The East Bay is rapidly growing a creative arts infrastructure to support the vision of a grand Gateway where the new bridge touches down.
One of the Bay Area's greatest assets is the community of people who live here. In 2010, when a group of artists, activists and entrepreneurs found out about a small environmental clause in the planning documents for the new East Span of the Bay Bridge mandating that land be set aside for a public park, they rallied in hopes of ensuring the park would achieve its highest potential. They formed Friends of the Gateway and set about visioning a bold design that would include large-scale public art, beautiful vistas, and a transportation museum built from salvaged sections of the bridge that would honor the Bay Area's industrial legacy and commitment to sustainability. I joined the group, at first chronicling their mission for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and later helping to shape and advocate for their vision. Ultimately, the contract to develop the parcel of land went to a large-scale developer, but we hope that something of our dream for a world-class park and community gathering space survives.
“When future archaeologists discover our society…” might sound like the prompt for your fourth-grader’s Language Arts assignment, but it nonetheless sets up a poignant query of the meanings we embed in our environment.
Where do we imagine these cultural excavators unearthing value? In books, paintings, and billboard advertisements; in the architecture of our churches, our banks, and our city halls; and – increasingly – in the growing maelstrom of digital ephemera that is the Internet. But beneath a grimy, graffitied highway overpass? Rarely.
But that may soon change. In 2013, the new east wing of the Bay Bridge will touch down in West Oakland, amid a tangle of concrete and steel arching over the muddy flatlands that feed into the port. The daring self-anchored span is designed to become an icon of the Bay Area – and thanks to a committed group of individuals and public agencies, it may bring with it the celebration of a different sort of monumental architecture: vaulted naves that are church to an underbelly of train tracks, flying buttresses that reinforce asphalt off-ramps, and viaducts that channel a flow of cars and trucks reaching east along I-80 all the way to the fringes of New York City.
Spurred by a tiny environmental provision requiring the bridge to be accompanied by land set aside for a public park, representatives from nine agencies – among them Caltrans, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the East Bay Regional Park District – teamed up to explore big possibilities for a 50-acre swatch of windswept and roaring land along the water.
“Travelers to this special gateway deserve to be offered a chance to pause and celebrate where they have been, where they are going, and what has happened here before,” said Will Travis, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.
The public process for what was christened Gateway Park began last year, in an address where Travis tied the plot to yesterday’s transcontinental railroad and to the pan-pacific shipping routes of the future. He positioned the park as an opportunity to celebrate an industrial culture uniquely integral to the Bay Area, and in its background he painted the “grand scale and ballet-like movements” of the Port of Oakland’s iconic cranes, massive ships, and brightly colored shipping containers “stacked higher than skyscrapers.”
“We’ve been given a great gift in the opportunity we have to make this place as spectacular as it deserves to be,” he told an audience of church groups, artists, and community organizers. “We would be remiss in not accepting this gift and irresponsible if we do not achieve excellence in our planning.”
The nine-agency Working Group envisioned the park as a portal for travelers taking off into the air above the San Francisco Bay, or alighting on solid ground in Oakland. The land would also serve as a hub where residents, commuters and tourists could experience the grandeur of the area’s infrastructure.
And grand the vision is. Though it will be many months before final plans are drawn, and possibly many years before the project is complete, all of the agencies involved have recognized the importance of working together to overshoot, rather than undershoot, the site’s potential. But with the number of stakeholders involved, agreeing on just what that will look like is no simple matter.
Friends of the Gateway is a group of artists, activists, community members and stakeholders who believe that the inspired infrastructure of the new East Span will stand as a monument to the intersection between the rational and the poetic, and that Gateway Park should do the same.
We are FOG: Friends of the Gateway. We believe that there is a natural junction where engineering, infrastructure, industry, landscape and art converge; that Gateway Park is the ideal location to celebrate this convergence. An overarching Art mission can weave these components together into a dynamic, world-class park.
We believe that Art can help fuel the economy, build communities, and educate and enrich lives. Art can tell the story of a place, create engaging public spaces, and bring forward important issues of ecology, site use and history.
FOG now has more than 70 members who represent diverse perspectives, talents and professions. While we have a strong arts focus, we are also urban planners, engineers, educators, entrepreneurs, marketers and communications professionals.
Our vision is to treat The Gateway as a once in a lifetime opportunity to create a public space that is a regional, national and international destination, that serves as a hub of economic and social activity. Read about it below: