Agnos from 1988 to 1992. The merchants were extremely frustrated because of these you know these frustrated expectations that took the form of now people actually hanging out in the plaza. It was just a tender box. That was the environment of

the UN plaza pretty much from the time that I started working in the plaza. It was just a tender box. That was the environment of UN Plaza pretty much from the time that I started working in the mayor's office. In 1980, the Market Street Association, an organization of business owners and property owners called for a farmers market to be put in UN Plaza. Chris Adams runs the farmers market. I know it wasn't raining, it was a nice sunny day,

1980, 81. And I believe it was springtime. Twelve farmers drove up with their trucks and they did not sell out, but as they came weekly, we just put our roots down there and we're here to stay. There were some people in the neighborhood who were trying to think of ways to heal the plaza, and the farmer's market was part of that. Poor people are here. It's harder for them to get by. It's not about, you know, driving them away. It's about civilizing the places where they live. They can come out. They can breathe out there. It is part of the tenderloin. That's their front room. I've been told that by almost all of this is our place.

You can see the refrigerators, couches, chairs. They do live down there. I don't want to push them out of there. I just share it. Bob Prentice again. It was a way to take over some use of that plaza with a purpose that supported everybody. The idea that you would bring a farmer's market

to the heart of the city where there was no retail grocer, where people who lived on the lowest incomes could not get decent food at decent prices. You see, to me, that's the spirit behind, you know, dealing with the seeming and avidability of poverty without being mean-spirited about it. Chris Adams, the director of the farmer's market.

I've been homeless. When? 1970? I lived in a car for two weeks with my kids. There was no way I was going to stay like that. That's one reason I was hired. Not that I could do office work, but I got along with the people outside. I can get along with all the nationalities.

I enjoy it. I think it's fine as a place that occurs every now and then. You think it's a good use of this space? Yes, I do. On Wednesdays, office workers in the Beseesh neighborhood skip microwave lunches, gobbled at their desks, and head out instead to the heart of the city farmer's market. On Sundays, it's a neighborhood crowd moving between the white tents that fill the

plaza. Folding tables covered with yellow squash, blueberries, salad greens, all organic. The customers are from all over. The farmers are from all over. That's why I love being where we are. I mean, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, Italy, all over the world. The heart of the city was a perfect name for it because I thought that solution demonstrated a kind of heart.

And I think there wasn't tension between the street people and the ones that ran the market. I remember that, but you know we worked that through. You think, you know, this is a civil way to make do with a situation that so far has been pretty lousy. Oh my gosh, it's United Nations. But on days when the farmer's market and the newer, less successful, antique, slash, flea market aren't in the plaza, United Nations reverts to what it used to be.

At the east end of the plaza, between the glass windows of the fast food franchise and stairs down into the subway station, the thieves marked it moves in. Black market salesmen filled the 20 feet with neatly laid out clothes, hand tools, pornographic videos, and consumer electronics of questionable provenance. Two days before Thanksgiving,

I went down to the plaza to ask the salesman what have you got to sell today? I got the sweater, a purple sweater, and I got glasses, I got hat, I got a new pair of underpants, I got shoes and I got jacket and I got a woman's blouse. My name is Zachary, I was born of Intura, but I came down here about 15 years ago and lived here ever since. My mother died in January and like, and what's that March? It started like, you know, go gambling. And I lost all my money so I'm out here now.

I was just choosing everything to me, you know? And I, I took it out by Gamla. And somewhat, you know, cursing God. While we were talking, the drug addicts distinguishable from the merely homeless by their lack of luggage began to line up against the windows of the Carl's Jr. Look, everybody's all lined up. Why are they all lined up? I have no idea. Why are they lined up? Oh, I don't know. He's leading. That guy with the dreadlocks is taking blood off his nose and now they're putting that guy in hand. That's what makes them say,

okay, they're uncivilized. Yeah, the guy must have punched the guy. That's sad. So you're going to clear up? Yeah, I got to go down the way. As Zachary packed up his meager merchandise, I went to find out what was going on. A tourist had bought food at the Carl's Jr. to give away to the homeless.

My name is Kadeezha Morris. My intention to be in California is to buy two big buildings to take the homeless off the street. It's hard to explain. It's a dream I had. And it's coming to pass. I've been driving around this block twice. And this was the sign the people in front of Cal Junior. So I know this was the place to rest. People were lining up. Everybody outside please. Somebody talk to him, go and drop it on the ground.

