Sunken Hallidie Plaza was a deeply wrong design idea

Change is brewing at the Powell Street BART Station, where a newly completed plan devotes at least $30 million to upgrades that include new ceilings, improved lighting and a more open concourse.

The first set of improvements should be completed by 2018. And when it’s done, the real problem with BART’s third-busiest station will remain: Hallidie Plaza.

What was envisioned as a grand entrance instead is a void to avoid, a deep, angled space beloved by none but too pricey to fix. A space to pass through on your way to Muni or BART, or where tourists wonder why the city’s official Visitor Information Center is in a setting that makes them want to book the first flight home.

The problem isn’t that the plaza connecting our below-ground transit to the Union Square area was done on the cheap. The granite walls are rugged and the carpet of brick is expansive. When it opened in 1973 as the centerpiece of the BART-triggered remake of Market Street, Mayor Joseph Alioto hailed the result as showing “it is possible to harmonize great developments with artistic beauty.”

Or, in hindsight, a monument to the sad truth that in cities, the biggest mistakes are the ones that can’t be reversed.

This hardly qualifies as breaking news: Months after Alioto’s praise for the multi-tiered space below the cable car turnaround, Chronicle columnist Herb Caen referred to it as “that awful sunken Hallidie Plaza.” He also had a modest suggestion: “Do you think if the city put a pack of hyenas in ... it would warm things up a bit?”

The problem is that — like too many other architectural wrong turns of the 1950s and ’60s — the sculptural pit was conceived with the idea that urban spaces should be secluded from urban drama, the noise and friction of the streets. Which is great if we’re talking about Golden Gate Park, but the junction of Powell and Market streets isn’t the spot to lie low.

No magnet for anyone

In the early years, the concern was that Hallidie was a magnet for ne’er-do-wells. Now, even hustlers are hard to find.

When I stopped by this week on a sunny afternoon, just two panhandlers stood waiting at the escalator down from the cable car turntable. There were a few folks in the outdoor cafe with its sign at the entrance declaring “no outside food” and a trio of pot smokers huddled by the elevator, out of service yet again.

Piped-in classical music filled the dark walkway below Cyril Magnin Street where the visitors center is located — an ironic accompaniment to the carom of a plastic vodka bottle hurled from the sidewalk above.

The desolation is by design, or rather, the process of elimination. All benches have been removed, along with the original circular planters and their seating-friendly rims. Instead of the men who lounged on the mezzanine — maybe vagrants, maybe just seniors who wanted to sit in the sun — there are enough pigeons to make Union Square jealous.

Start from scratch

So what should be done? Ideally, what I wrote a decade ago: “Declare the plaza a total loss and start again from the ground up.” I wasn’t the first with such a notion, nor the last: “Bring the plaza to street level and engage surrounding street life” is one proposal in the city’s ambitious and slow-moving Better Market Street plan, now in the environmental review process.

The problem is, such moves would cost exponential amounts of money; it’s hard to turn back the clock when the clock was replaced by a 20-foot-deep canyon. And in the unlikely event the city had money kicking around for such an endeavor, other civic needs are more pressing.

One outside observer suggests large-scale but temporary interventions.

“Maybe it becomes a jazz venue or a full-time farmers market,” said Gabe Klein, who has worked for the mayors of Chicago and Washington, and is author of the new book “Start-Up City: Inspiring Private and Public Entrepreneurship, Getting Projects Done and Having Fun.” “You want something big to make it active. It’s got to be interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

Long-ago discussion

Back in 2004, the city’s Department of Public Works held a three-day workshop to stir enthusiasm for updating this underworld that cable car inventor Andrew Hallidie no doubt would disown.

“It’s a discussion of what the plaza should be 20 years from now,” said one DPW staffer, Mohammed Nuru.

Now, Nuru is the city’s public works director. This week he touted the raised hopes in Better Market Street — “it’s still a very viable concept that needs to be looked at” — but admitted that the bright future dreamed of in 2004 remains distant.

“I see a lot of potential, but to my mind, it’s still a hole in the ground,” Nuru sighed. “Everything connects there — workers, visitors, people trying to get on a train. We should do something to make it special.”

Jazz venue. Glassed-in market. Heck, a plaza-wide trampoline or inflatable slides from the sidewalk down to BART. At this point, anything is worth a try.

Fixing cities

Gabe Klein will be talking urban iteration and fixing big-city mistakes at 6 p.m. Nov. 18 at SPUR, 654 Mission St. www.spur.org

For John King’s narrated video tour of Hallidie Plaza, go to: http://bit.ly/1MXidJS