(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 465: The SF Ferry Building with John King
This week on Talking Headways we’re joined by John King, Urban Design Critic at the SF Chronicle, to talk about his book Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities. We chat about the history of the Ferry Building in San Francisco which was one of the busiest city transportation hubs in the world in the early 1900s and how the building has evolved over time parallel to the ups and downs of cities.
You can listen to this episode by heading over to Streetsblog USA or at our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript for this episode:
Jeff Wood (1m 24s):
John King, welcome to the Talking Headways Podcast.
John King (1m 49s):
Thank you so much, I appreciate It.
Jeff Wood (1m 51s):
Well, thanks for being here. Before we get started, I Should ask you if You can tell us a little bit more about yourself.
John King (1m 57s):
I am the Urban Design Critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, which is a title I made up myself. I grew up, I grew up in the Bay Area and grew up reading San Francisco Chronicle. Alan Timmco was the architecture Critic at the time. This was in the seventies and eighties when development and towers and the nature of tearing down Urban neighborhoods and rebuilding urban neighborhoods was so vital and vigorous and issue in San, Francisco and other cities. And Timko was really an inspiration. He was from the School of critics who stood on top of Mount Olympus just hurling down lightning bolts and, and every battle was to the death or pure ex installation of virtue.
John King (2m 45s):
And when I, I started the Chronicle in 93, I’m a history major. I am not an architecture graduate or anything like that, but a good thing about journalism is you get to learn on the job. And so working first in Boston and then in Contra Costa and then at the Chronicle, I was able to develop my interest in cities and buildings and architecture and planning and landscape architecture. And most importantly, how all those things fit together. Which is why when I took or kind of created the post I have in 2001 because Alan Teco had retired in 93, I didn’t want the title architecture Critic.
John King (3m 27s):
I felt what’s interesting is how the pieces fit together. And certainly that’s true in transportation, which is one of the sub themes of my book on the Ferry building is what’s of interest isn’t just how a particular system operates, but it’s how all the different systems come together and work together or undercut each other or whatever. So that’s, that’s kind of my background. And then in terms of writing a book about the Ferry building, if you’re writing about architecture and urban design in San Francisco, beginning in the early two thousands, you know, I was new at this job when the Ferry building reopened, and I saw how it fit the city at the time and then saw how it kind of morphed and evolved and realized how much it’s tied into how a city works.
John King (4m 18s):
So that’s, that’s what led me here tonight with Jeff.
Jeff Wood (4m 20s):
Awesome. Well, I wanna talk about the book Portal San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of Cities. I’ve got one copy here. Let’s go a little bit back in time and, and talk about San Francisco’s waterfront specifically. I’m, I’m wondering what it looked like before the Ferry building, or even before most people were here
John King (4m 38s):
To picture San Francisco’s waterfront as it was before 1849 in the Gold Rush is really impossible to do in the current day. you know, You can look at maps, but basically the shoreline ran through the foundation of the Transamerica Pyramid. Salesforce Tower, I believe, was all within the bay, maybe, you know, maybe like the, the Eastern Wall just made it onto sand. Mission Creek was indeed Mission Bay. And it curled upwards in all directions and out in all directions.
John King (5m 20s):
And essentially San Francisco like cities, including Boston that has a similar kind of path. You had a place and you had shallow sand and marshes around it. And then you had a city that boomed, you know, San Francisco was essentially a sleepy hamlet on a nice little scalloped Sandy Bay where people just ended up, there were maybe 500 people living here in 1848. And then the Gold Rush was the gold rush. And this became the major port of call for everyone around the world trying to find their fortune in the gold country.
John King (6m 2s):
And San Francisco. By 1890 when the decision was made to build the Ferry building, it was the eighth largest city in the United States. And the shoreline had been extended by peer. It was, government was pretty fast and loose in those days and you could pretty much just put together a few speculators, stick a wharf into the water pointing east, and then the city was happy to let you do it and they just wanted to cut of the proceeds and then you could kind of put buildings along it. And lo and behold, you had a bigger city. And within the first few years of doing this, there were half a dozen major fires that pretty much burned everything down.
John King (6m 46s):
So it got put back up and then San, Francisco started to realize, and the state of California started to realize there had to be a better way. And so the shoreline we have today comes down to a good engineer drawing a curve on a map in around 1875 and saying, why don’t we do this? We’ll create several hundred new acres of land and we’ll build the sea wall that will lock in the dividing line. We’ll backfill that will create new real estate blocks that can be sold, you know, by the city or by the state. And we’ve settled the problem, which we are now learning is not true.
John King (7m 27s):
But that it, it was a good run.