As the manager tried to bring the food out. I give it to you, Ordon, you got the food right? There's now, nothing but this one. This is the seven police officers. When he got outside, the line collapse, order broke down completely. You got a small riot out here and it's a different thing. A woman got smacked. No grabbing, no touching. You want to do that?

And he must go do it. You guys be civil, he doesn't have to do this. One team in the line, right behind, right behind. You see how it is? I mean, a little man, it goes the wrong way. This is Mohammed, the manager of the Carl's Junior. I mean, we try to serve the food to the hungry, homeless people. Then I told him, go wait outside on the line,

so as soon as I get ready, I will be outside. They start fighting together. I don't know why they start fighting. When I came outside, and they start grabbing the food from the boxes, as soon as we came out with the boxes, everybody jumped on us. And two minutes, all the food is gone. In miniature, this food riot restates the failure of UN Plaza itself,

a dream that proved no match for its burden. Palprin II had a vision for something decent, of the grace of public spaces. But when this dream was overlaid on a real place, it just didn't work out. I'm not sure even now if I were gonna be asked to design this, how much I would change? Really? I mean, why would I, you're talking about my life's work

for Christ's sakes. I was the first person who ever designed a plaza and found so that people could use it. People should not be told you can't get inside of it and use it. All places should be usable by people in the city. Now having said that, why would I design something to prevent homelessness? I mean, homelessness is a social problem that cannot be designed for and in the sense of aesthetics and culture. Of course they should be friendly. The real question is

what do you mean by friendly? Nobody has ever said to me I want you to design an unfriendly place. But you know it depends on who you talk to. I mean when you say you've talked to people who say that sort of thing, oh, who are they? Sounds like a pretty stupid thing to say, actually. I would absolutely challenge it. I can't imagine that anybody could say anything like that. In 2000, the Department of Public Works applied for and was awarded federal grant money to clean up the 28-year-old plaza,

almost a million dollars, enough to make real changes to the design. This is Judy Mosqueda, a project manager for the Department of Public Works. I first got to know United Nations Plaza back in 1979. I used to take part into the plaza with my sister. I was about 12 years old. I was not a fast walker, and I remember so vividly, my sister walking as fast as she could up 11 more street because there were men harassing us

along the way, and I would have to jog alongside her to keep up with her, and that was embarrassing to me. When Judy came on as project manager, a plan for the redesign had already been drawn up. Landscape architects here at the Department of Public Works had made some recommendations for improvements to it. Things like replanting the planter beds with flowers instead of the grass that's there now.

Something that would add color a little bit of life to the plaza. As we went to the Board of Supervisors, the fencing around the planters became a contentious issue. In December 2001, the plan drawn up by DPW was rejected by the board of supervisors. They didn't like the fences. A 15 member task force was created by the city. The task force asked Roma design to make some recommendations. This is Boris Dramov, a principal at

Roma. The mayor's office, he was not too pleased with what was being proposed. And I said, there are the standard kinds of things to prevent people from using space. The first step is you take out the benches, then you put little fences around the green areas, then you put barriers for people, so they can't sit down.

And I said, frankly, I'm not interested in the negative approaches. 15 people with an interest, sometimes competing interests, were appointed by the supervisors to come up with a plan that would fix up the plaza without displacing anyone. The chair was Lynn Valente of the Market Street Association. This is the same Market Street Association that had created the popular farmers market 20 years before. People that are part of Market Street Association that have properties who will live and work up there, their number one request, get that fountain part of market-shoot association that have properties who will live and work

up there, their number one request, get that fountain out of there. Because people were essentially living in a defecating and urinating in the fountain and shooting up drugs in the fountain, all that kind of stuff, having sex, and I mean they've seen everything. In the end, the task force left Halperin's dream for UN Plaza behind. Roma recommended they removed the fountain, put a street through the thieves' market, in effect, changed United Nations from a formal place, a place for marches, a public square in Halperin's words,

representative of the ideals of a government and a city, and turned instead to exactly what Halperin didn't want. The informality of neighborhoods where little streets go on during around and you don't get any long views. This is Boris Dramov. This is really a street end that's been closed predominantly for traffic reasons. Fulton Street created a very awkward intersection with Market Street, and traffic engineers don't like triangular intersections, so they tend to eliminate them. Not because they thought it was the best place to create a gathering space.

One has to question whether there should be an open space of this size and this location. Why would you put it here? In spring of 2003, the plaza hit bottom. The plan drawn up by the task force appointed by the board of supervisors after a year and a half and more than 20 meetings was rejected by the board of supervisors. Around the same time, Channel 4 ran an extremely unflattering news account of the squalor in the plaza. Everywhere you turn, people smoking crack, all day,

every day, the mayor says he'll consider shutting down the fountain, removing the benches, and building gated playgrounds. ["Mare Willy Brown's Theme Song"] Within hours, Mayor Willy Brown had made his decision about United Nations plaza. City workers cut through the bronze legs of the 24 benches and by morning they were gone. I think people felt like they lost the battle of you in Plaza.

That they're vacating the premises now, that they're taking the benches out. It's contested to rain where they've given up hope they're going to win. Lynn Valenti of the Market Street Association. And we've come up with now after years and years and years of community input, of which I did eight or nine or however many years it is I've been working on. We've got, what we've got now is a caution tape around the fountain. No, it's not caution tape anymore.

It's a yellow plastic fence. I don't understand how that happened. I mean, I understand how it happened, but it just sticks in my crawl. The first plan that they came up with, the fencing that we were proposing, was no higher than three feet tall. It was not acceptable, then Roma design came in. I'd opened up the street, I'd let people drive down or bicycle down.

That was unacceptable, now we're down to the chain link fence around the fountain. And that's how it's been for almost a year. No flowers, no fences, no benches. The crack addicts have mostly been pushed out by the pervasive police presence and the street sweepers that circle constantly like fish and aquarium. The homeless people who used to sit on the planter beds are fewer and numbered, but they're still there. Many of them have shifted 50 feet towards City Hall, where they sit inside a large sculpture of San Francisco's pioneers in the middle of a traffic circle. It would be a stretch to say this is an improvement.

Have you been to United Nations Plaza recently? Have you seen? No, I purposely don't go there usually. Have you seen the pictures of the chain leg fence around the fountain? No, I know about it, though. The city and the project manager for that project has been very careful about keeping us advised

about what's going on. He's trying to recapture some of the original quality of the place and also deal with some of the social issues and neighborhoods that are encroaching on the place. I think some people want to turn that into something it's never going to be. It's not going to be a renaissance. That's not going to happen.

I mean, this is part of the tenderloin, and that influence is always going to be there. I'm sorry, but I think that's how it should be. I really do. Why do you cut off the daily life of the city in order to create a space for special events that only occur a few times a year. I would question whether we should have an open space

of this size at this location, rather than allowing the traditional elements of city form, like streets, sidewalks to exist. Judy Mosqueda is optimistic, but it is a resigned optimism. The funds were to be expended by, I believe, June 2003. Obviously, I've missed that deadline. I'm now shooting for June 2005, and I hope

to be successful for that. And if San Francisco's can't come to consensus on what should happen in this plaza, I may ask for another extension, or we may decide that San Francisco doesn't know what to do with this plaza at I may ask for another extension, or we may decide that San Francisco doesn't know what to do with this plaza at this point in time. Before San Francisco gives up on United Nations plaza, we might want to consider some words of advice given by President Harry Truman when the charter for the real United Nations

was signed almost 60 years ago. Oh, what a great day this can be in history. On all the arguments and disputes and different points of view, a way was found to agree. Truman is speaking to the delegates who would sign the UN Charter in the war memorial opera house. Six blocks away from the present day, United Nations Plaza. It was the result of a spirit of give and take of tolerance for the views and interests present day United Nations Plaza. We keep to our principles, and never forsake our objectives, the problems we now face, produced by Ben Tempton in 2004. I'm recording this on November 17, 2011, and I was down at UN Plaza today recording the fountain and taking pictures.

The art market was being set up, and the water was flowing in the fountain that was marred by a bit of trash circling in the eddies, but nothing to grow test or unexpected. The yellow chain that cordoned off the fountain in 2004 is gone. And this morning with the art market being set up, I got a much stronger feel for the intention of the plaza than was evident when it was at its worst. But the big issues were still playing the scene. when it was at its worst. But the big issues were still playing the scene. Landscape Architect Lawrence Halpren, who designed UN Plaza and is featured in the piece, has since died.

If this is your first exposure to Halpren, I really recommend you look them up and check out his other work. He has absolutely revered in much of the landscape architecture community and the very principles of interactivity and engagement that worked to the detriment of human plaza yielded stunningly successful results in other places. So it's worth exploring more of its legacy if you're into that sort of thing, which I think you are, because you just listen to a half hour documentary about the failure of a public space.

Which means you're a big old nerd like me. God love you. This episode of 99% Invisible was produced by Ben Tempton, and made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW Local Public Radio 91.7 in San Francisco, the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco, in the center for architecture and design. To find out more, go to the website, it's 99% Invisible. Don't work. you