Garage offensive
To hell with the courts – developers smash park tunnels before judge can rule on lawsuit

By Savannah Blackwell

On April 22 the beast began its ghastly work.

Having been stationed near its target in Golden Gate Park for a few days, the massive machine, a hydraulic excavator, rolled onto the top of the roadway above a long-treasured structure: the pedestrian tunnel on the northeast edge of the Music Concourse.

To the dismay of park users who were watching, the machine's roughly 40-foot-long arm reached out and smashed through the top of the tunnel – rupturing an irrigation line, sending the dirty water to the edge of a play area, and displacing a visibly agitated mature skunk.

The next day the machine was back at work – puncturing the top of the tunnel until it collapsed. In little more than 24 hours, the 100-year-old tunnel that had long served as a site for casual music concerts and provided a way for visitors to pass between the children's playground and the concourse without encountering cars was reduced to rubble.

It was an arrogant move that demonstrated exactly why so many activists have opposed the plans for a new underground garage in the park. The private outfit that's building the garage smashed the beloved tunnel just 18 days before a judge will decide whether the garage can actually proceed.

"This was a compulsive offensive," Chris Duderstadt, a retired engineer with the Alliance for Golden Gate Park, told the Bay Guardian. "It was vindictive and in-your-face."

The tunnel's demolition followed the felling of 15 to 20 cherry trees, some in full bloom, roughly two weeks before. Both actions took place shortly after the lifting of a court-ordered injunction on plans to build an 800-space underground garage beneath the concourse, to provide parking for the soon-to-be completed new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum as well as a reconstructed California Academy of Sciences (see "Hellman's Hole," 2/5/04).

The injunction had blocked action on the garage until a court hearing, which is slated for May 10. The court could – and might very well – upend the garage deal at that point. But serious damage has already been done.

The controversial garage project, the baby of Wells Fargo heir Warren Hellman, calls for the demolition of two other pedestrian tunnels connected to the concourse. The tunnels on the concourse's east side will be rebuilt, according to representatives of the Music Concourse Community Partnership, the private nonprofit Hellman created to raise funds for construction. But the one on the southwest side will be transformed into a garage entrance.

Steve Hirsch, an attorney with the firm of Keker and Van Nest who represents the MCCP, told us that if Judge James Warren does not decide in favor of the nonprofit, the MCCP will still restore the tunnel "as a gift to the city."

Katherine Roberts, a member of Trees Not Cars, argues that the project is illegal because it doesn't comply with the provisions of Proposition J, the 1998 initiative that authorized construction of the garage.

Though the ballot handbook and promotional material said the garage would be funded "entirely through charitable" organizations, the current financing plan calls for the Association of Bay Area Governments to issue $54 million in revenue bonds on behalf of the MCCP, using funds the MCCP has raised as leverage. Fees collected from garage users would go to paying down the bonds (see Hall Monitor, 5/21/03).

Prop. J states that the project falls under the auspices of a section of the City Charter specifically allowing construction of a garage underneath city-owned parkland. The section also says that any revenue derived from such a garage should go to the city's Recreation and Park Department.

Legal representatives of the MCCP as well as the city and county of San Francisco, which plans to lease the parking structure to the nonprofit until it is paid off, are arguing the section only applies to a garage approved by the Board of Supervisors – not one OKed by voters.

The hearing takes place Mon/10, 9:30 a.m., San Francisco Superior Court, Room 301, 400 McAllister, S.F.