By William Issel bi@sfsu.edu
ã Pacific Historical Review, November 1999.

Note:  A fully annotated version of this essay can be obtained by writing to Issel at the email address above.

Introduction

In January 1959, a coalition of neighborhood preservationists and environmental activists forced the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to rescind its approval of seven of nine freeways scheduled for construction by state and federal highway departments. Extensive consultation then took place involving the supervisors, city planners, independent highway designers and landscape architects, and state engineers. In 1964 and 1966, the Board reconsidered two of the freeways cancelled in 1959. The new plans included major changes in design and landscaping meant to improve aesthetic quality and lessen environmental damage. One of the two plans, the Panhandle Freeway, would have slashed through part of Golden Gate Park and displaced hundreds of African American residents of the Fillmore and Divisadero neighborhoods. The other, the Golden Gate Freeway, would have cut through part of the Fisherman’s Wharf area and run alongside the city yacht harbor in the Marina district. Plans for both of the freeways met defeat a second time.

The 1966 vote dismayed Mayor John F. Shelley as well as California governor Edmund G. Brown, who had both urged supervisors to approve the new plans. Brown and Shelley regarded the redesigned cross town freeways as necessary for the future progress of the city in the region and fully compatible with their city’s special peninsular character (both were native San Franciscans). The mayor maintained his sense of humor, remarking that "There will be a freeway on the moon before we get one in San Francisco." Governor Brown, however, made no secret of his disappointment and declared that "I can’t think of anything that’s happened in San Francisco or California that I regret more than the failure of the Board of Supervisors to come up with a plan to move traffic in and out of San Francisco."

Three years later, the city had a new mayor. Joseph L. Alioto, a former member of the city’s redevelopment agency, like Shelley and Brown a San Francisco native, matched them in enthusiasm for downtown modernization and economic growth. At the same time, the new mayor regarded freeways as blight on San Francisco’s landscape and he was on record with his demand that one of the four city freeways constructed before 1959, the Embarcadero Freeway, should be demolished. In one of Alioto’s first announcements, in March 1969, he declared victory in another freeway fight. The city won its five year battle with the state over the routing of a four mile section of the Junipero Serra Freeway (Interstate Highway 280) that ran through city owned watershed land in San Mateo County. The engineers insisted on putting the freeway on the shoreline of Crystal Springs Reservoir. The city wanted to avoid water pollution and preserve the shoreline area for recreational use, and it enlisted federal assistance on its behalf and forced the state to move the highway one-mile east along a ridge overlooking the reservoir.

By April 22, 1970, the nation’s first Earth Day, journalists routinely characterized the city’s refusal to cooperate with state highway engineers as "the San Francisco freeway revolt." Among the variety of attributes associated with "the city that knows how," San Francisco could now be designated as the site of the country’s first environmentalist victory in what Business Week magazine in 1967 called "The War over Urban Expressways." Metaphors of war and revolt evoke images of armed combat between forces of good and evil and heroic resistance to unjust tyrants. Such language serves a useful purpose, because it preserves some of the actual rhetoric of the time and highlights the contested and conflicted character of a great deal of the content of urban politics and policy making in postwar San Francisco and the nation at large.

The purpose of this article is to examine the complex practice of politics during the 25 years when freeway building occupied an important place in San Francisco urban policy considerations. The article draws upon archival material, oral history sources, contemporary journalist’s reports, and editorial comment, to describe the growing importance of environmentalist values as criteria in highway policy planning. Environmentalism assumed something of a formal status in San Francisco on August 26, 1963 when the Board of Supervisors established a policy declaring that all future transportation plans had to be compatible with the preservation of "land values, human values, and the city’s treasured appearance." The article presents an analytical narrative of the origins, development, and outcomes of the pattern of freeway politics that led up to and then followed the implementation of the 1963 policy. The article considers opponents of environmentalism as well as the reformers themselves, individual activists inside and outside government, existing and newly formed interest groups, partisan politics, and intergovernmental relations. The article begins with an account of controversies in the late 1930s and 1940s that prefigured later freeway politics. Then it describes the origin and development of the 1959 "freeway revolt," the rejection of the Panhandle and Golden Gate freeways, and the successful campaign to relocate the Junipero Serra freeway.

"A Device Which Can Make or Break the City"

A sense of urgency concerning transportation planning developed during the late 1930s, when the opening of the Golden Gate and Oakland-San Francisco Bay bridges in 1936 and 1937 created new highway connections between the city and Marin and Alameda counties. In addition, the gradual increase in population and industry on the peninsula stimulated increased highway traffic between the city and San Mateo County. State highway engineers worked on plans for new highway connections. City supervisors and bureaucrats in the city’s public works and public utilities departments vied with one another over whose office should exercise how much authority over the new routes, and activists from the city’s non governmental planning agencies offered advice to both city and state officials.

World War II produced an economic boom and a population influx that, in turn, generated a crisis atmosphere surrounding discussion of transportation. The war created increased pressures on the city's already troubled Market Street and Municipal Railway (MUNI) transit systems (the two were merged under MUNI auspices in 1944). The war also intensified the commitment among private and public activists to improve streets and boulevards within the city, build better highway connections between the city and the region, and create an efficient balance between highway building and transit modernization and expansion.

A controversy in 1942 over highway planning foreshadowed the conflicts that became evident as a regular feature of freeway politics after the war. Disagreements among members of the Board of Supervisors led to the cancellation of transportation consulting contracts with State highway engineer Charles H. Purcell and with the firm of Madigan-Hyland. The Chamber of Commerce originally suggested that the Board hire Purcell, a nationally eminent transportation planner, but when board members expressed concerns about possible conflict of interest, the proposal was rejected. Mayor Rossi then met with Robert Moses in New York City to seek his advice about who should be hired instead of Purcell, and Moses recommended the New York firm of Madigan-Hyland. However, criticism on the Board of bringing in an "outside" firm led the divided Board of Supervisors to reject that contract as well, leading to a stalemate.

