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For half a century, a series of mayors and city leaders have proposed plans to transform San Francisco’s Civic Center into a more welcoming and attractive place for residents.
Now, a few new additions have been added to the plaza as the space still awaits a major makeover.
“These pits have been empty for the past few years,” said Allison McCarthy of San Francisco Recreation and Parks.
It’s not every day that the city digs up Civic Center Plaza. But this morning, gardener Marvin Mouton and park service manager McCarthy are launching an effort that may take decades.
“So what we have to do is wait until the tree reaches the height of a mature tree,” McCarthy said.
These mature trees are like artifacts of San Francisco. The most striking features of the City Hall front lawn are the unmistakable shapes.
“These are sycamore trees,” McCarthy explained. “They are the most common pollinating tree in the City and County of San Francisco. POLLARD. It’s a way of pruning so that at the end of the pruning it looks like a big hand. Every year you have to prune it, it keeps the same standard height of the tree . ”
The oldest trees here were buried about 80 to 90 years ago. The four species being grown will take decades to catch up. This is one of the reasons why the pit where Sycamore failed sat vacant for so long.
“It takes a long time to get to this form,” McCarthy said of the delay. “So I think there might be a hesitancy to replant because you never know how the city is going to change. So they’ll say ‘oh, maybe it needs to be redesigned’ or ‘maybe we should wait.'”
“The biggest goal of the plan is to reintroduce vegetation on a large scale,” said Willett Moss, founding partner of CMG Landscape Architecture. “To add an additional 300 trees to the existing 350 trees.”
Moss has plans for a Civic Center Square. In 2017, Mayor Ed Lee called for a redesign and hired Moss’ CMG Landscape Architecture to develop a new vision for the space. The area has long showcased the city’s challenges, hosted protests and welcomed celebrations.
“So there are these large-scale events. And at the same time, we’re in the communities that are the least served in the immediate city, and the Tenderloin in particular is the most visible,” Moss said. “There have been calls for more open space in the Tenderloin and there are 17 acres here.”
Mayor Lee’s initiative was not approved. At least not in his lifetime. There will be a new mayor and the square will become the site of a new crisis.
“Granted, the transformation of the plans we’re engaged in requires an incredible cost on our part in the grand scheme of things,” Moss added. “Cities have said they’ve made changes in this area. Playgrounds. Kiosks.”
Moss’s plan isn’t the only new vision for the square. According to statistics, in the past 50 years, 10 different plans have been proposed for the Civic Center. Twice in ten years. But years have come and gone with all these grand visions. Why doesn’t anything stick together?
“Try to say something that’s not cynical,” Moss said after a pause. “I think the obvious answer is that it’s actually the center of the city. So it belongs to everyone but it belongs to no one.”
“So we’re going to wait a few years until we’re mature enough to start polling again,” McCarthy said of Sycamore. “When we started this process, the tree out front was probably 20 years old. So it was like a teenager.”
So, with no one supporting the new square, things will remain as they are, at least for now. This means the young sycamore trees will probably be here for a while.
“We only keep these ties for one growing season because the tree has to strengthen its muscles, and it can only do that by swaying a little bit,” McCarthy explained. “So, depending on the wind direction, it creates additional trees. The skin muscle layer, so you need to give it room to swing. So depending on the wind direction, it can swing a little bit.”
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