Las Urbanistas

Taking over shipyard at Hunters Point could be risky, costly

Robert Selna, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, March 9, 2007

San Francisco’s recent proposal to take ownership of the Hunters Point Shipyard from the Navy and accelerate the toxic cleanup on the former base could benefit the city whether or not the 49ers accept Mayor Gavin Newsom’s invitation to build stadium there, say those familiar with the site.

 

But, a city takeover comes with risks to the city, including:

– San Francisco may fail to get enough money from the Navy to pay for the entire cleanup.

– The city may face insurance fights over the scope and cost of the decontamination.

– The federal government, rather than the city, may be best suited to eradicate toxic waste created by the Navy.

“The big risk is that if there is a disagreement between the local government and the military about the actual cost of the cleanup, how much the city gets will depend on the strength of the congressional district where the base is located,” said Saul Bloom, executive director at Arc Ecology, a local nonprofit that helps communities plan for the closure and the cleanup of military bases. “The Navy will want to get out on the cheap, and the city wants to get the funding it needs to get the job done.”

Bloom acknowledged that the city is in a good position given that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, both Democrats, want the shipyard developed and have expressed a desire to keep the 49ers in San Francisco.

But the remaining cleanup cost will require major appropriations. The Navy estimates that over the next 10 years, it would need to spend $500 million, and it predicts that figure would go up by as much as $75 million if the city took over and tried to expedite the work.

In a recent memo, Newsom’s office proposed that the city take ownership of the former Navy base and assume responsibility for removing most nonradiological toxic material, provided the Navy pays the bill.

The shipyard closed in 1974 and, despite years of decontamination work, remains on the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list of hazardous sites. In recent years, the investigators found radiological deposits in the sewers and soil there.

In December, Newsom invited the 49ers’ owners to build a stadium on the shipyard as a last-ditch effort to keep the team from moving to Santa Clara. The area could accommodate 19,000 surface parking spaces and has room for tailgaters, addressing the 49ers’ chief concern. The Niners had rejected plans for a stadium at Candlestick Point that would have had a huge garage.

Team co-owner John York did not reject the Hunters Point offer outright but expressed doubt that the shipyard could be clean enough to complete a new stadium by 2012.

Last month, the 49ers told Santa Clara officials that they will present a comprehensive stadium proposal by early April. On Thursday, 49ers spokeswoman Lisa Lang referred to Hunters Point as a possible backup site.

“Any plan that speeds up the cleanup of a Superfund site is a step in the right direction, regardless of whether there is a stadium there or not,” Lang said. “It’s good for the neighborhood. It’s good for the city.”

City officials said they hope to make 27 acres of the shipyard available for a possible new stadium but also are trying to complete a 1997 master plan for the 500-acre plot, including preliminary plans for offices, stores, light industry and parks, some of which have been slowed down because of decontamination delays.

One of five shipyard parcels has been cleared for the Lennar Corp. to construct 1,600 condominiums and townhouses. But, the other developments have been stalled, raising the possibility that for a time, thousands of new residents will live in homes nowhere near a supermarket or other amenities.

If the plan to transfer the base to the city pans out, the Navy would pay the city for the cleanup and the city would transfer the responsibility and the funds to Lennar, city officials said.

Lennar would then hire a company to complete the job and would obtain insurance in case it turned out to be more costly than believed. But Bloom said insurance companies might be inclined to fight a claim for a more expensive remediation.

“A big insurance fight could cause a delay in the cleanup,” Bloom said. “We haven’t seen a delay like that yet, but we are really nervous about it.”

Lennar representative Sam Singer said Lennar got into a beef with its insurance company over a higher-than-expected decontamination job at the former Mare Island naval shipyard in Vallejo that Lennar converted into private housing. The dispute did not slow development, though, Singer said.

Some observers said that although the city and Lennar might be able to expedite the shipyard cleanup, there is no guarantee.

“People who are expecting miracles because the city would take over are deluding themselves,” said Michael Hamman, whose property abuts the shipyard and who serves on community development boards. “I think it’s simplistic to say that the Navy is dragging its heels. … Very few places have this much history of use and as many toxic hazards.”

Newsom’s base reuse director Michael Cohen said that the city would not take over the cleanup until the Navy removed the vast majority of the toxic substances, including any radioactive material.

“The Navy will have to show that most of the removal has already been done,” Cohen said. “We would come in at the end of the process and finish the job.”