Several months later, another private organization, the San Francisco Planning and Housing Association, its work supported by the Junior Chamber of Commerce and private philanthropists, called for action on transportation when it published its "Now Is the Time to Plan: First Steps To a Master Plan for San Francisco." (San Francisco had a Planning Commission but no master plan, director of planning, or planning department) The pamphlet, widely distributed, asked residents "Why must San Francisco Plan?" Because: "Land values are wrong . . . people are moving to the suburbs" and "Areas in the city which lose to the suburbs decay and go to seed -- these are the blighted areas which must be replanned and rebuilt and bring the suburbs back to the city." Transportation planning occupied a central place in the Association's analysis: "The automobile has created problems which force us to re-shape our city" and citizens were advised to "increase the value of SAN FRANCISCO and your section of it, by a comprehensive MASTER PLAN."

Then, in November 1943, Roger Dearborn Lapham, a Yale graduate who had led the waterfront employers during the 1934 strike, won election to the mayor's office. A business-sponsored candidate who promised to assume active leadership of a program of infrastructure and public works planning, Lapham appointed a Citizens' Postwar Planning Committee in April 1945. This voluntary organization functioned as a quasi-public body and in October it presented a prioritized list of public works projects, including highways, as well as a plan for financing their implementation. Lapham also presided over the preparation of San Francisco's first city formal planning document, a project that was part of the program of his fellow Republican, Governor Earl Warren, who used his office to facilitate the creation of local planning agencies throughout California.

Lapham’s predecessor, Angelo Rossi, hired San Francisco's first planning director, L. Deming Tilton, in 1942. Tilton set to work preparing the city’s first Master Plan. The plan appeared in December 1945, and it included recommendations for cross-town freeways that had originated with State of California highway engineers.

The city's new director of planning and the state highway engineers disagreed almost immediately over how to implement several key elements in plans for the city’s first freeway. Commenting on the state’s proposed extension of the Bayshore Freeway in April 1945, L. Deming Tilton put into play a point of view that would recur throughout the debates during the twenty years to come. A freeway, Tilton warned, "is a device which can make or break the city. It can liberate or contribute to congestion. It can cut the city into unrelated parts, or bind it together. It can destroy values, or create new ones. The State cannot soundly develop its urban freeway plans without attention to the planning problems of the city itself." Tilton criticized the state for a narrow approach that considered merely "the assembly and interpretation of traffic data" and the "engineering problem of designing bridges and tunnels", and practice of making plans "without adequate consideration of local problems and without reference to local planning bodies." Tilton emphasized the need "to plan future improvements which will bring maximum benefits to the business interests and people" and insisted that "This first freeway ought …to be definitely related to the city’s plans for mass transportation as well as for the movement of private vehicles. Failure to provide for transit service on the Freeway will result in an unmanageable deluge of private automobiles in the already congested areas of the city."

Tilton underscored three broad issues in his 1945 statement and in a 1946 article published in The American City. First, he insisted upon local input in state planning. Second, he stressed the importance of serving business interests in a fashion that would jeopardize neither the property values of neighborhood residents nor the aesthetic values of the community. Third, he urged the city to face squarely the challenge of combining freeway building with transit expansion: "freeways must be designed and built to carry transit vehicles." Tilton’s personal influence was limited by his brief tenure as the city’s planner (he left in 1946), but the issues he identified soon generated debate beyond the confines of planners and politicians. The policy making process became more complex after 1945, as the state moved to implement freeway plans contained in the Master Plan and the more detailed Transportation Plan of 1948, which both the city and the state adopted as the "Trafficways Plan" in 1951. New plans, the product of reappraisal and redesign prompted by testimony at public hearings, media criticism, and discussions within and among the branches of city government, were produced in 1955, 1960, 1964, and 1966. The Bayshore Freeway, the Southern Freeway, and parts of the Central and Embarcadero Freeways were constructed. The Western Freeway and six others were never built.

The complex character of the policy implementation process derived from divisions over several sets of issues that developed as the city, the state, and the federal government moved beyond planning into route selection and construction. During the late 1940s and early 1950s divisions appeared over the basic question of the extent to which the automobile and truck constituted a promise to San Francisco and to what extent they posed a threat. Questions developed about the extent to which freeways might address the transportation needs of inter-city travelers to and from other Bay Area communities while at the same time worsening the problems of city residents. Discussions that began in 1945 over the optimal mix of freeway and mass transit transportation modes intensified in the following decade as planning for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) proceeded. Disagreements developed between the city and the state about where freeways should be located on city land and about the nature and extent of city participation in and control over location decisions. Differences about freeway planning policy based on disciplinary perspectives and professional career practice manifested themselves among the planners and engineers on the city payroll and between city and State personnel. In addition, alignments among city interest groups multiplied as competing and potentially polarizing sets of priorities became apparent that were based on aesthetic, environmentalist, and preservationist considerations, questions of neighborhood integrity, a desire to preserve residential property values, and a determination to enhance commercial and retail income-generating potential.

"Business Interests must take Leadership"

San Francisco’s city planner during the mid 1950s, Paul Oppermann urged business to "take leadership, that City Hall will follow." Business and labor leaders stressed the need for the city to maintain as much of its traditional domination of commercial and retailing activities in the Bay Area as possible. They regarded freeway construction as a source of livelihood for unionized workers and completed freeways as a vital means for the kind of inter-city auto and truck movement that would allow San Francisco to more effectively compete with regional rivals in an increasingly dispersed metropolitan economy. Citywide business organizations and the labor movement displayed considerable solidarity with state highway engineers. They urged city officials to move ahead with construction of the system of freeways planned by the state of California and approved by the Board of Supervisors in 1944 and codified in the Master Plan of 1945 and the Trafficways Plan of 1951. The AFL-CIO County Labor Council, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and the Down Town Association asked its members to speak with a single voice in support of the planned freeways.

When differences did develop among business and labor interests during the 1950s, they reflected the tensions that existed as the regional economy shifted toward the service-oriented economy of the future and away from the city’s commercial and manufacturing past. Those who emphasized the future growth of tourism regarded massive freeways as incompatible with the preservation of the kind of old-fashioned ambience that would attract the maximum number of convention-goers and recreational tourists to San Francisco. A telling instance of this point of view occurred when Charles Blyth, one of the founders of a non governmental planning agency called the Blyth-Zellerbach Committee, telephoned his friend Mayor George Christopher a few days after the mayor took office in January, 1956. Blyth asked the Mayor to find a way to limit the damage that the Embarcadero Freeway, particularly the section that ran in front of the Ferry Building, might do to the future growth of tourism and to office development along the waterfront. The Mayor met with Blyth, other business leaders, and the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and agreed to seek an alternative to the two-level concrete structure. Christopher insisted at the time and since that he would rather have seen the proposed Ferry Building Park at the foot of Market Street than the freeway, but he eventually abandoned the effort. He could not put together a financial plan to pay the additional construction costs needed to replace the state’s elevated highway with an underground boulevard below the surface.

"Hold it! Not so fast!"

Organized business and the labor movement cooperated in endorsing the importance of completing the state’s system of freeways as incorporated in the city Master Plan. However, the freeway revolt was more than a simple two-sided conflict, with downtown business leaders, joined by labor bureaucrats and government officials on one side arrayed against a coalition of neighborhood people and environmentalists on the other. San Francisco newspapers also played an important role in the freeway revolt, for as the state plans moved to the implementation stage, articles and editorials on the subject increased in volume, and the nature of coverage changed markedly. Prior to the mid-1950s, a note of technological triumph pervaded media coverage. From then on, however, the press, television, and radio began to air doubts about the high social and cultural costs of cross-town freeways and raised questions about the wisdom and judgement of the state highway engineers and their allies in the city.

The San Francisco Chronicle played a particularly important role in the freeway revolt after its executive editor, Scott Newhall, decided that any additional freeways would add to the already considerable damage to the bay area’s unique character caused by demographic and social changes since World War II. Newhall, a maverick descendent of one of the state’s wealthiest nineteenth century land developers, operated according to the philosophy that "the editorial page was my particular interest and baby." Thirty years after the freeway revolt he explained that "I didn’t want to be Democratic or progressive or communist or anything else. I just wanted to be independent and speak on our minds, no matter what." Newhall’s friend and sailing companion Karl Kortum directed the Maritime Museum on the northern waterfront, and in the late 1940s he and his father organized local residents and forced state highway engineers to move a planned section of Highway 101 near their Petaluma ranch in Sonoma County. Now Kortum shocked Newhall with photographs he had taken detailing the damage done to the city of Seattle by the intrusive character of its recently completed waterfront freeway.

The Chronicle’s environmentalist position had the extra benefit of allowing Newhall to claim moral superiority over the rival morning paper, the Hearst family’s San Francisco Examiner. The Hearst paper presented itself as the voice of reason on the subject of freeways, arguing that the automobile was here to stay, freeways were necessary, and the city ought to be choosing the best design rather than calling for a stop to their construction. One of Newhall’s goals as executive editor, he later explained, was "to supplant the Examiner as the basic Number One influence on the political life, social life of San Francisco." Newhall succeeded in winning the circulation war, expanding his paper’s circulation beyond his fondest hopes, and the two papers eventually signed a joint operating agreement with the Examiner publishing an afternoon paper.

In the early 1950s, before Newhall realized that what happened in Seattle could occur in San Francisco, the Chronicle had endorsed the state’s freeway plans. The paper went so far as to provide front-page space above the fold on August 9, 1954 for an article written by the California Division of Highways engineering staff. Headlined "S.F. Skyways To Ease Traffic, Open Up Vistas," the article praised the new "system of Skyways" because "the beauty which has long been San Francisco’s fame will . . . be unfolded to the public entering from all directions." By December 8, 1955, however, the paper used its lead editorial to announce: "Planners Sound Freeway Warning." Readers learned that urban planner Francis Violich and architect William Wurster condemned "a headlong rush to concrete" and that even Paul Oppermann, San Francisco’s City Planner, urged restraint. San Franciscans should regard "a blind rush for a freeway, any kind of freeway, right now" as "an expensive, unsightly, and very durable civic blunder for future generations to mourn over." One cartoon typical of the Chronicle’s increasingly critical point of view appeared above the caption "Hold it! Not so fast!" The cartoon showed a determined police officer halting a truck filled with construction workers with pick and shovel and containers of "instant freeway." The truck bore the label "Willy-Nilly Construction Company" and the Ferry Building stood in the background behind a "Danger – Men at Work" sign.

News stories appeared about divisions within the business community over the details of freeway planning. Columnist Herb Caen condemned freeways because they destroyed the special ambience of his "Baghdad by the Bay." Environmental writer Harold Gilliam, who served an extended term as the official "writer in residence" at the Department of Interior in 1961, analyzed the potential impact of freeway construction in detailed articles. The paper also took full advantage of the possibilities for caricature presented by the new Governor, Democrat Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, who voters sent to Sacramento in early 1959. Brown campaigned on a platform of public works construction that included completion of the state’s interstate highway system. To the Chronicle, Brown’s determination of push expressways through San Francisco made him a traitor to his city. He was lampooned in cartoons as an unfeeling "Sun King," accumulating a reputation as a master builder while allowing his "highwaymen" in the Highway Commission and the Division of Highways to destroy the people’s environment.