Jeff Wood (7m 30s):
Well it’s interesting that that whole construction of the, of the sea wall and also the politics behind some of it too, because there were some offers apparently for people that were saying, well, we’ll build it for you if you give us complete control for the lifetime of the sea
John King (7m 43s):
Wall. Yes,
Jeff Wood (7m 43s):
Yes. But it’s interesting to think about it today too was like some of the politics of the, of the shoreline, but also the state versus city kind of push and pull too that we even still see today.
John King (7m 54s):
Right? Yeah, the, the Port of San Francisco is an autonomous fiefdom within the city of San Francisco government structure. It was transferred in the late 1960s to the city from the state. The state had taken over the port in the 1860s because what Jeff was describing, San Francisco politicians were prepared to give the waterfront and the right to develop a waterfront and put in AC wall to a consortium of a half dozen or so, wha op operators and the board of supervisors.
John King (8m 34s):
And the mayor waved it through, despite the public being horrified and the, and the rival war operators being horrified too. And it went up to Sacramento, the state senators and Assembly at that time, the assemblymen, they didn’t matter. They didn’t care what San Francisco did. So they approved it a Governor Downey at the time, he vetoed it and then had the state take the land back from the city. The state feeling that the Port of San Francisco is too important to the health of the California economy to be in the hands of San Francisco. So it, it is variations of what’s going on right now with housing policy fights.
Jeff Wood (9m 18s):
I just find it so interesting that it feels like deja vu almost. And there it’s still going on today where the state and the city are fighting over.
John King (9m 24s):
Yes, definitely topics
Jeff Wood (9m 25s):
Of state importance, national importance. Well, so then what’s the process like for getting to a place where we need a Ferry building, a specific building in the center of it all to funnel people into the metropolis?
John King (9m 38s):
You know, the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge were built in the late thirties, but those were not what started the development of suburban communities in the Bay Area. You had suburbs feeding workers into San Francisco by the 1860s and certainly the 1870s. I mean the first, I don’t know a whole lot about Ferry history. I learned all this for the book. you know, the first Ferry to operate on the Bay regularly was about 1854. So you had communities growing in Alameda, in Marin, the Peninsula could come up by land obviously, but even like Vallejo and Benicia, places like that.
John King (10m 20s):
And so you had these Ferry operators bringing people in. But then there was also everyone coming from Chicago or Boston or New York once the trains, you know, crossed the Rockies and everything. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, everybody who was coming from the East coast to go to California no longer took the ship to Panama. They hopped on a train, they came all the way across, they got off in Oakland and the train stopped in Oakland right where the Ferry started on the Oakland Mole. And so essentially the last stop on the train line was a Ferry ride into San Francisco.
John King (11m 6s):
So you needed to have some sort of Ferry building just to consolidate all the different Ferry lines coming in also so you could clear them away from where you were trying to build the seawall. you know, the seawall wasn’t built in an empty place with the idea of a city growing. It also took shoving people away from the shoreline to be able to build a permanent shoreline. you know, so you have this tension that by 1890 it’s like we re we need a real Ferry building because we’re having so many people coming in here.
Jeff Wood (11m 37s):
How many people abouts were coming in at that point? I mean, I, I have a number for 1910, which is like a hundred thousand people a day were coming through the Ferry building.
John King (11m 45s):
Yeah, I mean at that time, I think, I think the first year it opened, it was about half that, you know, at the peak of service, which was around the early thirties, you had upwards of 50 million people a year coming into San Francisco through the Ferry building. The city claimed that it was the second busiest transportation depot in the world next to chairing cross in London. So it, it, you know, obviously it wasn’t as big from the start, but it was already disproportionately big. Again, this was the eighth most populous city in the country. It had the largest working port on the west coast and it was the financial center of the West Coast.
Jeff Wood (12m 26s):
And from a an architecture standpoint, there’s some fascinating stories you tell in the book too about how it was designed and some of the innovative ways that it still exists.
John King (12m 37s):
Yeah, it’s funny, we think of the Ferry building as this wonderful old landmark on the water. It’s 125 years old this year and things, you know, but it was a very much, it was a symbol of modernity in San Francisco. And it was a badge of pride of San Francisco of we are a city pushing into the future. That was the play, not look at our wonderful past. And so the foundation of the building essentially is 5,100 or so pine tree trunks. The trees were cut down in Oregon, they were cleaned off, they sailed outta COOs Bay, they headed south.
John King (13m 17s):
The first big barge to leave COOs Bay hit a storm, sunk Capsi flipped over every, the monster raft is what the examiner called it flipped over all those logs, just floated off to who knows where, you know. So you had all these things, 80 foot long trunks of Oregon pine. They were driven into Bay mud. They were not driven down to bedrock, it was just drive them into the mud, drive them below the mud, which is why they’ve survived because they haven’t been exposed to air or water since they went in in a steady pressure. And you had like an open box at the top of each tree trunk and it was a square box.
