San Francisco’s automotive past haunts its post-car dreams
The Embarcadero Freeway’s influence lives on in a less-than-welcoming hotel design
The Hyatt Regency San Francisco is haunted.
You won’t find an apparition of a colorful century-old character, as you might at other landmark hotels in the city. This Brutalist classic from 1973 is too young for that. Nor is it inhabited by, say, the spirit of a waterbed salesman who choked on a Harvey Wallbanger at the lobby bar.
No, the Hyatt is haunted by the ghost of a dead freeway. State Highway 480, the Embarcadero Freeway, dominated San Francisco’s waterfront from 1968 to 1991, looming just a few hundred feet from the hotel. The double-decker monstrosity has been gone for more than 25 years, but its existence at the time of the Hyatt’s development — and the car-centric thinking that birthed it — left a mark on the hotel and its surroundings that has long outlasted the freeway itself.
A bold move is undercut
This week, as the city bans private cars from much of iconic Market Street, including the block in front of the Hyatt, the legacy of mid-20th century infrastructure still limits efforts to make San Francisco as congenial to walking, biking, and transit as it could be. The Hyatt Regency is a case in point.
To understand the scope of the missed opportunity here, it helps to have an idea of how ideally the Hyatt is placed for a post-automotive age.
The hotel lies directly inland of the historic Ferry Building, now home to tourist-friendly food shops and biweekly farmers markets. Between the two buildings, where the freeway once stood, there’s now a broad boulevard — The Embarcadero — with a wide island in the middle where historic streetcars pick up and drop off passengers. On the inland side of the boulevard is Embarcadero Plaza (formerly Justin Herman Plaza), an open gathering place that’s a bit thin on amenities but draws crowds with a winter ice-skating rink and other events. The Hyatt rises up from this gathering place.
Shops and restaurants line the ground floor of the Hyatt along Market Street’s wide brick sidewalk, and on its north side the building is linked to the Embarcadero Center mall, an open-air shopping center nestled amid office towers. But the hotel’s main entrance isn’t on one of these facades. It’s on the east end of the building, on Drumm Street, near the meeting point of Market and another major artery, California Street.
An urbanist’s dream
This corner may be the most transit-rich in the city: There’s a cable car terminus, a subway entrance for regional (BART) and local (Muni) rail lines, and a stop for several Muni buses and the F Line historic streetcar. There’s even a tourist-friendly bike rental depot, right in the mix.
But what face does the Hyatt present at this hub of the city? Driveways, gray walls, tall plastic hedges, and exit-only doors. You can’t legally walk into the hotel from the Market-California-Drumm corner without going halfway up the block and crossing the hotel’s long, airport-like loading zone into the front doors.
Other major San Francisco hotels, including the Palace, the Westin St. Francis, and the Fairmont, are easily approached on foot and invite pedestrians in with entrances that are central, spacious, and elegant. Even more recent ones, like the St. Regis and the W, take advantage of excellent walkable locations by providing front doors built for arrivals on foot as well as by car.
Missed opportunities
The Hyatt missed out on this. Though it has four potential walking entrances (only two of which are open to the public now), all of them have built-in limitations that would require more than quick fixes to overcome. No doubt many design factors influenced decisions about these doors, both at the time of construction and in the years since. But in each case, I believe the overpowering influence of the Embarcadero Freeway was at least partly to blame.
In my next post, I’ll examine each of these entrances and how the presence of the Embarcadero Freeway, and the thinking behind it, hurt their potential to improve the walkability of the lower Market Street area. Then, I’ll consider some possible solutions that might help to make the Hyatt less like a spaceship from the Cold War and more like a 21st century San Francisco neighbor.