By the late 1950s, the Chronicle provided detailed reporting on city planning personnel who questioned aspects of the state highway plans. The paper also covered the activities of several neighborhood organizations that mobilized to protect homes, businesses, and parks as the state highway department moved to begin construction of the planned freeways. In both its reporting and editorializing, the paper sided with the growing grassroots mass movement, which it characterized favorably as a righteous crusade to defend the city from the depredations of soulless pencil pushing state bureaucrats.

"This is YOUR fight! Stand up and be counted"

At about the same time that Scott Newhall joined the environmentalist cause, media coverage of freeway issues increased generally because of the newsworthy activities of neighborhood associations in the Glen Park, Sunset, Telegraph Hill, and Marina, and districts. These areas, slated for freeways according to the Master Plan, now mobilized in order to exercise more effective control over future land use decisions in the city. City planner L. Deming Tilton had enunciated this principle eleven years earlier, and a variety of neighborhood associations, individual homeowners and small business owners had complained against freeway-related displacement in the late forties. Their objections were typically voiced in letters to the editor to local newspapers, or to the mayor and the city planners, or presented a public hearings convened by the state highway department. The city’s media provided little coverage, and the few editorials that did appear typically sided with the highway builders. Opportunities for widespread freeway opposition in the late forties also was limited because much of the highway building in those years took place on land previously used for right of way by the Southern Pacific Railroad. In addition, the number of homes and businesses to be displaced was substantially smaller than would later be the case, and the individuals and organizations in the largely blue collar districts affected in the late 1940s lacked resources and effective leadership.

The prospects for successful resistance improved between 1955 and 1959. The state legislature revised the California Streets and Highways Code to require the Division of Highways to solicit public response to new freeway plans, and in San Francisco, the highway engineers’ proposals affected well-to-do parts of the city where hundreds of homes and businesses faced displacement and relocation. Neighborhood organizations and influential business owners and politicians from the Glen Park and Sunset districts generated the interest and resources necessary to create successful grassroots movements at a time when the press and media had become more receptive to their cause. The Sunset district campaign involved tens of thousands of residents against the Western Freeway. A property developer and a politician proved particularly influential at this stage of the freeway revolt. The property developer was Christopher McKeon, a resident of the Sunset District that would have been bisected by the state’s planned Western Freeway. In 1956, McKeon employed direct mailing and house-to-house canvassing to put together a neighborhood-based anti-freeway organization, the Property Owners’ Association of San Francisco. He also enlisted the support of Rev. Harold Collins, a Roman Catholic priest whose St. Cecilia’s parish congregation stood to have its quality of life adversely affected by the Western Freeway. McKeon and Collins filled neighborhood auditoriums to standing-room-only conditions for several public meetings in the spring of 1956 to protest the construction of a freeway through the Sunset District.

McKeon and Collins successfully mobilized Sunset district residents determined to protect the city’s environmental quality (and the value of their investments), while William Blake, from a position inside city government, went on to provide leadership in the city-wide freeway revolt for a decade. Blake was a millionaire who had originally been appointed to the Board of Supervisors by Mayor Elmer Robinson. As the chairman of the Board's Committee on Streets, Blake became an outspoken critic of freeways, and in June 1956, he joined McKeon and Collins and leaders representing other neighborhood organizations and pressured the Board to pass a resolution protesting the construction of the Western Freeway. Mayor Christopher vetoed the resolution, but the Board’s action encouraged the grassroots anti-freeway sentiment and strengthened opposition to cross-town freeway construction.

The views of attorney Joseph L. Alioto, Chairman of the city Redevelopment Agency in October 1956, typified the emerging consensus on behalf of environmentalist considerations: "For my part, I see no justification for freeways in the center of San Francisco. Any freeways needed should be built near the city’s borders." On January 23, 1959, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to reject the Western Freeway along with the six others in the Master Plan. Adopting the rhetorical style of Patrick Henry defending American virtue against imperial oppression, Blake endorsed the environmentalist position at a meeting packed with spectators who cheered their approval. Board members who had previously supported the state freeway proposals joined opponents to send a unanimous message of non-cooperation to the state freeway builders. Later, in 1967, Blake admitted having taken on the leadership role in the freeway revolt partly because he surmised that "It's good politics to oppose the freeway."

After the Board’s action in rejecting the seven freeways, Mayor George Christopher -- drawing upon the model provided by Mayor Lapham's Citizens Planning Committee of 1945 -- appointed a Citizens Freeway Committee to develop recommendations for future freeway policy. Christopher appointed Christopher McKeon to Chair the Committee. The group met for ten months, and then the Mayor abruptly ordered them to submit a report detailing their progress and to disband. This destroyed the chances that a "blue ribbon" citizens group might put the freeway program back on track. The Committee, bitterly divided, came up with two separate reports. The Mayor’s dismissal of the Committee was a response to an article in the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin that accused McKeon of a conflict of interest that called into question his ability to discharge his duties in an ethical manner. The article suggested that McKeon would benefit financially by the delays caused by the freeway revolt and by adoption of a routing plan that he supported for connecting the San Francisco and San Mateo sections of the proposed freeways. If the state could be delayed long enough for McKeon to rezone a piece of land owned by his family’s firm (the Zita Corporation) that stood in the path of the Junipero Serra Freeway, he stood to make a substantial profit. McKeon did buy a 375-acre St. Francis Heights tract for $1,000,000 at about the time he organized the Property Owners' Association. Five years later he completed the rezoning and sold 18.5 acres (the portion required for the interstate highway) to the state for $950,000, a price reflecting the higher valuation.

McKeon was outraged at the accusation that he intended "to maneuver freeway routes for his own business purposes." He flatly denied the charges and filed a $100,000 libel and slander suit against the three members of the committee who, he claimed, had informed the reporter that he had been "dishonest in his duties as chairman and member of the freeway committee." The committee members denied having intended to defame McKeon and hired attorneys to defend themselves, but the case never went to trial. Five years later McKeon quietly withdrew his suit and paid his court costs and attorney fees as well as those of the defendants. McKeon went on to serve as a member of the California State Contractors License Board and also became a director of the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Board, but he never provided further information about the incident. When he died in 1967, he left an estate valued at $6.2 million dollars, including stock in the Zita Corporation amounting to $3.7 million dollars.