John King (14m 1s):
You filled it with concrete and then when the concrete dried, you broke off the Wood and you now had a base to build catacomb like arches that interconnected. ’cause the piles were often bundled together under the weight of support. This is all worked out by the engineer for the port. And then they just poured a lot of concrete on top and that was the foundation. So it’s a very simple foundation which had problems once the building was moving into its current incarnation since not only is there no basement in the building, there’s no underpinning, like if you want to drop wiring into this floor, you just lift up the panel by me and you drop it down to put in.
John King (14m 46s):
Like if you were putting in the slanted door restaurant to run the piping necessary for that, they had to drive through the concrete and the pipes are all underneath the concrete foundation running along the catacombs below it, you know. So it was definitely ahead of its time, but that’s kind of how it works. So you just had this big flat concrete table and then you built a 600 foot long three story building on top of it. And then in the middle of that building you put a 245 foot clock tower and bingo, the sea wall stops at the east end of the Ferry building.
John King (15m 27s):
So there’s no sea wall that goes out to protect the Ferry building. It’s all sitting on wooden piles.
Jeff Wood (15m 33s):
Another thing I found really interesting, you’re talking about the catacombs underneath and, and how to drive pipes underneath. You have to go under the idea that people who are putting in pipes for cowgirl creamery or whatever it is, have to go still on a boat underneath. Yes. The Ferry building at low tide. Yes. To actually fix something is still amazing to me. Yeah,
John King (15m 51s):
I chickened out ’cause I was offered because you know, the boats are going under all the time and, and an engineer whose office is in this Ferry building we’re sitting in, he was kinda showing me diagrams and explaining how it worked and he said, you know, in a month or so we’ve gotta go in to do some testing. You’re ha you’re welcome to come along. And my official excuse to myself was that, well, I’m not gonna fit it into the book. It doesn’t really work. I need to focus on getting the book done. But there is definitely the kind of claustrophobia person in me who is like, that just sounds too creepy.
Jeff Wood (16m 26s):
How many tools are at the bottom of the, underneath the very building?
John King (16m 30s):
No one knows. If you were to go out in King Tides, you could pro at the, when they go in the low, the super low tides, you could probably find a few. Yeah, there’s a great quote in the book where an architect who worked on some of the interiors during the restoration of the building in 2001 and two was saying they’d send people in rowboats underneath. And sometimes the rowboats, you know, they’d flip over and we’d lose the tools. Sometimes we’d lose the workers. So presumably they then came back. But it’s still, it’s the notion that something that low tech still is being done in this 21st century age is pretty crazy
Jeff Wood (17m 12s):
From an architecture standpoint as well. I’m also curious about the comparisons to other kind of city entry buildings like train stations. And at the time the robber barons and other folks were building these ornate train stations in east coast cities, but the Ferry building was where people came in San Francisco. And so there was a comparison made between the two. Yeah,
John King (17m 32s):
If you go back into the architectural literature, the late 19th century, there were articles comparing, you know, that the cathedrals of yesterday are the train depots of today. They are the buildings that define the city, that mark the city that are the symbol of the city. So with the Ferry building here in San Francisco, there’s no need for the clock tower. The clock tower is not there so that somebody at front in California street can know what time it is. The clock tower is there, so boats pulling in, people can be suitably impressed by the city they are entering.
John King (18m 13s):
And from the city side, it’s so that people can see the building that marks the shoreline that marks this building stands between us and the thing that made us, we are a port city, you know? So it was very much a conscious decision. Last thing really quick is that Jeff’s right, if you go to the train depots, like a Grand Central Station for instance, or Union Station in Cincinnati or something, the details are incredible, but those are, because those were private companies trying to one up their competitors. The Ferry building was a state building built on a state approved budget.
John King (18m 57s):
So the architect Arthur Page Brown, very smartly did all these big gorgeous moves, but the details themselves are pretty straightforward. you know, it, it was not a building intended to make you gasp, but the tile work and things like that, it was more, it wowed you with the arches marching along the Embarcadero or just the telescoping of the clock towers. It rises into the air, it it very smart design.
Jeff Wood (19m 27s):
But the tile work still is pretty impressive. The
John King (19m 29s):
Tile work is impressive, but anyone who’s been like inside Grand Central Station, I mean that stuff is, goes way beyond impressive.
Jeff Wood (19m 38s):
It reminds me of also the start of the book where you talk about the 1906 camera ride and I imagine most folks in this room have seen that YouTube video where there’s a camera a couple days before the earthquake and seeing the Ferry building the distance is, is reassuring to a certain extent knowing what’s coming.
John King (19m 53s):
Absolutely.
Jeff Wood (19m 53s):
In a couple of days,
John King (19m 55s):
Absolutely everything along Market Street would disappear or just become a burned out Hulk. But the Ferry building stayed.
Jeff Wood (20m 2s):
You followed San Francisco history for quite a while. I’m wondering if there’s anything kind of new you learned in, in the process of writing this book?
John King (20m 9s):
I learned lots of new things. I mean, one thing about being a journalist, even if you’re a journalist who’s a history major, is that you’re focused on the present or you’re focused on the past as it directly relates to the present. That’s one reason I ended up writing about the Ferry building. I got so interested in kind of past stories, but in writing the book, I was fascinated at a number of things starting with, I was surprised at how thoroughly society embraced automobiles just without question. And I don’t mean this from a 21st century. Cars are bad because of climate change and things, but just if you look at something like the Embarcadero Freeway, which became the symbol that in tandem with the Ferry building triggered the freeway revolt in San Francisco and you know, kind of encourage free revolts across the country.
John King (21m 9s):
There was no opposition to the idea of networks, of elevated freeways going into San Francisco after World War ii because every city was doing it because everyone now felt they either had a car or they felt they were entitled to have a car. And if you have a car, the beauty of a car compared to say a Ferry is you don’t need a schedule and you don’t need a certain set route. You are your own commander. You can go wherever you want, whenever you want. Everything’s convenient. So the idea of just crisscrossing San Francisco with all of these elevated freeways, all of these open air freeway cuts going through the city, it was very uncontroversial initially.
John King (21m 59s):
I mean there, there are transit studies from the late thirties and the late forties that read like military manifestos, that gridlock is killing our city. We need to have a sustained campaign to crush it, you know, and so it’s elevated freeways and it was only when the Embarcadero Freeway started going up and people saw what it was doing to their notion of the water and to their vision of the Ferry building. That just seemed like their birthright almost, that people started to really question the larger notion of is getting from point A to point B more important than everything else connected with what makes a city work.
John King (22m 43s):
you know? So that was one thing that surprised me. The other thing that surprised me, and I knew this in a general sense, but we forget how the Bay Area was so tied to the military, how important it was as a military place for the United States. Certainly up until and through World War ii, the Ferry building, you know, once the bridges went up in the thirties, it was obsolete functionally. I mean, obviously it wasn’t obsolete as a symbol of urban vitality and affection as we learned in the coming decades. But in a transit sense, if everybody just wanted to be on a car and they, or they rode the key line into San Francisco on the lower deck until they could afford a car, they did not care about the ferries.
John King (23m 32s):
The ferries pretty quickly drifted off to its southern Pacific, still had one going back and forth. But during World War ii, the Ferry building came back to life, partly because the USO used the upper area, the the nave, you know, the, the whole grand open hall. That was like a place where soldiers on leave in San Francisco could stay. So they’d be bunking and things like that. While they had like a weekend in San Francisco and the ferries themselves, contin were brought back to life because the workers would go from San Francisco to Richmond or to Marin City or down to Alameda or out to Mayor Island because this was a major hub of World War ii.
John King (24m 22s):
One of the things I enjoyed about research in the book is just really fleshing out how the region came to be and all the different lives the region has lived.
Jeff Wood (24m 32s):
And kind of that car orientation that you’re talking about goes all the way back to the 1915 Panel Pacific.
John King (24m 39s):
Yes. That was actually, that was a surprise that incident
Jeff Wood (24m 42s):
International exposition, because I didn’t know this, but Henry Ford set up a small assembly line Yes. In the marina.
John King (24m 49s):
Yeah. So you had the Panama Pacific International Exposition, which is remembered for, you know, the Palace of Fine Arts and very much all this kind of nostalgia seeped looking back to a Pacific tradition that did or didn’t exist, but it also had like kind of a hall of machinery or whatever. And as Jeff was saying, Henry Ford set up a small assembly line within the 1915 World’s Fair that was assembling cars that were then sold and it took like 60 minutes or something like that. And so we had this factory and then one day of the fair was Thomas Edison Day.
John King (25m 35s):
So they were celebrating the crater of electricity there, which I would guess is something a few months in to spurred the attendance or something. But, so Henry Ford gave Thomas Alva Edison a tour of the assembly line and he was pointing it out with pride and telling Edison how in Detroit he had lines that worked even faster than this and things and wasn’t an impressive, and Ed Thomas Edison looked and just said something like, soon they will begin to spawn. So that was Thomas Edison predicting what automobiles, but shortly due to America.
John King (26m 16s):
And I very quickly give praise to my editor at WW Norton, Tom Meyer, because I had a much different snippier journalistic ending to that particular chapter. And he was kind of, well go find some more information about the World’s Fair. you know, does it relate to the Ferry building and cars at all in any, or does it relate to what was coming with the bridges in any way? And when I found that in some book or newspaper search, it made me think occasionally editors are right.
Jeff Wood (26m 47s):
Well, that’s a good point too, is like when did the Golden Gate Bridge become a usurping symbol of San Francisco over the Ferry? Because for the longest time people associated the Ferry building with San Francisco, it was the thing on postcards, it was the thing that people knew of the city. And so how fast did the Golden Gate Bridge take over? Sure.
