Landscapes of San Francisco Bay: Plates from Bay Lexicon
Mixed Media
San Francisco lives on borrowed water.
The city’s watershed is defined twice, once by topography and once by engineering. The steep west slope of the Sierra Nevada sends rain and melting snow to San Francisco Bay. Water travels in streams and rivers down the Central Valley, through the California Delta, and past the Carquinez Strait, always moving toward the ocean. Since the 1920s, an aqueduct has carried some of that current on a different route. The Tuolumne River is captured behind Hetch Hetchy Dam and gradually released into pipes that run straight to San Francisco. Every spigot in the city is connected to the mountains.
The aqueduct is good and bad. It protects San Francisco from local scarcity, and it provides clean water, uncontaminated by the farms and factories that lie between the mountains and the coast. But what comes out of the tap is used at the expense of the estuary. Before plumbing stretched across the state, that water belonged to the fish.
Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island make a pair, but they are not twins.
Yerba Buena belongs to the geological formation of the Coast Ranges, a consequence of the movement of tectonic plates that make up Earth’s outer layer. Thirty million years ago, the plate under the Pacific Ocean began to slide northward against the edge of the plate that supports North America. Folded and crumpled by the friction, the North American sea floor was pushed up into a line of low mountains on the edge of the continent. Ten thousand years ago, when the last ice age ended, Yerba Buena was separated from its neighbors by rising water in San Francisco Bay. The mountain became an island.
Treasure Island is a younger construction, the product of dredges and siphons. Until the 1930s it was Yerba Buena Shoals, a high patch of bay floor just north of Yerba Buena Island. It presented a significant navigation hazard—some parts lay just a few feet below the water—and in 1936, the federal government’s Works Progress Administration undertook its transformation into useful ground. Sand and sediment dredged from around the bay were piled behind a seawall built of rubble blasted from the Yerba Buena Tunnel. The new land was dedicated almost exactly a year after the Bay Bridge had connected San Francisco to Oakland. Treasure Island is a closer relative of the bridge than of the old island: both projects were undertaken to expand the territory of a watery metropolis.
Once, new land at the edge of the bay was built horizontally. Piers extended streets into the mudflats of Yerba Buena Cove. Rubble and sand were placed beside and between the piers to raise the surface of the flats. The seawall was constructed to stop the filled ground from eroding. Land was made for access to the water because the city lived on maritime commerce.
Today, new land is made vertically. The stacked floors of the Embarcadero Center multiplied the surface of the ground dozens of times, and its garages made inhabitable space underground. Built between 1967 and 1981, as ship traffic was moving from San Francisco to Oakland, the center’s towers defined a new world on the waterfront. Office workers replaced longshoremen, and access to the bay was less important than easy connections to subways and freeways. Sometimes cities are remade gradually, but the Embarcadero Center was part of a rapid process of urban renewal fueled by suspicion of the old, enabled by public policy that swept away anything decrepit, and bankrolled by real estate speculation. The compound and its neighbors, high-rise buildings linked by walkways two stories above the street, crowded out the warehouses of the Produce District.
In this vertical city, the filled land at the shore is uncertain ground. It does not have the structural strength to support tall buildings, and earthquakes have the power to shake it into a liquid. The Embarcadero Center’s towers extend far below the surface of the waterfront. Their foundations reach through sixteen stories’ worth of rubble and mud to bedrock, and their bases are designed as giant shock absorbers.
Like many iconic places, San Francisco Bay is loved better than it is understood. Its power as scenery has obscured its ecological complexity, its natural and cultural dynamics, and its ongoing evolution as a metropolitan centrepiece. The products of long, reiterative interactions among human intentions, geographic circumstances, and environmental processes, its landscapes are ecological hybrids. They are hard to describe, and so they are hard to apprehend: language is the first tool for perception, and we cannot recognize what we cannot name. An illustrated field guide to San Francisco’s shoreline, Bay Lexicon offers a nuanced, place-based vocabulary that makes the hybrid circumstances of San Francisco Bay apparent—and legible—to the range of audiences with a stake in the landscape’s future.
A collaboration with the Exploratorium of San Francisco, this project emerged from work over the last five years with curator Susan Schwartzenberg to develop exhibition content and teaching materials for a new museum gallery about the landscape and ecology of San Francisco Bay. Bay Lexicon uses illustrated flash cards to examine and define elements of the landscape visible from the gallery and along San Francisco’s Embarcadero. It builds on the principles of the Exploratorium’s founder, physicist Frank Oppenheimer, who believed that a citizenry informed about science comprised the best defence against the catastrophe of nuclear warfare. Today, as we face the spectres of immediate and long-term ecological disaster, environmental literacy is an essential skill. Events like Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate this need. The havoc that the storms created was the predictable outcome of reciprocal influences between dynamic environments—the Hudson River estuary and the Mississippi Delta—and engineering interventions people made in order to live there. No surprise to landscape scholars and ecologists, the catastrophes came as shocks to the general public. Few people had the ability to read the landscape, to translate its physical circumstances into representational terms that could explain what had happened or suggest how to move forward more sustainably.
Using methods and tools from landscape scholarship, design, and science education, Bay Lexicon aims to encourage observation and enquiry about the natural world and its relation to culture. By defining and questioning a series of sights and situations along San Francisco’s shoreline, the lexicon articulates relationships between visible, tangible artefacts and the complex (and often invisible) processes that shape the bay and its edges. It asks how the physical landscape has been transformed by practices of inhabitation and because of ideas about meaning and value. It locates observations of local conditions in the context of the region, and it reminds readers that the present always contains traces of the past and clues to the future. The project uses a specific place to raise general questions: Bay Lexicon considers San Francisco Bay as a subject, but it raises issues that exist in every hybrid landscape.