Chronicle staff writer Patrick Hoge contributed to this report. E-mail Robert Selna at rselna@sfchronicle.com

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This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

“In Barcelona there is no need to prepare the revolution, simply because it is always ready. It leans out of the window on the street every day.”

That was the city’s governor talking in 1909, in the midst of the half-century or so of tumult surveyed by the fascinating, but not perfectly satisfying, “Barcelona and Modernity,” now at the Metropolitan Museum.

The show’s subtitle is “Gaudí to Dalí,” lest the public be deterred from an exhibition that’s in fact heavy on Catalan heroes like the great (and vastly underappreciated) architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner, the whimsical jewelry designer Lluís Masriera and the painters Isidre Nonell and Ramon Casas (who, despite having passed out of fashion, was better than Picasso for many years; it was Casas, by the way, who owned the very first sports car in town, and his prestige and élan inspired the Dada artist Francis Picabia to develop his famous mania for them).

You can’t blame the museum for not calling the exhibition “From Romà Ribera to Josep de Togores.” Nobody would come (and in the case of those two, for good reason). The Met show stocks up on Mirós and Picassos, just to be safe — too many Picassos, actually.

It’s easy to assume, at a glance, that Catalan artists and architects produced provincial knockoffs of Art Nouveau or neo-Classicism. But the old capital-of-culture concept — that art beamed out from centers like Paris or Vienna to the periphery — doesn’t account for Barcelona. It acted as a prism, absorbing but also refracting what came from abroad.

The show begins with moody Symbolist and sunny, salon-style pictures from the turn of the 20th century, which are not so memorable (save for Casas’s mural for the cafe Els Quatre Gats of himself and his gangly friend Pere Romeu, a failed painter, on a tandem bicycle), but no worse than much of what was done in Paris. Rooms alternate between art and design. Designers like Masriera, Josep M. Jujol, Gaspar Homar and Joan Busquets, integrating furniture, painting, lighting, metalwork and a slew of global influences in hybrid objects, produce the first knockouts, which also describes the folding screen by Gaudí in the shape more or less of bat wings; shy of having the Casa Batlló transported to New York, it’s the best we can get of him.

No museum can conjure up a city, especially one as physically remarkable as Barcelona. Gaudí’s buildings need to be walked around. You need to go up onto the hill of Montjuïc, where you get a panorama of the knotty Gothic quarter, the onetime capital of a Mediterranean empire, nestled inside the utopian sprawl of the 19th-century Eixample, Europe’s first true urban grid plan.

The closest you come to a panorama in the exhibition is a black lacquer panel, a dining room decoration made by Jaume Busquets and Lluís Bracons, showing a bird’s-eye view of the harbor mobbed with ships, the Gothic quarter receding in the background below a flock of biplanes. It’s marvelous.

If the city was not Paris in 1900, it was nonetheless a proud, strange, heroic place. The period of its history covered here begins roughly with the Universal Exposition of 1888, which signaled the resurgence of Catalan prosperity and nationalism. It ends with the defeat of Republican forces in 1939 in the civil war at the hands of Gen. Francisco Franco, who imposed fascism on Spain, suppressed all Catalan culture and basically turned off the lights and left Barcelona to rot.

Between those years, the city was one of Europe’s great petri dishes of political and cultural ferment. The population was exploding. A new rail line linked it to Paris. Industry thrived, above all the textile industry, with fresh construction in tow. Art followed wealth, as usual.

And the short-lived Quatre Gats (the “four cats” in Catalan slang meant “just a few guys”) was where the best artists congregated. It fostered a new bohemianism that aspired to rival Paris’s. Over the years nostalgia has exaggerated its reputation. But many artists introduced their works there, including hundreds of the deft, facile portrait sketches by Casas and Picasso (the Met has a few) that provide a cultural who’s who of the day, and the cafe even spawned a glossy publication with articles and reviews from Paris and reproductions of drawings by Four Cats regulars.

So the city was booming. Earlier in the 19th century, the central government in Madrid had allowed Barcelona’s medieval walls to be demolished, and the Enlargement, the Eixample, provided fresh boulevards and squares for the new affluent classes. They lived beside appalling, fetid congestion in the old center, where the working poor were the ones leaning out the windows, as the governor put it, and calling for revolution.