John King (27m 7s):
You know, if you go back to early 20th century popular culture, the Ferry building was the calling card for San Francisco. And if you saw any movie set in San Francisco in the 1920s or thirties, including the first Maltese Falcon movie, which was 1931 or something like that, it opens with a shot of the Ferry building from the Bay saying this is San Francisco, you know, it is, look at the building, the equivalent of the shot. Now that’s an aerial shot curving in above the Golden Gate bridge toward the skyline. And the Golden Gate Bridge pretty much became the icon of the city the day it opened.
John King (27m 50s):
I mean the, the Golden Gate Bridge was so beautiful, it was so much a triumph of the modern era and the Ferry building by then, the Bay Bridge had opened about six months earlier. So it was already obvious what was happening to the Ferry building it. So it was like flipping a switch
Jeff Wood (28m 8s):
From a, not just a car standpoint, but also from a maritime standpoint. It’s interesting to see that kind of parallel between also the idea of containerization too, because the cars took over as the main form of transportation, but the port changed because of the containerization of cargo. Yes. And so before that it, it was mostly men taking apart ships from the longshoremen, basically taking apart ships, and then the containerization changed the fortunes of the waterfront as well.
John King (28m 37s):
Yes, and the, the subtitle of the book is San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities because a lot of the changes seen in San Francisco are directly paralleled by other large older American cities. And one is the trajectory of urban ports. As Jeff was talking about, San Francisco has saved more finger piers than other cities on the water by a long shot because we love history. But every big waterfront city used to have a lot of these narrow piers sticking out. And then as the ships got bigger, as containers started to become the way of, you know, the beauty is, is that the old way, economic beauty, the old way of doing it is workers are lugging stuff in and out of the ships.
John King (29m 32s):
And those finger piers were used for storage as much as anything else because you’d, you’d be spending the week amassing everything that’s then going to, to be put on the next ship to pull in. And once that stuff is put on and the stuff is taken off, then you’ve gotta get rid of that with containers, you just fill the containers in wherever they happen to be, and then you just lift the container up with a crane, you drop it onto a truck and you drop it onto a ship. you know, so that’s, that’s why it works the way it does. And those ships were too big and too heavy to slip into a traditional waterfront. So San Francisco in the fifties was still trying to modify the Embarcadero, but it was pretty clear by the end of the fifties that the Embarcaderos day as an economically viable urban port were finished.
Jeff Wood (30m 26s):
And then the highways come and the Embarcadero Freeway kind of as you mentioned earlier, gave residents kind of a taste of what their freeway future would look like.
John King (30m 34s):
Yes, definitely. Yeah, it just was such, I mean, there are a fair number of you in here who look fairly young who would not remember the Ferry building. I grew up when it was primarily a way to come in from uc, Berkeley, to clubs in North Beach at night and then zip home. And it was kind of a fun ride. But you know, you had a double deck concrete viaduct, 60 feet high, no architectural grace, and it was wide, probably five lanes wide covering what now is the Embarcadero Boulevard where the street cars run and things like that. And so that was like a wall cutting off more than a mile of the waterfront.
John King (31m 16s):
And then behind it you had the Ferry building and you had a Ferry building that was sparsely occupied and it was kind of cheap office space in various ways. And it had air conditioners sticking out a windows, the front facade looked about the way it does now, but the sides had been completely torn off and like res stripped with modern band windows and things like that. And so you had this just, I mean it was literally the wrong side of the tracks and that’s just how it functioned. Oh, and there was still a freight Rail running north and south on the Embarcadero, which had been put in in the early 19 hundreds and survived into the early 1980s.
Jeff Wood (31m 59s):
So if the Ferry building and it was cut off by the Embarcadero freeway, why was it so hard then to get people to vote, to tear it down?
John King (32m 7s):
I knew this dimly, but I had forgotten about it. In 1986, San Francisco voters were asked if they wanted to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway and replace it with the Surface Boulevard and a little context, quote unquote, everybody hated the Embarcadero Freeway from the day it went up. You had the Chronicle saying it should be torn down. You had board of supervisors and planning commissions passing non-binding resolutions to tear it down. It was just everybody hated the Embarcadero Freeway. Then Diane Feinstein put together a plan, she got the Board of supervisors to back her, she was Marathon and all the regional agencies, all the agencies in this building to go along with the idea.
John King (32m 60s):
And so it was smooth sailing. The money was there supposedly to take down the freeway and move the traffic onto the surface streets. And voters rejected the idea by more than 60%. It was not a close election, it was just a total defeat of the idea. And a lot of it was convenience. you know, you had people who just thought, yeah, but it’s so much more convenient to ride it. And then San Francisco in 1986 was going through all sorts of development battles. And so opponents of Feinstein effectively use the argument, if we tear down the freeway, we’ll just get a bunch of developers building a bunch of towers and that’s what’s gonna happen.