"Save Our City"

McKeon’s absence from the leadership of the freeway revolt after the middle of 1960 had little effect on the grassroots movement. The campaign against the Western Freeway in the Sunset District developed a momentum that carried it beyond McKeon’s personal inspiration or influence. The developer could not have generated the high levels of public opposition to the Western Freeway, or turned out the large numbers at public meetings, had it not been for the growing influence and increased militancy of the neighborhood associations. As the city planners and state engineers worked with consultants and the Board of Supervisors on revised plans for interstate expressways in San Francisco, the freeway revolt intensified. The thousands of city residents who signed petitions against freeways, and the hundreds who packed the Board of Supervisors meetings refused to accept even minimal incursion of freeways into the city’s Golden Gate Park or additional freeway construction along the waterfront.

The environmentalists regarded freeways as absolutely incompatible with the city’s geographic, social, cultural, and historic character, and they called for the demolition of those freeways that had already been constructed. In August, 1963 the Board of Supervisors established its policy declaring that all future transportation plans in San Francisco had to be compatible with of "land values, human values, and the preservation of the city’s treasured appearance." Between 1963 and 1966, using tactics that were also proving successful in the civil rights movement, environmentalist leaders built an even more robust campaign against any further freeway construction in the city. New leaders emerged who joined William Blake in his campaign, conducted from his position as Chair of the Streets Committee of the Board of Supervisors, to keep "the concrete monstrosities" out of the city altogether.

In 1964, Sue Bierman, a resident of the neighborhood adjacent to the Panhandle section of Golden Gate Park, mobilized a district association called the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council to convince the Supervisors to reject the first revised plans for the Panhandle Freeway. Five years earlier, her husband, Arthur K. Bierman, had organized a group called "Sanfranciscans for Academic Freedom and Education" which had succeeded in mobilizing public opinion to protest against the local hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Sue Bierman originally became active in environmentalist causes when her neighbor, Dianne Feinstein, recruited her to join a campagn to protect the city’s Sutro Forest from future development. Jean Kortum (whose husband Karl had convinced Scott Newhall to support the freeway revolt) organized the Freeway Crisis Committee. Using the slogan "Save Our City," Jean Kortum brought all of the separate neighborhood defense groups together in a citywide coalition. The result was the successful 1966 campaign that stopped the Panhandle and Golden Gate freeways.

Bierman and Kortum were leading figures in the reform faction of the county Democratic Party headed by Phillip Burton, a member of the California State Assembly, who would later become one of the leading voices for environmentalist policy reform in the United States House of Representatives. John Burton, Phillip’s younger brother, worked alongside Kortum in the Freeway Crisis Committee. The campaign against the Panhandle Freeway plan of 1964 operated out of the campaign office of Willie L. Brown Jr., a Burton protégé who won his first term in the Assembly during the 1964 election. Brown played an active part in the freeway revolt, pointing out the extent to which housing displacement by the Panhandle Freeway would have an especially deleterious impact on the largely African American Fillmore district.

The environmentalist leaders and the reform faction in the Democratic Party aroused enough grassroots support to cancel out the influence of the city and state Democratic leaders, Mayor Shelly and Governor Brown. The Board responded by rejecting state plans for the Panhandle and Golden Gate projects by a narrow six to five vote. The Board even rejected new studies for alternative routes within the city limits that had been proposed by Supervisor Jack Morrison and by a coalition of business and labor organizations. By the middle of 1966, Mayor Shelley and an angry Governor Brown resigned themselves to the cancellation of federal funds for interstate highways through San Francisco.

The Junipero Serra Freeway Controversy

A few months earlier, on January 3, 1966, Mayor Shelley wrote to President Lyndon Johnson and to Undersecretary of Commerce for Transportation Alan S. Boyd. The mayor expressed his desire to avoid "becoming pitted against [the State of California] in expensive acrimonious litigation" over the location of a section of a new federal interstate highway linking San Francisco and San Jose. The controversy had arisen because the city and the state preferred different routes for a 4.2 mile section of Interstate Highway 280, the Junipero Serra Freeway, in San Mateo County. Determined to "exhaust this last chance for agreement," Shelley requested federal assistance in settling a dispute over whether to build the freeway along the shore of the Crystal Springs Reservoir or along a ridge one mile east overlooking the reservoir. Either of the proposed routes would have constituted a small portion of a total of fourteen miles of watershed land owned by the City and County of San Francisco that would be granted to the state for highway purposes. However, the state preferred the shoreline route while the city wanted the ridge route. Although the mayor imagined his letter to represent the last chance for settling a dispute that had begun in 957, in fact he set in motion the last three years of a freeway controversy that was finally concluded by his successor, Joseph L. Alioto, with a compromise agreement in March, 1969.

When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act on June 29, 1956, the legislation gave responsibility for route selection to state highway departments; cities and towns were expected to cooperate with their state highway engineers. The California Division of Highways (CDH) received federal aid funds for I-280 in subsequent months, and then announced route options and began public hearings on the alternatives in April 1957. Large numbers of residents from the well-to-do communities in the path of the proposed new freeway turned out for the hearings. The engineers presented two proposed routes, requiring the demolition of 500 and 100 homes and businesses respectively. Both options met overwhelming resistance, and local government officials demanded another location.

One month later, B. W. Booker, the state highway engineer offered another possible route. This one avoided the built-up parts of San Mateo county (and the need for housing displacement) by running through fourteen miles of watershed land owned by the City and County of San Francisco. The city's water department manager, James H. Turner, immediately criticized this new proposal. Turner objected because part of the route, a 4.2 mile stretch of the freeway running alongside the city's Crystal Springs Reservoir, created a "problem of turbidity (muddy water runoff) and contamination of the San Francisco water supply."

