7
 
On the Waterfront

Active waterfronts are as much a hallmark of American cities today as busy sidewalks and skyscrapers were in the past. Not since waterfronts served as commercial ports and transportation hubs have they figured so prominently in city planning. When the citizens of Brooklyn Heights called for converting the disused piers along the East River into a park, they were following a pattern repeated in countless cities. Waterfronts today, whether along a deepwater harbor, a lake, or a river, represent some of the most desirable urban real estate—not only for parks, but also for museums, tourist attractions, recreational facilities, and commercial and residential developments. Reclaimed harbors (Boston, Baltimore, and Toronto), converted piers (New York and Philadelphia), restored waterfronts (Louisville and Seattle), and rehabilitated canals (Georgetown and Montreal) loom large as urban attractions. Even cities without old waterfronts are jumping on the bandwagon. Dallas, for example, recently launched an ambitious flood-control plan that will transform the area on the banks of the Trinity River into the nation’s largest urban park.

Waterfronts are almost entirely absent in the big ideas of twentieth-century city planning. Camillo Sitte’s The Art of Building Cities, for example, which had a powerful influence on Garden City planners, ignores waterfronts altogether. In his magisterial Town Planning in Practice, Raymond Unwin discusses the plan of medieval Nuremberg, but does not consider the Pegnitz River, which runs through the center of the old city, worth mentioning. Le Corbusier’s “Contemporary City of Three Million Inhabitants” includes an industrial zone serviced by a barge canal that connects to a river that he purposely located some distance from the city center. “The river is a kind of liquid railway, a goods station and a sorting house,” he observes. “In a decent house the servants’ stairs do not go through the drawing-room—even if the maid is charming (or if the little boats delight the loiterer leaning on a bridge).”1 In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, the river passes indiscriminately through an industrial district, behind a roadside market, through a recreation area, next to the county seat, and then beside the sports arena parking lot.

Only the City Beautiful planners appreciated—and exploited—the potential of urban waterfronts. A characteristic early example is the Pennsylvania state capital of Harrisburg, which sits beside the Susquehanna River. In 1900, Harrisburg was a small city of only fifty thousand, sandwiched between a flood-prone creek and a muddy riverbank that functioned chiefly as a trash dump. The city fathers, encouraged by the impending construction of a new capitol building, launched an ambitious beautification campaign, which, according to historian William H. Wilson, was the first in the nation to use the phrase City Beautiful as a public rallying cry.² The extensive civic improvements, which included river dredging and flood control measures, as well as major sewers, street paving, and parks, took a decade and a half to implement. The Boston-based landscape architect, Warren H. Manning, was commissioned to prepare the master plan. Manning had spent eight years with Frederick Law Olmsted, where he had worked on park systems in Buffalo and Rochester, and would go on to design city and campus plans, public parks, garden suburbs, and private gardens, becoming, as one landscape historian writes, “one of the period’s most prolific practitioners.”3

Manning considered Harrisburg one of the most important projects of his fruitful career.⁴ The master plan encompassed the whole city and included parkways, a 140-acre park centered on a lake created out of swampland, and the crowning jewel, a three-mile-long riverfront park. A winding drive and linear park along a curving bluff overlooked the river, while below a concrete promenade stabilized the bank at the water’s edge. The park was linked by a pedestrian bridge to a large island in the middle of the river, where Manning planned athletic fields, a grandstand, and swimming facilities.

The design of the Harrisburg parks tends to the naturalistic, for although Manning played an instrumental role in founding the American Civic Association and the American Society of Landscape Architects, both bulwarks of the City Beautiful movement, he was not sympathetic to Beaux Arts–style planning and much preferred the picturesque approach of his mentor, Olmsted. “A splendid strip of green,” runs a contemporary description of Riverfront Park, “giving a superb view over the unsurpassed panorama of river, island and mountains to the west and affording easily reached breathing spaces for a vast multitude of people.”5

“Vast multitude” proved to be right; by 1912, the park system was attracting an estimated 1.6 million visits per year.⁶ The island park today continues to be an active place, with playing fields, picnicking grounds, nature trails, marinas, a baseball stadium, and on the island’s tip, a public beach. Riverfront Park remains an urban breathing space, just as Manning intended. On the warm summer day I visited, I saw walkers and joggers on the pathways, people eating their lunch at picnic tables, and fishermen on the promenade steps, dangling their lines in the Susquehanna.

The most ambitious urban waterfront proposal for a major American city was contained in Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. This document was commissioned by a group of progressive businessmen who were inspired by the work that Burnham, McKim, and Olmsted Jr. were doing on the McMillan Plan in Washington, D.C., and hoped to influence the development of their own city. The plan described Lake Michigan as one of Chicago’s great natural assets and proposed lining the lakefront with a series of parks and a giant harbor for freight and passenger vessels as well as pleasure yachts. The south branch of the Chicago River would carry barge traffic, but with plenty of places for “delightful loitering” since the banks were modeled on Parisian quais, with streets overlooking lower-level wharfs. “The opportunity should be seized to plan a comprehensive and adequate development of the river banks,” Burnham and Bennett wrote, “so that the commercial facilities shall be extended, while at the same time the aesthetic side of the problem shall be worked out.”⁷

Burnham’s Plan of Chicago made the river an integral part of the city.

