By Savannah Blackwell

On a glorious Sunday afternoon, about 50 San Franciscans of various cultures separated into two facing lines to dance the chacarera del triste on the stage of the bandshell at the southern end of the music concourse in Golden Gate Park.

"It cuts across the barriers," Fern Filner said, shortly before she stepped onstage to join the others.

Yet this ritual – dancing in the Argentine folk tradition in the heart of city's main communal space – could soon be disrupted, thanks to a Sept. 16 vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that paves the way for construction of an 800-space underground parking garage to accommodate motorists visiting the soon-to-be-rebuilt cultural institutions on the east and west sides of the concourse: the California Academy of Sciences and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum.

"Both rich people and poor people are looking for community life," Roberto Riobo, who organizes the "Barrio Tango," told the Bay Guardian. "But it's the rich who are for parking the cars. They don't care about the floor dance of the poor people. If they build the garage, [then] the community, it's broken."

The board's 8-3 vote – with Sups. Matt Gonzalez, Tom Ammiano, and Chris Daly in dissent – to approve the project's environmental impact report moves the garage's proponents closer to breaking ground, but it's by no means the final step.

The planning is unusual in that neither the supervisors nor the Planning Commission has final say over when construction will begin – and even the supervisors aren't sure what happens next. But Daly told us that a few more small issues associated with the project are likely to come before the board. Most important, the supervisors will have to sign off on a 35-year lease deal to allow the Music Concourse Community Partnership (MCCP) – the private nonprofit set up to receive money raised by Wells Fargo heir Warren Hellman to pay for the garage – to build and operate the garage on city land. That issue isn't even on the board's calendar and may not come up for several weeks, but the lopsided victory seems to bode well for the garage.

Park activists had hoped the board – most of whose members were elected in 2000 in a revolt against the big-money, strong-arm tactics of Mayor Willie Brown – would either kill the project outright or at least slow it down considerably by refusing to sign off on the environmental report.

"This project came at a very different time in San Francisco history," Kathy Roberts, of the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, said at the meeting. "We hope you won't continue the atmosphere of deception which the previous supervisors were voted out of office for."

Back in the days when Brown single-handledly controlled city politics, he and his cronies hatched the parking garage plan in negotiation with activists for children and the environment. It was aimed at accommodating the ambitions of de Young Museum director Harry S. Parker, who believes pumping up weekend attendance is the only way to attract big exhibits. His goal has been complicated by the city's 20-year-old tradition of closing the eastern part of JFK Drive, one of the main routes through the park to the concourse, to traffic on Sundays.

Former supervisor Michael Yaki, with Brown working behind the scenes, crafted 1998's Proposition J, which allows for the construction of the garage. Sold to voters as the Golden Gate Park Revitalization Act, the initiative was boosted by a campaign using literature and signs featuring sketches of a car-free, verdant concourse. Activists say the current design shows that voters were misled. The MCCP nixed the more expensive and environmentally friendly design approved by the Golden Gate Park Concourse Authority – the official, public body created by Prop. J to oversee the garage's construction – because of the higher cost (see "Hellman's Hole," 2/5/03). In effect, the private outfit has determined the current design.

Since the project's environmental report went to the San Francisco Planning Department early this year, the museum's political allies have been pressuring city officials to move the garage along (in time for the De Young's reopening, planned for 2005.) The heat got the Planning Commission to approve the report just a week after denying it because of concerns that the destruction of 100-year-old pedestrian tunnels connecting to the concourse would ruin the historic character of the area.

When that decision was appealed by park activists to the Board of Supervisors Sept. 16, Daly took on Parker directly and pointed out that museum backers' claims that the city is required to build a garage are not true. (Prop. J authorized, but did not mandate a garage). But Ammiano and Gonzalez were the only allies he could find.

"Some very powerful people have lined up behind this garage, including big business and labor leaders," Daly said. "It's a tough sell to say this garage is not a done deal."

Activists hope to file suit over the environmental report, arguing that the city failed to look at alternatives to a garage and is not considering the cumulative impact of the $500 million worth of projects (including the reconstruction of the de Young and the Academy of Sciences) slated for the concourse.