Endres Ware provided architecture and engineering services for the site, including the design of a bridge with a 105-foot span for pedestrians and light vehicles that leads to newly restored wetland areas.

Bridge deck plan

The wood deck of the pedestrian bridge, which is cantilevered from a torsion pipe beam that  spans between concrete piers,  is set back from its support so that it gives the illusion that the bridge is floating above the natural landscape below. The sinuous railing provides areas for people to lean out over the creek without blocking the deck.

Along the trails through the park are a maintenance building, public restrooms, and picnic and shade shelters that Endres Ware also designed for Ryder Park. The structures contribute an open framework that allows visitors to pursue the activities of their choice from strolling, jogging and cycling to picnicking. The uniform palette of materials: Ipe wood, also called ironwood, decking, solid concrete bases, steel pipe, and the curvilinear forms shared by the structures promote a perception of the meandering park as a single entity.

References to nature are most obvious in the splayed forms of the two picnic shelters arcing away from each other that suggest wind-blown leaves. Wood slats recalling leaf veins are bound together by upper and lower steel cables that run through them to form the central vein like that of a real leaf.

Picnic shelters plan

The shade structure, shown here in structural drawings and a photograph continue the palette of materials used in the picnic shelters and their skeletal form.

As shown in the photograph above, the 70-acre park projects a festive feeling appropriate to a waterside recreation area.

Since southeastern San Francisco is changing dramatically, how will its transformation affect the city as a whole? Will people travel the same routes to the same destinations that made the city famous in the past? Or, will a new city center in Mission Bay turn the old familiar city into what we may call the “museum city.” This transformation will not rob the historic city of its charm and importance, but it may no longer have the dynamism that will characterize the new center.

When San Francisco is depicted in the public’s imagination, its important geographic centers are typically those that were established in the 19th century and remained dominant through the 20th century. They are: the financial district in the blocks around lower Market Street; the commercial areas focused on Union Square and in recent years extended to Mission Street; the hills named Nob, Russian, and Telegraph; and other well known residential neighborhoods: Pacific, and Presidio Heights, the streetcar suburbs such as the Mission and the Western Addition, and the Richmond and Sunset districts, automobile suburbs that began to spread across the city in the early 20th century.

In recent boom times real estate development for office space crossed Market Street, and a new cultural center coalesced south of Market in the 1990s in what is now called SOMA.

Both SOMA and the Central Waterfront district to the south have experienced more or less steady development of market-rate and affordable housing with related commercial activity. The completion of the baseball park in 2000 spurred growth and attracted attention further south to the Mission Bay area.

Yet, the idea of living and working in the barren southeastern flatlands so unlike the familiar and glamorous traditional city to the north did not appeal to most San Franciscans.

In the mid-1990s, the Port of San Francisco’s planning and environmental staff collaborated to establish green guidelines for land use and development of the Port’s maritime facilities from Piers 80 to 98. One of the Port’s early moves was to turn Pier 98—bay fill that became a brownfields site—into Heron’s Head Park, a dedicated wetlands habitat. Owned and maintained by the Port, it provides a sanctuary for 78 different species of birds—and an ideal place to study the shoreline ecology of the south waterfront and how its flora and fauna have been impacted by industrial pollution.

The heart of this area is the Backlands, which takes in Piers 90 and 94. The majority of its 47 acres was undeveloped—as bay fill, it required foundations that were too costly for most industrial buildings. The development of Mission Bay forced the concrete and gravel suppliers located there to move to the Backlands. Norcal’s recycling plant was already in operation at Pier 96, close to barge and rail service. Bode’s and Hanson’s new concrete and gravel plants were required by the Port to be green by design and operation. Both plants also take advantage of service from barges and ships. Their open hard surface lots are paved in permeable concrete. Stormwater runoff is addressed by surrounding open areas and parking lots with bio-swales planted with reintroduced native plants.