"Our Sacred Watershed"

The CDH compiled engineering data showing that water purity could be protected even if the freeway were built on the edge of the reservoir. City Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) member Don Fazackerley noted, however, that the highway engineers "are not impressed with our sacred watershed." The SFPUC did, however, give the state permission to use the fourteen miles of watershed land, but only with the understanding that the city preferred the most easterly route possible above the reservoir in the Crystal Springs section. In January 1958, the SFPUC formally adopted Resolution 17-825, stating that "as a policy of the Commission to protect the public water supply the proposed Junipero Serra Freeway through the City's watershed property adjacent to San Andreas and Crystal Springs reservoirs in San Mateo County should follow the most easterly route possible on watershed lands." In April 1958, the city Board of Supervisors backed the SFPUC resolution with a similar policy declaration of its own. Then, three months later, the SFPUC adopted a revised state route plan for the fourteen-miles in the city's watershed, including a four mile section alongside the Crystal Springs Reservoir. This series of decisions by San Francisco would bedevil the intergovernmental relations important to the I-280 project throughout the next ten years, because the state and the city interpreted them differently. As federal officials discovered nearly a decade later, the California Highway Commission (CHC) and state highway engineers interpreted the revised SFPUC document to mean they had been given a green light to proceed without further revisions to their route plans. The city officials, however, interpreted the agreement as subject to future revision, and they expected in the course of events to exchange the undesirable shoreline route for the preferred ridge route.

The potential for conflict implicit in the fact that city and state officials interpreted their 1957 and 1958 agreements differently was magnified by the escalation of mutual distrust associated with cross-town freeways within San Francisco An institutionalized pattern of suspicion and intransigence developed between the city and the state, aggravated at times by partisan rivalry between Democrats and Republicans and by intra-party bickering between representatives of rival Democratic party factions.

The change of regimes in the San Francisco municipal government that took place after John F. Shelley became mayor in January 1964 also made resolving the differences implicit in the 1957 and 1958 agreements more difficult. Shelley was a liberal Democrat who had been a prominent local and state labor leader before becoming a state senator and eight-term congressman. Like his Republican predecessor George Christopher (1956-1963), Shelley was determined to make his mark as a postwar pro-development mayor, but at the same time he appointed one of the nation’s leading environmentalists, former Undersecretary of the Interior (1961-1964) James K. Carr as his Director of Public Utilities While serving under Stewart L. Udall in the Interior Department, Carr met and became friends with Harold Gilliam, the San Francisco Chronicle environmental writer. Gilliam came to Washington in 1961at the request of his friend Wallace Stegner. Gilliam helped Udall write the first draft of his book The Quiet Crisis, which had been suggested to him by Stegner while the Stanford professor served briefly as an adviser to the Secretary.

In August 1964, in his capacity as the city's new General Manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission [SFPUC], James K. Carr and his San Mateo County counterpart met with engineers of the Division of Highways for discussions about the Junipero Serra Freeway. The I-280 construction project, which had been proceeding from south to north, was nearing the last phase, from the town of Woodside north to Daly City. Carr requested that the CHC approve the city's long-established, but also long-ignored, policy declaration that the city's water supply would be endangered unless the state used the ridge route option for the Crystal Springs Reservoir section of the freeway.

Neither Carr's predecessor in the SFPUC, nor the pre-Shelley Water Department general manager, had adopted a pro-active stance on this dormant issue during the years of the Christopher mayoral administration after the 1957 watershed route agreement. To make matters worse, the SFPUC and Water Department staff, lacking instructions or leadership to the contrary, had created their own cooperative working relationships with the state highway engineers for some five years on the assumption that the shoreline route would be constructed. Consequently, and somewhat understandably, the Highway Department and the Highway Commission reacted to Carr's initiative with a combination of astonished disbelief and extreme annoyance.

The Carr proposal initiated a year-long series of maneuvers by the city of San Francisco, other municipalities on the peninsula, state officials, and consultants hired by the parties to the dispute. The Highway Commission initially rejected the request to reopen the route-selection process, but it did agree to reconsider the provisions for maintaining water purity given the SFPUC’s newly-announced concerns. Both San Francisco and San Mateo counties persisted in calling for new hearings on the route locations, on the grounds that the 1957 and 1958 hearings and studies required updating. However, the governments of Woodside and Daly City reaffirmed their support for the shoreline route. The Peninsula Highway Design Committee, a voluntary association formed during the first hearings process and made up of Santa Clara as well as San Francisco and San Mateo County representatives, along with other peninsula cities and Stanford University, also renewed its support for the shoreline route. Leeds, Hill and Jewett, an engineering consultant firm hired by the CDH, insisted that complete water purity protection systems could be built for either route, but that the cost for such a system would be a half million dollars more for the ridge route. San Francisco's consultant, Stanford engineering professor Rolf Eliassen of the Hall and Metcalf firm, argued that a comparative analysis of the two systems showed that pollution could only be avoided if the ridge route were chosen. After reviewing the new studies and listening to testimony on water quality control, the CHC voted 5 to 2 in favor of reaffirming the shoreline route. Thomas F. Stack, chairman of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission reacted to the negative decision by announcing the city's determination to "go to the ridge or go to court."