With its stress on luxury objects, the show mentions but doesn’t dwell on the fact that Barcelona back then was also called “the rose of fire” and the “city of bombs” for a reason. There were endless battles among anarchists, Stalinists and republicans, and waves of strikes, terrorist attacks and police reprisals. Twenty-one people were slaughtered in a bombing of the Liceu opera house in 1893. The police forced confessions under torture and staged public executions by garroting. There was more rioting when Madrid conscripted troops for a war in Morocco. Dozens of churches were torched. The military shot hundreds in the streets.

And during the late 1910s and early 1920s, Barcelona was the site of more than 800 terrorist assassinations, among them the killing of the Spanish prime minister by three Catalan anarchists, which led to a military coup that installed a dictatorship in Spain in 1923.

Apropos of all this, Nonell drew beggars huddling in shawls in the vein of Goya. Casas painted the garrotings. But it’s telling that the arts in Barcelona thrived despite and amid all this chaos, and mostly with no special regard for it.

Instead, a succession of elite movements, nationalist and internationalist in inspiration, adopting names like Modernisme, Noucentisme and Vibracionismo, unfolded. Unless you’re already familiar with them, it’s nearly impossible to make heads or tails of them from the show. Suffice it to say that they all shared a desire that Barcelona take a place on the world stage, on its own terms.

That’s the crucial point: on its own terms. Dalí’s Surrealism, for instance, with its hyper-reality mixed with melting, oozy shapes, was international in its reach but had deep roots in Catalan sources. The gooey forms harked back to motifs in Gaudí and Domènech and to Miró, who shared with Dalí a fixation on excrement that came straight out of an old Catalan tradition, which at Christmas still includes the ubiquitous statuettes of figurines … well, you know.

A dressing table by Gaudí, from 1890 or so, with a mirror improbably set at a diagonal, its wood frame carved to resemble a ribbon unfurling, is also Dalí before the fact. So too are the works by Lambert Escaler, who in the early 1900s made green earthenware jardinières in the shapes of women’s heads, which Dalí all but copied directly for his “Dream” 30 years later.

As for Domènech, his Palau de la Música Catalana, the Palace of Catalan Music (in the show there’s a model of the building, along with blueprints, a poster, balusters and tiles), often gets lumped together with Art Nouveau, a French movement. But it’s Modernista, a specifically Catalan phenomenon. It was built for local choral societies, whose members were working class. They sang folk songs. The palace meant to connect folk music with international music by composers like Wagner and Brahms, loosening the grip that the Liceu had on serious music and delivering it to the masses. The building’s decorative program trumpeted the idea. Its tile and stained glass celebrated crafts with Catalan roots. It was also iron and glass, a modern design.

For which reason, I might add, it had lousy acoustics, so that whenever a truck passed on the cobblestones outside, the musicians had to pause.

By the 1920s there was talk of tearing the palace down, Catalan Modernisme having gone out of style, replaced by the white stucco classicism of Noucentisme, with its preference for plaster columns and antique fountains. People in the neighborhood starting calling the building the Palace of Catalan Junk. But it survived, fortunately, as a gaudy dowager, eventually to be recognized, as Robert Hughes puts it in his 1992 book on Barcelona, as “both Catalanist and international, proving that a vigorous regionalist culture does not have to be a provincial one.”

Exactly right. In time, a new generation of Catalan architects like Josep Lluís Sert replaced Noucentisme with the white box aesthetic of the International Style, but again gave it a local spin, Sert regarding the white box as a Mediterranean invention, not something cooked up in the architectural laboratories of Germany by Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus.

As proof, Sert’s pavilion for the Spanish Republic at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair (where Picasso’s “Guernica” was first shown), unlike Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion (of which there’s a splendid model in the show) had the casual grace of a seaside villa.

There’s a model for it here too, along with an old BKF chair, from 1938, designed by the Grupo Austral. Iron-framed, with a leather swing-seat roughly in the shape of a butterfly, it looks like a Calder or an Arp or one of Miró’s blobs, just not like something you can get into or out of easily.

It’s deeply Spanish in its materials but made to flatter one of those airy Mediterranean villas, championing a fresh take on modern life. The old era of stuffy, formal living had given way, after the Depression, to a new architecture of multipurpose rooms; proper dining chairs and straight-backed salon chairs were replaced by one that was impossible to sit up straight in. You had to lie in it sideways. You had to relax.