Although Burnham and Bennett’s plan for Chicago was not implemented, the idea of a lakefront park took hold. The grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition were transformed into Jackson Park, and the lakefront opposite the Loop was made into Grant Park, with sites for museums and other cultural buildings. Chicago was the only major American city with a civic waterfront, for by the 1920s most cities had ignored the “aesthetic side of the problem” for so long that rivers and lakefronts really did resemble the “liquid railways” of Le Corbusier’s memorable characterization. Through the mid-twentieth century, city waterfronts were so vital to the national economy that most cities hadn’t paused to consider any aesthetic function. Loading and unloading cargo was labor-intensive—and irregular, for ships arrived at indeterminate intervals—so ports depended on large workforces, permanently on call, which only cities could provide. Ports required not only stevedores and piers but also storage facilities and warehouses, as well as ships’ chandlers, brokers, shippers, and various other intermediaries. The steamship-driven expansion of transoceanic travel with its tens of thousands of passengers added hotels, boardinghouses, and restaurants. Indeed, so great was the cumulative impact of all this maritime-related activity that, at least in North America, it was impossible to have a thriving urban economy without a port.* A protected harbor immediately accessible from the sea was best: Boston, New York, and Charleston on the Atlantic; Mobile, Houston, and New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico; Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego on the Pacific. A deepwater port on a navigable river or bay—Montreal, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Portland, Oregon—was almost as good. Cities were also built on major rivers and lakes: Cincinnati and Louisville prospered on the Ohio, as did Minneapolis, Saint Louis, and Memphis on the Mississippi, and Omaha and Kansas City on the Missouri; Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Chicago depended on the Great Lakes.

The advent of truck transportation and air travel altered the competitive advantage of cities with good harbors, since factories and warehouses were now located adjacent to highway interchanges and airports rather than near urban piers. But the chief agent of change for waterfront cities was the shipping container. The first full-fledged example of container shipping occurred in April 1956, when a refitted Second World War tanker, the Ideal-X, sailed from Newark carrying fifty-eight containers—actually aluminum truck bodies with the wheels removed. Arriving in Houston, the bodies were unloaded, dropped onto trailer chassis, and hauled to their final destinations. It signaled the beginning of a revolution in global transportation, for at a time when it cost $5.83 per ton to load loose cargo onto a medium-size ship, the cost of loading a ton onto the Ideal-X was just 15.8 cents.8

Containers are filled at their point of origin, sent to a port by truck or railroad flatcar, and hoisted aboard a vessel specially designed to carry as many as ten thousand so-called cans. Containers awaiting shipment do not need warehouses; they are stacked up on paved areas that resemble vast parking lots. Nor does loading and unloading rely on a large pool of longshoremen, since the work is largely automated. The great advantage of container shipping is the efficient transfer of cargo from one mode of transportation to another, so direct access to highways and railroad lines is essential. The old urban ports, surrounded by dense residential neighborhoods and narrow streets, were ill suited to handling the transshipment of containers, and it was far more efficient to build brand-new ports—containerports.

This technological change had a devastating effect on traditional port cities. As late as the mid-1950s, New York City had 283 working piers. In 1955, New Jersey announced that it was building the largest containerport in the country, and within five years it was handling more than half of the region’s cargo. By 1970, New York City was down to only one-fiftieth of the tonnage it had a decade earlier, and most of the Manhattan and Brooklyn piers, including ones that had recently been refurbished (and would form the basis for Brooklyn Bridge Park), stood empty.9 The same cycle was repeated in other maritime cities. Oakland took the majority of shipping business from San Francisco, as Seattle did from Portland. Unlike a traditional port, a containerport does not have to be close to a city. The old urban Port of New Orleans, for example, now handles chiefly cruise ships; its freight function has been replaced by the sprawling Port of South Louisiana, which stretches fifty miles from north of the city to as far as the outskirts of Baton Rouge.

Such momentous changes in how goods are transported left the old port cities with abandoned wharves and empty warehouses. What was to be done with this waterfront real estate? San Francisco showed the way. In 1962, William Roth, a local developer, purchased a two-and-a-half-acre waterfront site in the Fisherman’s Wharf district from the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, which was moving to a suburban location near the airport. Roth converted the old factory and warehouse into restaurants and shops, adding a raised pedestrian plaza that provided wonderful views of San Francisco Bay. Ghirardelli Square, as it was called, is not a historic restoration. The architects, Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons, gutted the old buildings and pragmatically added new structures, including a three-hundred-car garage. The result, as Alexander Garvin put it, “successfully combined nostalgia for old San Francisco with the freshness of a new retail facility.”¹⁰

Ghirardelli Square proved immensely popular and spawned another project nearby. Leonard Martin, a developer, bought an empty three-story brick structure from the Del Monte company, and architect Joseph Esherick transformed what had been a peach cannery into The Cannery, a picturesque complex of art galleries, a comedy club, and a movie theater, as well as a mixture of restaurants and shops. In less than a decade, thanks to Ghirardelli Square and The Cannery, the Fisherman’s Wharf district became one of the city’s chief attractions. Other public and private developments included a maritime museum, berthed historic ships, and an amusement park on a cargo pier, as well as Fisherman’s Wharf itself, once the center of San Francisco’s commercial fishing fleet and now a collection of waterside seafood restaurants.

Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco introduced a new urban-renewal formula: rehabilitated waterfront buildings + commerce + tourism = downtown activity.

Fisherman’s Wharf is an example of successful revitalization based not on urban renewal, public housing, or grand civic projects, but on tourism. Tourism was largely ignored by the first generation of urban-renewal planners—even Jane Jacobs had nothing to say about it—but it proved to be a powerful economic force for urban change. Cities that couldn’t recover lost manufacturing and industrial jobs discovered something that older European cities such as Venice and Vienna had known for a long time: instead of offering financial services or manufacturing shoes, a city could sell pleasure.

Unlike the failed urban-renewal projects of the 1960s, Ghirardelli Square and The Cannery were a hit with the public. This was in no small part due to their designs; Wurster’s and Esherick’s architecture, refreshingly unpolemical in a relaxed Northern Californian manner, is an eclectic mixture of old and new. Rather than remaking the city in a Utopian image, or adapting a model from the suburbs, these architects took advantage of precisely those attractive attributes that were unique to cities: interesting-looking, old industrial buildings, vibrant density, and, above all, the unique character of a waterfront.

Ghirardelli Square and The Cannery were private development projects, but an earlier Texas waterfront-improvement project followed a different model: public funding in the first phase and private initiative in the second. The city of San Antonio, founded in 1718, sits athwart the winding San Antonio River, and like most North American cities, it has historically treated the river merely as a commercial convenience. By the early 1900s, no longer used for barge traffic, the river—which is a dozen feet below street level—had become an unsightly garbage dump. In 1926, after a disastrous downtown flood, city engineers proposed redirecting the watercourse into an underground conduit. Construction was stopped after a number of public meetings, and influenced by a proposal by local architect Robert Hugman, the city decided to undertake a civic beautification project instead. In 1938–41, with the support of the federal Works Progress Administration, floodgates and a bypass channel were built, and the horseshoe-shaped river, flanked by ancient bald cypress trees, was transformed into a linear park with walkways along the riverbanks.11 Thirty-one new stairways led down from the street, and twenty-one new pedestrian bridges crossed the watercourse. Hugman had called his original proposal “The Shops of Aragon and Romula.” That name didn’t stick—the linear park was christened Paseo del Rio—but his vision of shops and restaurants along a picturesque waterside promenade came to fruition, and the Paseo, or River Walk, became a popular and commercial success. Like Ghirardelli Square, the Paseo was also a tourist attraction capitalizing on nostalgia, in this case for the city’s Spanish heritage, which was alluded to in Hugman’s design for the staircases and bridges. During the 1960s, the Paseo was twice enlarged; in 1968 a waterway was extended to the new convention center, and a major hotel, the Hilton Palacio del Rio, was added to the commercial mix.*

Urban infrastructure transformed into a recreation site in San Antonio’s secluded Paseo del Rio.

The lessons of the Paseo del Rio and Ghirardelli Square were soon applied elsewhere. In Boston, the Redevelopment Authority was looking for a commercial use for the city-owned Quincy Market, three historic waterfront buildings that had served as a public market since 1826 but were now empty. In 1974, James Rouse, a Baltimore-based shopping-center builder, was designated the developer of the six-and-a-half-acre site. The floor area of the old market was 370,000 square feet, equivalent to a small regional shopping center, and enough office workers and residents were within walking distance of the site to support stores and restaurants, but Rouse decided to target tourists as well as locals. Instead of building anchor stores, he created a retail center that consisted only of small, primarily local, businesses—160 of them—including shops and restaurants, and, in the outdoor areas, scores of pushcarts. Rouse’s architect, Benjamin Thompson, added glass extensions to the main central building, creating a shopping place whose architecture combined the old and the new. Thompson made the public spaces narrow, emphasizing density and pedestrian activity; the upper floors of the old market were turned into offices. In another departure from convention, no parking was provided.

Like Ghirardelli Square, Quincy Market is a commercial development that attracts the public through its iconoclastic approach to urban development, and like Paseo del Rio it is a successful partnership of public and private interests. Rouse and Thompson went on to build a second so-called festival marketplace on Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Though smaller than Quincy Market, and lacking historical structures, Harborplace was equally successful, and annual sales in both developments exceeded those of traditional suburban shopping malls. The festival marketplace model has been repeated in several cities, by Rouse and others: New York’s South Street Seaport, Miami’s Bayside Marketplace, and Chicago’s Navy Pier. While more formulaic, and often considerably less charming, than their predecessors, all capitalize on the same simple fact: people like to be near water.

*For historical reasons, Europe has many inland cities, such as Paris, Madrid, and Berlin, but all major American cities founded before the nineteenth century had an important commercial waterfront.

^*In 1981, another branch was built as far as the Alamo, and there is talk today of extending what is now a network of canals north and south of the city.