"Airborne Caravans"

As it happened, the city went to the White House and to the federal bureaucrats rather than to court, for it was at this point that Mayor Shelley requested mediation efforts from the White House and from the Office of Transportation of the Department of Commerce. The mayor's request generated an invitation to a January 13, 1966 meeting in the White House with Alan Boyd, the Director of Transportation in the Commerce Department. Mayor Shelley, SFPUC General Manager Carr, and Thomas Stack, the city agency’s president, traveled to Washington, D.C. in the first of what the city's critics on the Highway Commission would later characterize as "airborne caravans." One week after the meeting, Boyd instructed Lowell K. Bridwell, the Deputy Under Secretary for Transportation, to order a thorough study of the central issues in the freeway location dispute. In an informal handwritten note to Bridwell, Boyd indicated his sympathy for the San Francisco point of view. Provided the city "will equalize the cost of construction through agreement on R/W [right of way] cost" Boyd wrote, "what valid reasons do Highway people have for objecting to ridge routing"?

Boyd and Bridwell had their answer within two weeks, following a trip to San Francisco by Edward Swick, the Location and Right of Way Director of the Bureau of Public Roads. After meeting with all of the state and city representatives who were parties to the dispute and touring the proposed sites, Swick reported that the state was correct in arguing that the shoreline route would be more direct, safer, and cheaper to build. The city, however, was correct in its argument that the ridge route posed less danger to water purity. "There seems little question that the ridge route will give less possibility of contamination to the Crystal Springs Reservoir, although the degree of the importance of this element is questioned [by the state highway engineers]." Given the state's questions, Swick examined data maintained by the SFPUCs Peninsula Division Manager, and the federal Public Roads Director then concluded that the complex system of ditches and pipes designed by the highway engineers to handle water runoff during and after the construction of the shoreline route "probably have an adequate theoretical design but that they are so extensive and elaborate that adequate maintenance is not practical." The city took the position that "failure in times of storm is almost certain." Such a storm in fact occurred during Swick's visit, giving him an opportunity for personal evaluation. He agreed with the SFPUC division manager's evaluation and reported to Bridwell and Boyd that "Experience to date in the maintenance of the system at the San Andreas site indicates that he may well be correct."

Swick took care in his report to recommend that the federal Bureau of Public Roads should provide neither "assistance or interference" in the resolution of the route location dispute, and urged that "this problem should be worked out between the Division of Highways and the [city] Public Utilities Commission." If the state and city remained stalemated, then Public Roads, in Swick's estimation, ought to concur with the Division of Highways and allow the shoreline route to proceed. However, Swick's recommendation posed a dilemma for the federal government which he outlined explicitly: "Public Roads would be subject properly to criticism if we approve a Division of Highways line and serious pollution does occur which can be related even remotely to the highway location."

Undeterred by Swick's suggestion that they were improperly involving the federal government in a dispute that should be settled by state and city officials, Alan Boyd and his deputy Lowell Bridwell moved quickly on two fronts. First, they asked the Division of Highways to make an official estimate of the added costs involved in relocating the disputed section of the freeway from the shoreline to the ridge route. Second, they expressed their dissatisfaction that the SFPUC "was less than fully communicative on the possibilities of offsetting additional costs." Even though they realized that "this may very well be a temporary bargaining position on the part of the [city] PUC . . . it is quite important that Jim Carr [city PUC general manager] be made to understand that we cannot be of any assistance in developing the ridge route unless he is willing to give us assistance through free right-of-way."

The Division of Highways took less than a month to prepare a comparative cost analysis that yielded an estimate of a net increase of $6.2 million dollars should the ridge route be chosen. The SFPUC, however, did not respond favorably to the federal insistence on monetary concessions to offset the (now-official) cost increases, even though, according to Lowell Bridwell, "If we get such assurance, I believe that both the California Highway Department and the Bureau of Public Roads will approve the Ridge Route." Instead, the City Attorney announced that a new report by the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration corroborated the city's estimate of the damage that the shoreline route would cause to water quality. Also, the PUC engineers and the City Attorney's office had examined the State Highway Engineer's cost figures and "reached the contrary conclusion that, if all costs are considered, moving the freeway to the high alternate route would actually result in an overall savings of some $2,190,000 to the Federal Government and to the State."

While it is true that the federal proposal for compromise in March 1966 did not yet have the final approval of state officials, the City Attorney's rejection of the compromise proposal on April 26 had the effect of increasing the intransigence of state highway engineers and the Highway Commission and testing the patience of the federal officials. Matters were made worse by the fact that the City Attorney's introduction of the new bargaining position was announced only four weeks after the Board of Supervisors had rejected the joint federal and state proposals to build the Golden Gate and Panhandle freeways through San Francisco.

The city tested the patience of state and federal officials even further when it enlisted the support of the California Department of Public Works, whose Bureau of Sanitary Engineering now announced its preference for the ridge route, and when Mayor Shelley asked Governor Brown to put pressure on the Highway Commission to reconsider its earlier vote rejecting a change in routes. At the Governor's behest, the Highway Commission met and agreed to restudy the feasibility of the ridge route. By the beginning of August, however, Lowell Bridwell had already given the SFPUC General Manager "another ten days" three times. Now he decided that either the city had to back down on its refusal to offset the cost increases for the ridge route or he would instruct the Bureau of Public Roads that it was "free to go ahead in any manner it deems advisable."

"Special Effort should be made to Preserve the Natural Beauty"

During the next several months, events took place outside the circumscribed arena of highway politics that changed the character of the Junipero Serra Freeway fight, shaped the evolution of a settlement between the state and the city during 1967 and 1968, and led to a victory by the City in early 1969.

The first of those events occurred on October 15, 1966 when the U. S. Congress passed Public law 89-670 creating the federal Department of Transportation. The declaration of policy that accompanied the legislation contained language that was seized upon by the San Francisco side in the Junipero Serra freeway dispute to strengthen the city's position that only the ridge route was acceptable. In an April 4, 1967 letter to Alan Boyd in his new position as Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Shelley pointedly referred to two specific provisions of the law:

"It is hereby declared to be the national policy that

special effort should be made to preserve the natural

beauty of the countryside and public park and recreation

lands, wildlife and water fowl refuges, and historic sites."