John King (33m 48s):
And once that election occurred, the whole question of taking down the Embarcadero Freeway seems settled once or for all until the Loma pre earthquake came around.
Jeff Wood (34m 0s):
The echoes are interesting because the, the progressive supervisor that basically said not to tear it down because it was a giveaway to developers, I feel like that kind of echoes today, just like the state fights with the city over the waterfront. Kind of echo today’s housing discussions as well.
John King (34m 16s):
Exactly. If you allowed this to happen, it’ll just be a bunch of market rate housing bills, you know, and, and obviously issues are complex and there are valid things on both sides, but very, very simplistic.
Jeff Wood (34m 29s):
So between the 1989 earthquake and today and in the 1990s and early two thousands, the building got a revamp. It feels like the building at that point is kind of living its best life.
John King (34m 39s):
One of the things that’s interesting, the Ferry building that we know today is totally different than the Ferry building that opened in 1898. you know, the architectural shell is the same historic features such as the Grand Nave have been restored very well. you know, that was filled with offices for 50 years. I mean, both wings had been, whole floors of offices had been put in, the skyline had been covered over, or the skylights had been covered over. You can’t conceive what it was like. And unlike today when ferries pulled in, you didn’t get off the Ferry and walk on the land.
John King (35m 20s):
You pulled directly into the Ferry building and you stepped out and walk through like you were walking into an airplane terminal. you know, it was connected pieces walking in. That stuff had been torn off long ago or burned down long ago and replaced and all, you know, so you have this totally different building that was then restored and recreated. And today’s building functions not so much as a transportation hub, though it does have the ferries, but it’s totally in sync with the 21st century San Francisco, very organic, very committed to different sorts of cuisines.
John King (36m 2s):
The idea of public access, you know, the wonderful walkway between the structure and the water that was just built in the early two thousands as part the project. you know, before that there were boilers sticking out of the back of the Ferry building. There was no place to walk back there. The Ferry building embodies so much of today’s San Francisco or 21st century San Francisco. It is a building that is rooted in the past, but it’s showing off present day values. And in that way it’s in sync just as much as the 1898 Ferry building was. In terms of this is the Portal showing San Francisco is a true American city.
Jeff Wood (36m 45s):
It also feels like it over its lifespan. It’s also kind of reflected what cities were going through in the United States too. You had a kind of an up period through the Second World War, and then you had a down period, and then you have kind of a rebirth of cities. And the Ferry building seems to have matched that timeline overall together.
John King (37m 2s):
That’s true. And it’s especially true because every big American city has that wonderful building that people didn’t know what to do with after its relevance. Seemed to have passed some cities, tore them down. you know, Penn Station was torn down in New York City and that was so controversial. It spurred the National Preservation Movement, the stock exchange in Chicago with, you know, gorgeous Louis Sullivan iron work and things. And Frank Lloyd Wright worked on it. That got torn down. And now the artifacts are sold off and shown in museums.
John King (37m 42s):
you know, the Ferry building was lucky in a way because it was protected by the Embarcadero Freeway. There were proposals to take it down and the initial proposal, which would’ve replaced it with a 40 story tall modern shaft that would hold a World Trade center in 1949, it was supported by all politicians across the board, but it made no sense economically. So it never got anywhere. But once the freeway went up, the way the Ferry building was stranded made it stronger as a symbol of what was at stake in terms of the urban values of San Francisco. So it didn’t go through a lot of changes that might have messed it up.
John King (38m 26s):
And it was able to draw on the best examples of urban revitalization in the seventies and eighties and learn from the mistakes of those eras. you know, obviously at Dodge Durban renewal with just tear things down. But then it also dodged some of the tackier aspects of festival marketplaces and things like that, or a, something that would’ve added like taller buildings to the back of it in things.
Jeff Wood (38m 52s):
There was a specific design by I mpe that was fairly, I I think maybe at the time it might’ve looked good, but now it would look very, I just, I’m just gonna say bad. It just looked bad.
John King (39m 2s):
Yeah. IM pe who, you know, very much a great architect, he and his office were hired to work in a development proposal in the, at the end of the seventies, I think it was released in the early eighties, and they restored the shell of the building and they brought back the skylight and everybody was happy as could be initially, but basically they kept the, the front of the building, restored it, Gord very faithfully, but then attached a multi-story terrorist office building and back stepping down to the water, which looked like a lot of other IMP projects at the time.
John King (39m 44s):
The interior was turned into an open air shopping mall that had the bulb glass storefronts that were very 1980s. And the skylight wasn’t just restored, you know, if you were to walk into the na today, you see this nice narrow skylight at the peak of the trusses, essentially the entire roof became a skylight and then a big chunk of the back wall became a skylight. So you turned it into a temple of light or something like that. And so it would’ve totally, it would’ve kept the front as an artifact and it would’ve stuck an entirely different creature into it, like a hermit crab, you know, you’ve, you’ve got the shell and then something else climbs inside.