It comes near the end of the show, all charm and impractical ingenuity, before studies for “Guernica” and posters for the Republican side (and a couple for Franco’s side) in the civil war that finally ended Barcelona’s run: joie de vivre along with pandemonium.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad description of the city during this whole remarkable era.

“Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudí to Dalí,” organized in conjunction with the Cleveland Museum of Art, remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum through June 3. It was put together at the Met by the curators Jared Goss and Magdalena Dabrowski.

KINGSTON, Wash. — Amateur gardeners by the thousands used to herald the arrival of spring with a pilgrimage to an artificial paradise here known as Heronswood.

They strolled through its woodland garden, marveling at hellebores with black flowers, electric blue corydalis and silvery cyclamen that they could buy in the Heronswood nursery. Gathered from six continents and artfully displayed beneath towering Douglas firs, the vast collection inspired and delighted gardeners from the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

But this spring, a visit to this enchanted forest will have a scary new price tag, $9 million.

About 25 miles north of Seattle by ferry and car, the site on the Kitsap Peninsula, including gardens, empty greenhouses and a three-bedroom ranch house, is being sold by W. Atlee Burpee & Company. The company bought the nursery and gardens in 2000, moved the nursery to its East Coast sites last year and closed the garden to all but potential buyers, causing an uproar.

People say they think that Burpee absconded with a horticultural gem that raised gardening excellence in the Northwest. They are saddened, and some are enraged, to be locked out of a place that transformed a backyard hobby into a globetrotting adventure in plant exploration.

The closing was hugely traumatic, said Kathy Fries of Kirkland. At a garden convention in Seattle, Ms. Fries began to weep as she recalled trips there and described “the fear of losing the inspiration I’d come to rely on” for her home garden.

Burpee added insult to hurt feelings when it set an opening price for the 15 acres of $11 million, since reduced to $9 million, a surprising figure for a homestead without a water view, even in the inflated Puget Sound market.

The lower price, twice what Burpee paid for the property, is “based on the value of the botanical garden as a work of art, as a treasure,” said George Ball, the president and chief executive of Burpee and a former president of the American Horticultural Society.

Preserving the woodland garden will be a condition of sale, but public access cannot be guaranteed, Mr. Ball said.

Gardeners have started the Pacific Northwest Horticultural Conservancy ( www.weloveplants.org), to buy the site and turn it into a research and education center. The group has asked Mr. Ball to lower his price, said its chairwoman, Lee Neff. Mr. Ball said he had offered to sell it to the group for $4.5 million.

No matter the outcome, Burpee will have a hard time rebuilding its image in this region. In newspapers, people have disparaged it as shameful, deceitful, greedy and inept.

At Christmas, Burpee landed on The Seattle Times’s “naughty” list along with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il.

“I’ll never buy a Burpee product again,” Barbara Guthrie of Shoreline said at the garden convention. “They might sell seeds and plants, but they don’t really care.”

Much of the 20-year history of Heronswood has been a clash between art and commerce. In 1987, Daniel J. Hinkley and his partner, Robert L. Jones, an architect, bought two and a half acres for $98,000 and a few years later added several acres for $37,000, Mr. Hinkley said.

The two and loyal employees who called themselves Heronistas transformed five acres of blackberry-infested woods and paddocks into extraordinary shade and sun gardens.

Mr. Hinkley traveled to China, Costa Rica, India, New Zealand, South Africa and anywhere else he could find unusual plants and seeds to import and propagate in this moist, relatively warm climate.

To finance his passion, Heronswood sold excess plants mostly through a 200-page textbook-style catalog intended for gardening purists. It listed products in botanical Latin and carried no photographs or drawings of the plants.

By 2000, the founders and workers had painstakingly indexed more than 7,000 plants. They sent catalogs to 50,000 people and shipped plants around the United States and the world. But the responsibility became oppressive, Mr. Hinkley said.

The owners decided to sell when Burpee, whose catalog readership is in the millions, offered $4.5 million for the Heronswood name, nursery and gardens, Mr. Ball said.

Mr. Ball, who has compared Burpee to a Ford and Heronswood to a Jaguar, said he could not turn a profit on his new brand. Many perennials that thrived in Kingston cannot survive in backyards in drier, hotter regions or colder regions, he said.

The Burpee research director, Grace C. Romero, said many potential customers found the Heronswood catalog, with its Latin names, impenetrable. In 2003, Mr. Ball said, he offered to sell back Heronswood and an adjoining property to its founders for $2.8 million, 60 percent of what Burpee paid, but they declined.