"The Secretary shall not approve any program or project

which requires the use of any land from a public park,

recreation area, wildlife and water fowl refuge, or

historic site unless there is no feasible and prudent

alternative."

The advantage that San Francisco hoped to gain from the environmentalist language of the Transportation Department Act was compounded by a requirement in the legislative mandate that the Secretary of the new department "cooperate and consult with the Secretaries of the Interior, Housing and Urban Development, and Agriculture . . . to maintain or enhance the natural beauty of the lands traversed." During the next several months, Alan Boyd and Lowell Bridwell, who had moved up to become the Federal Highway Administrator, heard from all three cabinet officials. While Orville Freeman of the Agriculture Department excused himself by reason of lack of expertise on the subject of the Juniperro Serra Freeway, Stewart Udall of Interior strongly supported the San Francisco side and condemned the state officials for taking a "very limited view of costs." Robert Weaver, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, also supported the San Francisco side, and he urged Boyd to follow the example of HUD in resolving a similar controversy in Philadelphia by using his offices to firmly move the disputants toward compromise. Boyd soon did exactly that, when he called all of the parties to the controversy to a meeting in San Francisco with the Federal Highway Administrator on August 24.

If the establishment of the new federal Department of Transportation raised the hopes of San Francisco and strengthened its resolve not to accept the shoreline route, the election of Ronald Reagan to the Governor's office in November 1966 and his appointment of a new State Secretary of Business and Transportation and four new members of the Highway Commission led to the hardening of the state's position in favor of the shoreline route. Although the Commission agreed to Boyd's request for another, third, study of alternative routes, Gordon C. Luce, the new State Business and Transportation Secretary, reminded Boyd that "sole authority" over where to locate the freeway belonged to the Commission "at a regularly called meeting." Luce also made clear his dislike of interference or favoritism by the federal government and declared his and the Commission's determination to resist federal pressure when it came time to vote on the final routes.

Although partisan differences aggravated the dispute during 1967 and 1968, Boyd and Bridwell continued to use their control over federal funds as a reminder to both the state and the city that some compromise was necessary or the money would be withdrawn from California. By the end of 1967, the city of Redwood City, the Sierra Club, the California Society of Professional Engineers, and San Francisco and peninsula newspapers and television stations were backing the ridge route. The Highway Commission's third study ended in a mixed conclusion: the shoreline route was superior in highway operation and engineering; the ridge route was a better choice if recreation was considered a high priority. In all other respects, either of the two routes would be satisfactory.

In October, the city finally acquiesced to the federal demand that Alan Boyd had made nearly two years earlier and agreed to grant the entire watershed right of way, including the ridge route section to the state at approximately two-thirds of the previously-announced cost. This action led the federal officials to anticipate the signing of a formal agreement between the state and the city in the near future. The Highway Commission took another view, diminished the value of the city's concession, and adopted a new hard-line strategy. In its December 1967 meeting, the Commission received a new consultant's report that concluded that neither the ridge route nor the shoreline route afforded the best access for recreational activities in the watershed lands and recommended consideration of an entirely new route approximately midway between the two. Relations between the state and the city parties, never amicable, now worsened dramatically. When the city's new mayor, Joseph L. Alioto, took office in January he immediately demanded that the Department of Transportation take two actions: require the Highway Division to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and inform the state that the federal share of funds for building I-280 (90 percent) would be granted to California only if the ridge route were chosen. Demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway had to wait until 1991, after damages caused by the Loma Prieta Earthquake of Oct. 17, 1989 rendered the structure unsafe. Resolution of the Junipero Serra Freeway dispute required more than another year. The Highway Commission stalled, diehard members of the Commission postured, and the state Department of Public Works Director, Samuel B. Nelson, recommended that action be delayed until after the November 1968 election on the assumption that Alan S. Boyd and Lowell K. Bridwell would be replaced by Republican appointees of Richard M. Nixon. On September 12, 1968, Bridwell announced that the state would have to return federal funds for the entire I-280 freeway unless the ridge route in the Crystal Springs section were accepted by the state. Predictably, the state side denounced Bridwell's decision as "an unwarranted intervention by Federal officials in a local freeway dispute." Then, in March 1969, the Highway Commission formally voted to accept the ridge route but only after approving a statement that "the commission . . . is not surrendering, but is agreeing to a compromise." Construction began almost immediately, and the completed stretch of the freeway opened to traffic September, 1973.

Conclusion

The history of the Junipero Serra and San Francisco cross-town freeway controversies demonstrates the degree to which environmental activism at the grassroots level changed the character of public life, as determined citizen’s groups insisted upon exercising greater control in shaping land use policy, preserving neighborhood character, protecting the purity of air and water, preserving natural beauty, and expanding urban outdoor recreational space. Both disputes involved differences in opinion among local, state, and federal government officials and a variety of expert consultants and organized pressure groups. In both disputes, partisan politics complicated the proceedings and hindered compromise. Freeway revolts that occurred elsewhere in the nation after the 1959 action of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proceeded according to patterns that in many respects were similar to the San Francisco experience. However, in contrast to many other controversies over route location and displacement, particularly those in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Birmingham, and New Orleans, issues of race and ethnicity played a relatively minor role in the San Francisco freeway revolt.

The San Francisco freeway revolt provides an opportunity to examine the political process by which "the new liberalism" of the postwar period developed, as citizen groups forced elected and appointed public officials to build environmental values into the content of public policy. In the cross-town freeway revolt, grassroots citizen groups developed a new and powerful ability to shape the exercise of federal and state power. Grassroots activism sparked the Junipero Serra dispute, but its resolution demonstrated the power of the experts and officials who decided what weight should be assigned to competing location criteria. In the Junipero Serra relocation controversy, federal officials used administrative and legislative authority to force a compromise between state and local government officials. In both cases, individuals and groups inside and outside government successfully used politics to build environmentalist values into the substance of public policy decisions affecting the everyday lives of millions of Americans.