Presidio Tunnel Tops

I first heard of what has come to be known as the Presidio Tunnel Tops in 2015, when visiting landscape architect Rania Reyes mentioned her involvement in a new Presidio Parklands Project in San Francisco. Rania was being given a personal tour of the garden at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles by its landscape architect Mia Lehrer. We were all there for an installment of Shirley Watts’ Natural Discourse symposium “Flora & Fauna,” at which Mia Lehrer was a speaker, and I sort of tagged along for Mia’s after-hours tour of the garden.

As far as what I could discern about the Presidio project, as a tag-along not wanting to be too intrusive with endless questions, I had a vague sense that there was to be some heroic geoengineering involved. And then over the next seven years I completely lost track of the project. In defense of my inattention, this was a long, winding, extremely complicated project with a lot of moving parts and overlapping administrative jurisdictions*.

The year of Rania’s visit to LA’s Natural History Museum, 2015, marked completion of the Presidio Parkway. This new roadway, comprising two tunnels, seven lanes, replaced the earthquake-damaged, bottleneck-prone elevated road (Doyle Drive) that had led motorists in and out of the city to the Golden Gate Bridge since 1937. It would be another seven years before the planting of the tunnels over the parkway would be finished and the mostly privately funded Tunnel Tops opened to the public.

(*Agencies that Built the Presidio Parkway
California Department of Transportation (CalTrans)
Metropolitan Transportation Commission
San Francisco County Transportation Authority
The Presidio Trust
Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District
The National Park Service — from the website)

The Presidio and I go way back, to when this former Spanish military fort dating to 1776 was a quiet, uncrowded destination to walk when I lived in my 20s in the Marina district of SF. After moving away, the Presidio was always a beloved place to revisit on yearly trips north to plant nurseries (e.g. Western Hills). Over the years, I think every family dog has romped through the Presidio. San Francisco’s embarrassment of riches in parks and open space has always been a source of envy to this Angelino. (Yeah, I know, in LA we have the beaches as our parks/open space, but I stubbornly prefer parks/botanical gardens.). And now with completion of Tunnel Tops, a project on a creative, technical par with the High Line, my envy is going to require frequent visits to assuage.

Unlike the High Line, there’s not a lot of media coverage on Tunnel Tops, even though James Corner’s firm Field Operations had a hand in both projects. Tunnel Tops’ salient evolutionary points, to me, are that in the year 1989 the Loma Prieta earthquake made the main conduit to Golden Gate Bridge, Doyle Drive, unsafe. Also in that year, the military gave up the site as a military post. What followed were years of inter-agency debate over use and access. The favored solution was building a freeway to modern standards that would continue the tradition of bisecting the Presidio, sequestering it from a view of the bay and adjacent jewel of the city Crissy Field. Ultimately, a landscape architect’s vision that prioritized this incredible setting of natural beauty as an opportunity for recreational space for people thankfully won the day.

During the long inter-agency period discussing a new roadway, somehow amidst the gravitational pull of conventional traffic solutions, landscape architect Michael Painter’s improbable proposal to build a park atop tunnels slowly gained traction. From SPUR (San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, a nonprofit): “For infrastructure projects like roads, landscape architects are at the bottom of the professional pile. A common attitude is, We’ll build it, then give you a little money to pretty it up. The focus is on objects, while landscape architects focus on spaces.”

“Presidio Tunnel Tops reimagines a once-elevated highway into a vibrant, ecologically rich 14-acres of public space. Built atop 7 lanes of Presidio Parkway tunnels, the new landscape stitches together historic parklands with the San Francisco Bay and transforms infrastructure into an immersive experience, choreographing movement, topography, and ecology to create an open, accessible pedestrian connection across 40 feet of grade change.” American Society of Landscape Architects — read more about the project from ASLA here.

For my first visit, to find the park ablaze with flowering leucospermums was pretty special. (I especially noted the coastal woollybush from Australia, Adenanthos sericeus, because I just planted another one in my SoCal garden.) Leucadendrons and other proteaceae, succulents, California natives, grasses, it’s a gorgeous mix that’s maturing beautifully in the propitious climate of the Bay Area.

This April the current administration fired all the board members of the Presidio Trust, the federal arm that manages the Presidio along with the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. For now it’s uncertain how this will affect the park’s future operation. But it’s all the more reason to experience Tunnel Tops now in all its glory.