In short order, Burpee produced a catalog bursting with color photographs.

To Mr. Hinkley, that “vulgarized” what Heronswood represented. “These are not marigolds,” he said.

In May, Mr. Ball ended his experiment. The nursery was trucked to sites in Delaware and Pennsylvania, where the plants will be close to metropolitan centers and tested for their ability to thrive in varied climates.

Mr. Ball said he fantasized that a very wealthy man would buy the property for his garden-loving wife.

Anyone who does must be willing to spend a minor fortune on landscaping and to preserve three woodland acres that can never be bulldozed for a guest house, tennis court or swimming pool.

There have been three nibbles, but no serious offers, Mr. Ball said.

He has not given up hope, saying, “You never know where an angel is going to come from.”

A small energy company is the latest to propose a liquefied natural gas terminal in Southern California, detailing a plan Wednesday for two floating platforms about 10 miles southwest of Huntington Beach.

As envisioned by Esperanza Energy, a subsidiary of Tidelands Oil and Gas Corp. of San Antonio, the terminals would be located in 1,100 feet of water, among a set of existing oil platforms. The facility, to be called Port Esperanza, would transform the super-chilled liquid fuel back into vapor and then pump it ashore through pipelines.

The proposal comes six weeks after Long Beach officials pulled the plug on plans for an $800-million natural gas terminal in the Port of Long Beach after safety concerns proved insurmountable. Sound Energy Solutions, a partnership with ConocoPhillips and Mitsubishi Corp. that is proposing the port terminal, last month sued to force the Long Beach Harbor Board of Commissioners to revive the project.

The proposal also comes just weeks before the Coast Guard is expected to release the final environmental impact report on BHP Billiton’s proposed gas facility offshore near Oxnard, a plan that has drawn significant local opposition.

Given the strength of the resistance to the half a dozen other plans, Esperanza executives studied all of the West Coast proposals for liquefied natural gas operations to learn from their mistakes.

“Our goal was to not pursue a project unless we were convinced that we could do it better than anyone else,” said Terry Mitchell, an Esperanza vice president.

The company, which first signaled its interest in building an offshore terminal in April, took pains to point out the ways its proposal addressed past community concerns. No gas would be stored at the facility, for example, and no pollutants would be emitted as part of the regasification process.

Harvey Morris, assistant general counsel for the California Public Utilities Commission, said that Esperanza addressed one of the commission’s “major concerns”: that an LNG facility shouldn’t be located in or near densely populated areas.

“This project, like three others, is located in federal offshore waters at least 10 miles from land and, under our experts’ views, would pose no safety risk to people onshore,” Morris said.

But Esperanza’s efforts didn’t calm all of the waters.

“It doesn’t really change our position, which is that we don’t need it, whatever it is,” said Rory Cox, California program director for San Francisco-based Pacific Environment. Cox said that the environmental group disagreed with a 2003 California Energy Commission study that determined California would need the resources of at least one and perhaps two West Coast LNG terminals.

Others said the latest project highlighted the need to consider these plans collectively rather than proposal by proposal.

“What we have been asking the state to do is to compare all of the proposed LNG projects,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center. “Until we get that kind of information, it’s hard to make an analysis.”

The heart of the Esperanza proposal, Mitchell said, are two floating machines that are half the size of a yard crane at the port of Los Angeles or Long Beach, projecting about 100 feet above the water. They would be anchored to the bottom and maneuvered alongside an arriving ship by using onboard electrically powered thrusters. Once attached to the ship with suction cups, they would draw liquefied gas from the ship.

Esperanza intends to use warm water discharged by a power plant to warm the LNG and turn it back into gas, Mitchell said. It then would travel by pipeline to shore, where it would tie into Southern California Gas Co.’s distribution network.

“We would generate no air emissions with our terminals. We will locate in an industrial area near existing oil platforms and they would be very difficult to see from the shore,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell did not estimate the facility’s cost but said it would be comparable to other West Coast proposals — about $800 million. The facility would process as much as 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day. In 2005, Californians consumed nearly 6 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, according to the California Energy Commission.

Esperanza expects to submit formal proposals as early as the end of 2007.

The project will require approvals from the state’s Public Utilities, Lands and Coastal commissions and the Coast Guard.