John King (40m 33s):
Yeah. And initially it was very popular because IM Pay was doing it, but with time it, many things proposed for the Ferry building and the Embarcadero just broke down under their own weight with the passage of time. And this was one of them,
Jeff Wood (40m 48s):
Which makes the redesign of today’s Ferry building really interesting. You think about that I am pay design where interior you would have these kind of store bulbs that would, the windows would stick out from the stores and you’d have to enter the stores. But now you walk down there and all of the stores kind of come at you in a vibrant way. And so I find that really interesting too, that little design choice that made the Ferry building kind of what it is today.
John King (41m 10s):
Yeah, the, the developer of the Ferry building, Wilson Minnie Sullivan put together a good design team in making the bid for the project. But then when they got the project, the developer, Chris Meany took the lead architects of the different firms with him to Europe to investigate market halls of Europe. So they went to London and Paris and Milan and Venice, which makes me wish I’d become an architect. And, but they came back with very specific ideas that they can tell you specific antecedents that shaped the interior in, in terms of just how the ground floor feels.
John King (41m 53s):
And it’s just things like, you know, not having glassed in spaces, but having these graded entries that open and close and pull down was just to give it more of a street like feel and to not have kind of the hermetic distinction between inside and out. And it, it worked really well.
Jeff Wood (42m 15s):
So on the horizon we have, or here already climate change, we already have king tides obviously, but is the Ferry building up for it?
John King (42m 25s):
The next year or two are going to be really fascinating in San Francisco because since 2016 there have been a procession of very serious studies about the stability of the sea wall, which remember was built in the late 19th century and very kind of haphazardly built and, you know, sea level rise. you know, earthquakes plus sea level rise is not a good prognosis for the future of the waterfront or the Ferry building. The Ferry building is seen as so valuable that the port officials say there is no chance they would see that as something that’s allowed to become obsolete or derelict.
John King (43m 10s):
But it becomes, do you raise the building up? There’s a study going on right now on purely in terms of engineering. Is it feasible to do that? And if it was determined to be, that’s a whole separate set of issues in terms of the finances and politics. There is also a question of do you build a breakwater that essentially do you seal off portions of the Embarcadero to keep water from coming in? But would the Ferry building have its allure if it was sitting on a lake with a concrete walkway, you know, 100 yards to the east and then the entire embarcadero, if you’re going to, you need to rebuild the sea wall or at least strengthen it.
John King (43m 57s):
The one that exists now, and that’s pretty definitively shown by engineering studies, you should raise it up a few feet because of sea level rise, but how on earth do you do that? You don’t want to just build a wall and wall off the bay from the city. So you could think, well, what we could do is slope the Embarcadero roadway up and create the promenade hole, few feet higher. But obviously then you’ve got the problem with every pipe underground, every sewage line underground tearing up the Embarcadero for who knows how many years and things like that. And the Army Corps of Engineers has been working with the city on a study, and the Army Corps is supposed to release its report by February that will do a draft set of recommendations on how to deal with the San Francisco waterfront.
John King (44m 52s):
And my guess is it’ll cause a lot of outrage and a lot of protests, but it will get the conversation moving from, we need to be concerned to. So what are we gonna do about it?
Jeff Wood (45m 7s):
I have two more questions for you then I’m gonna open up for questions from the audience, but how do we keep the Ferry building as an icon in the future going forward? How does it remain an icon for the city?
John King (45m 17s):
I think the Ferry building will always be an icon for the city because it’s in an iconic location. It’s where Market Street meets the water, you know, you just see the Embarcadero coming up in a very real way. The, the Ferry building is where so many people begin their day in San Francisco, they meet at the Ferry building and they decide are they gonna go north or south? It’s going to be iconic because the farmer’s market, which is a separate entity, but has become inseparable with the notion of authenticity, has to stay, you know, I’m sure the developer would see more profitable things to do, but realistically they also know if they did that they’d be killing the goose that makes them authentic.
John King (46m 3s):
It’s so visible, it’s so dramatic. It’s tied in, you know, water traffic is more and more a factor, not what it was in the early days, but it is a very legitimate thing. So I think just the power of its presence ensures that in various ways it will be an icon. It is not a building that will have once been an icon like the Palace Hotel. It is very likely to be an icon when it turns 250 if we’re lucky enough.