Bode and Hanson have both made green part of their brands, installing large public displays of their sustainable building products. They jointly sponsored an ornamental garden on Third Street that helps form a green gateway to the Bayview. They also helped defray the cost of cleaning up a former dumping area at the end of Pier 94 to create another wetlands. New soil has encouraged native grasses and shrubs to grow, creating a home for local and migrating birds—a nature preserve in the making. Discarded tires and appliances, long buried by other debris, are removed as they continue to surface.

Green Synergy

The Port’s latest master plan for the Backlands’ 47 acres identifies potential tenants with both the means to build and operations that suit the green program. They are a bio-diesel processing plant and San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s wastewater treatment digesters. The oldest tenant in the Backlands is a tallow company. Due to clean air restrictions, it’s no longer allowed to process the grease it collects from local restaurants, so it’s been shipping the waste to Port of Stockton and from there across the Pacific to China. By locating a bio-diesel plant next door to the tallow company, the grease can be processed locally in a sealed system and then converted to bio-diesel fuel.

Greater synergy will also be realized by relocating the wastewater treatment digesters to the Backlands from their current site in a residential neighborhood half a mile away. The new treatment plant will be able to separate the organics and process them appropriately, either cooked directly into fertilizer or sent to the bio-diesel plant to be turned into fuel. The latter process will use the high concentrations of methane that are a byproduct of water treatment as fuel—another example of the Backland’s “virtuous cycle.”

What’s next for the Backlands? Logically enough, the Port hopes to attract sustainable industries, locating them adjacent to Cargo Way, creating a “green cluster” along the south waterfront. They envision improving public access on this road, which links Third Street to Heron’s Head Park, to integrate the adjoining Bayview district with the regional Bay Trail and San Francisco’s Blue Greenway. By reconnecting the city to the Bay in a way that signals a new attitude toward its ecological integrity, the Port’s efforts are as full of promise in their own way as the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway.

The MUNI bus facility will have the capacity to maintain and operate 165 diesel buses, and provide a comfortable work environment for approximately 300 employees. The facility’s 5.32 acres of city land is on Islais Creek, an industrial creek being reclaimed for public use by the community. Two buildings covering an area of 54,000 sq ft have been proposed. One building near the creek incorporates a public use lobby and labor history exhibit. 41,000 sq ft of property has been dedicated to public access.

RCCo is committed to design the facility as environmentally friendly as possible within the constraints of a project which presents an inherent potential for producing waste and toxins. We are studied ways of recycling wash water, and harnessing natural energy for use within the building through the use of solar panels and possibly windmills. The “sawtooth” clerestory design allows for maximum sun exposure to maximize the benefits of the solar panels, and to maximize the amount of light that filters into the building’s interior.

World War II provided the impetus for the construction of factories and warehouses. During the War, the creek served as parking areas for large ocean-going tugs. Further up along the shore of the creek is located the largest copra coconut processing plant in the entire United States west coast region. In fact, the abandoned five-story high copra crane, shown in the picture above was used to transport large amount of copras from ships to the plant as late as 1974, is still standing on the creek bank today and is preserved as a historic landmark.

ILWU Local 10 longshoremen worked the pier, using picks and shovels to break up the large pieces of copra in the ships’ hulls. A large suction pump known as a blower then moved the copra pieces to the mill where ILWU Local 6 members processed it into oil. The remaining “copra meal” was pressed into pellets, put into 100 pound sacks and the warehousemen prepared it to be shipped across the bay to warehouses at Colgate-Palmolive-Peet and McKessin-Robbins. The crane was used to load the copra meal onto outbound ships.

By the 1970’s the businesses around the Creek had mostly closed and many buildings abandoned. Today the area contains several auto wrecking yards, underutilized warehouses and private and public bus storage yards. These facilities are situated right up to the edge of the Creek precluding public access to the water except in several small locations.

Presently, community organizations including the Friends of Islais Creek, established in 1984, have been working to improve the conditions of the creek and nearby areas.

The Copra Crane has been the subject of a campaign to save it as a monument to the old days of longshoring at the creek. Aerial dancers “re-purpose” the Copra Crane on Islais Creek for a unique dance performance in 1999.

Wikipedia > Islais Creek