S.F. almost tore down S.F.’s Ferry Building after World War II

The lead headline on the front page of the Jan. 22, 1948, San Francisco Chronicle got straight to the point: “40-Story World Trade Center Urged for Ferry Building Site.”

The headline wasn’t intended as a warning — beloved civic treasure at risk! — so much as a sign of progress. The foot of Market Street would receive the “special recognition” desired in the city’s shoreline plan that had been done in 1943, with an eye to life after World War II. The Board of State Harbor Commissioners, which managed the port, had proposed the location. After all, said one commissioner, “If we fix up the poor old Ferry Building, we still have a 50-year-old building.”

The general idea of world trade centers dated back at least to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, where, even as the deadliest war in history neared, a building was devoted to the theme of “World Peace through World Trade.” The end of World War II seemed to signal that such centers’ moment had come, and civic leaders saw one as a way to reaffirm San Francisco as the trading gateway between the United States and the Pacific Rim. New Orleans already had opened such a center in 1943. Why let some other West Coast city cut in line ahead of San Francisco?

Not every local embraced the idea: “It’s an outrage,” one member of the city’s Board of Supervisors told the Chronicle. “They might as well tear down the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York.” But other reactions echoed the letter writer to the Examiner who urged naysayers, “Wake up. Throw out those 1905 calendars. … We’re living in 1948. The past is past.”

Equally sanguine was Leland Cutler, the president of the trade center authority. No fly-by-night huckster, the dapper Stanford graduate had built a formidable reputation as a business executive with a zest for civic projects, whether working to line up construction financing for the Bay Bridge or presiding over the Golden Gate International Exposition that spawned Treasure Island. This track record made Cutler an obvious choice to lead the trade center push: Demolishing the Ferry Building “might meet with disfavor” among historians, he said the day of the announcement, but “a new and modern structure might, in effect, be a replica of the present building.”

The quest was also embraced by the Chronicle, which followed the news story with a rhapsodic editorial praising the “logic” of clearing out the clutter of the past to move forward and seize the initiative. Rather than offering sentimental objections to the World Trade Center Authority’s huge proposal, the paper urged readers to view the swap of old for new in a different light — as “a monument to San Francisco’s future.”

That this future would be bigger, and emphatically different, was accepted across the board. As the planners were considering a new plan for the waterfront, there were studies underway to identify locations for a second Bay Bridge and a second Golden Gate Bridge to handle the traffic jams that the ever-growing number of commuters faced twice a day. Or consider the writings of Herb Caen, the young Chronicle columnist who was more popular than ever after returning from military service in Europe. He still dished out snappy observations and topical jokes, but readers particularly relished the smitten paeans to the city that was “glamorized a little by a wisp of fog.” If such rhapsodies were sentimental, well, “the San Franciscan is hopelessly sentimental, and I am hopelessly San Franciscan.”

Yet Caen agreed that the postwar strains were real. His chosen city’s residents “can no longer sit quietly and ruminate on past glories,” he wrote in 1948’s “The San Francisco Book.” “The scenery? Beautiful, but no scenery can be quite as beautiful as a home to see it from.” In a city with a population that grew from 634,536 to 775,357 in just one decade, he also challenged the idea of trying to protect “ ‘landmarks’ that serve no purpose today and have a doubtful importance as relics.”

His next book was “Baghdad-by-the-Bay,” a celebration of his chosen city that became a national bestseller and downplayed current affairs. Yet, when the Ferry Building makes an appearance, Caen sees nothing more than “this sad old pile of gray — dead and useless except for the clock that goes ticking on when all else is gone.” In another chapter, he contemplates “the last rusty old streetcar rattling around the loop of the Ferry Building — old friends that have a lot to talk about, nothing to live for, and nobody to care anymore.”

The full reveal of the World Trade Center came in 1951 with the publication of a 55-page prospectus on what the authors boasted would be “the most worthwhile major project in the annals of development in the west.” The proposal had grown to nine blocks in size, three spanning a submerged Embarcadero and the other six perched on a mammoth pier that made Ferry Building architect A. Page Brown’s vaulted concrete platform beneath the terminal seem petite. In the center was the slab-like tower — “a landmark of massive simplicity” — surrounded by a vast plaza linked to Market Street by automobile ramps and to the bay by steps at a scale reminiscent of the ones in Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein’s legendary 1925 silent classic “Battleship Potemkin.”

Schemes of this nature, eye candy unfurled with assurances that anything was possible, were nothing new to this stretch of the city. Now, though, government forces were the ones treating the urban terrain as a blank slate to be rearranged at will in service of a mega-development that supposedly would “foster international trade as a source of mutual understanding, which is prerequisite to lasting world peace.”

The problem is that nobody could say what a world trade center would actually do on a day-to-day basis, or why it needed to be so large. The prospectus coincided with Cutler departing on a promotional trip to Asia after telling reporters that already “he has in hand tentative commitments to fill three buildings.” A European expedition followed, but by then even the Chronicle was losing interest: Cutler’s meeting with an Italian trade group in Rome was given a squib on an inside page beneath an article titled “Air Line Hostesses are Models for Aviation Day Travel Show.”