Jeff Wood (46m 32s):
And then the last question I have, you’ve talked about this book a fair amount since it came out and you’ve done a, a number of interviews. I’m wondering if there’s a question that you haven’t been asked
John King (46m 42s):
At this point. I feel like I’ve been asked a awful lot of questions. I guess what I haven’t been asked, just kind of thinking off the top of my head would be, why didn’t I go more into the subject, the person asking me questions cared about the most? Because I was not aiming for an 800 page book. I was aiming for a 250 page book. And I have gotten a hint. Anyone, someone who really loves Ferry Boats will say there’s not enough on that. Someone who really is interested in how the building came back to life in the 21st century and the people who took part in that are still alive and active.
John King (47m 25s):
I’ve definitely gotten questions not from interviewers, but from people just, why didn’t you put in da da da da da? you know, that was a really spicy tale.
Jeff Wood (47m 35s):
And it’s
John King (47m 36s):
Like, well it is to you and eight friends of yours, but not, not to the general reader. And I am fascinated by its role as a popular culture symbol, like in movies and things. And I skimmed a lot of bad movies and a lot of bad TV shows looking for the references, taking notes on the references and everything pretty much fell out except for it came from beneath the Sea with the hydrogen powered octopus that pulled down the tower. Couldn’t resist that.
Jeff Wood (48m 8s):
It’s interesting, at, at the time, I guess the Ferry building was the thing to tear down now that everybody takes down the Golden Gate Bridge.
John King (48m 13s):
Yeah, they took down the Golden Gate Bridge too. Now it’s the Transamerica Pyramid
Jeff Wood (48m 18s):
And then the cover of the book is actually some pop culture as well, right? I mean,
John King (48m 21s):
Yes, the cover of the book, which was dreamed up by an in-house designer at WW Norton, bless him, takes its inspiration from Crate Art of the 1930s. There was a, the Merrill Packing Company, and Salinas had a line of produce Frisco vegetables, and the owner of the company, Mr. Merrill, wanted to have something on the great art that would tell you, this is San Francisco, this is Frisco, here’s, here’s a building that says Frisco. And our letters say Frisco. And Mr. Merrill chose the Ferry building. And I talked to his grandson who is still owns the company, it’s still the family owned Merrill packing in Salinas.
John King (49m 7s):
And yeah, his grandfather explained that well, that was San Francisco at the time. And in the fifties, you know, the, the actual crates were dying. You had boxes now. But they decided to freshen their look. So the, the symbol for the Frisco line in the fifties until it went until it, they discontinued it in the early sixties. You had the Ferry building still, but you also had the cable car. So they shook things up by bringing the cable car in.
Jeff Wood (49m 35s):
Alright, well I’m gonna open up to questions. If folks have questions, raise your hand and I’ll call on you. So there’s a question about the architecture and how it’s evolved and where it came from.
John King (49m 43s):
The original architect, a Paige Brown, the architect of the Ferry Building, did go to Europe on kind of a tour to look at train depots and various buildings of note. It was not explicitly modeled on any building or if he, if it was, he never said that very much. Looks like the clock tower you’re talking about. On the other hand, there weren’t that many models to choose from. I mean, that seems to be the cleanest connection. But at the time, you know, you wanted to do the gesture. This was the city beautiful movement. You wanted big arches, you wanted masonry, you wanted a certain kind of robust dignity, and you wanted a clock tower.
John King (50m 24s):
So you kind of did the streamline stream, the stripped down streamlined tower. He was accused of plagiarizing, McKim, Mead and white, the firm he started with for a tower on Madison Square in New York. That also kind of looks like the tower Owensville, but you know, how, how many big clock towers could you pull from in Europe at the time? It’s that, or it’s St. Mark’s in Venice. So you’ve, you’ve got, oh, that’s Cal
John King (50m 55s):
There we go. So you only had like that and big bin, you’ve got three to work from.
Jeff Wood (51m 0s):
That was a question About the chimes up.
John King (51m 2s):
That’s one of the things I left out the book. Yeah, it’s, the clock was a working clock. I mean, it, it’s still working. I think it’s turned off now because there was the scaffolding up to repaint the tower that just came down in November. But it always was a working clock tower. It also had a siren that went off three times a day very loud. And that I think went into the sixties or so. But I didn’t find any lore in terms of using the clock tower and the chimes to send out certain signals. It was more just a very basic signaling, I think the hour and the half hour.
Jeff Wood (51m 43s):
So would a change of place for Market Street or a location for Market Street changed the design? Yeah,
John King (51m 49s):
San Francisco is very much an accidental city in, in the 1840s, a Swiss engineer platted out like an eight block grid at the request of the local leaders. I mean, I think this is before it was part of the United States before the Mexican American war. And then there was kind of a realization that his platting would hit Knob Hill and Russian Hill, which at that time were could not be scaled because the cable cars didn’t exist. So we needed another plat. So then a different engineer ran a diagonal kind of at the angle.
John King (52m 30s):
And so Market Street was created as where the two grids collided. And so if they had collided in a different place, the Ferry building would be in a different place because it was deliberately placed to be at the axis of the waterfront and Market Street.
