Why San Francisco Razed Embarcadero Freeway | FORGOTTEN
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The Embarcadero Freeway, officially known as State Route 480, was a double-decked elevated highway in San Francisco constructed in the 1950s as part of a broader plan to develop an extensive freeway network across the city. Running along the waterfront, it connected the Bay Bridge to the northern neighborhoods but was widely criticized for cutting off the city from its historic waterfront and obstructing views. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake caused significant damage to the freeway, leading to its closure. Public sentiment, which had increasingly favored preserving the city's waterfront character, led to the decision not to repair but to demolish the freeway in the early 1990s. Its removal transformed the Embarcadero area into a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly boulevard, reconnecting the city with its waterfront and sparking significant redevelopment and revitalization.
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And in Millbrae, we're behind hillton hotel when walking around lagoon u today see the debris of road dumped along ocean path
I believe the last scene from Invasion of the body snatchers (original)was filmed on the Embarcadero freeway.
Was the King street exit on 280 part of the Embarcadero freeway?
@@josemejia9349 Close. It was filmed at the fountain in Justin Herman Plaza, which is near the base of the Embarcadero Freeway. (The 1978 remake) The 1956 original was all filmed in Southern California).
I’m surprised the video didn’t mention the main reason behind the demolition of the Embarcadero, the collapse of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland. Two thirds of the fatalities of the Loma Prieta quake occurred when huge sections of the similarly designed freeway pancaked killing 42 people.
Yup. He simply said "across the region" when he was talking about deaths. I missed being on the Cypress if my day hadn't been delayed at work. Still sends chills down my spine thinking about it.
I was on the Cyprus structure, I thought I had a flat tire so was on the off ramp when it pancaked
@@rjohnson1690 I was thinking the exact same thing watching this video. All he showed was one small section of the bay bridge collapse. Most of the damage was with the Nimitz Freeway collapse. And he didn't even show one single picture of that collapse.
@@Bluebelle51 Wow! How lucky.
The other day he posted a video saying a shipwreck was forever "lost". Meanwhile we know where it is it's just not recoverable, this channel doesn't really due it's due diligence in explaining history
I had completely forgotten the Embarcadero Freeway--the freeway to nowhere. It was never completed, so it went from the Bay Bridge to nowhere, carrying very little traffic. The freeway never made it to the Golden Gate Bridge, or to Fisherman's Wharf or even Pier 39. It ended at Broadway, turning the main street of North Beach, the City's historic Italian neighborhood, into a dangerous high speed stroad that immediately plunged into a tunnel and came out--you guessed it--nowhere.
Like most everyone else, I'm glad it's gone.
When you look at the traffic patterns today, there was little sense to connect to the Golden Gate. Most people using the GG are from San Francisco or going to SF. Through traffic is handled by 19th, Van Ness, and the Richmond San Rafael Bridge just fine. Feeding any more traffic to the GG seems to be a problem in fact.
From my recollection, it ended where it ended to bring more people into Chinatown. And the reason it was razed because it was just plain stupid to begin with.
Somebody's bank account got fat.
Its incredible how much damage 1950s-1970s urban planners did to American cities....
Check out Buffalo and the loss of the incredible Olmstead park system to a freeway to separate neighborhoods :(
@@cameronleonard7208 Interstate I-190?
They built them fast too. The could go from proposed to built in 2-5 years.
Today's light rail systems take 10-20 years to build.
@@jamesparson ha takes longer cause everyone has to get paid for nothing, that's your government not "building to fast" may be safer now but doesn't cancel out the shadyness from government officials and business queers
And how resistant our current leaders are to undoing that damage. I'm looking at you, St. Louis. Two of our major interstates cut right through the city.
to be fair, it was an earthquake hazard, and it looked like trash, so i think that it is completely fine that the freeway is gone
I have a chunk of it.Building engineer,221 Main St.building,Bechtel Corp.lower floors,freeway passed by the 6th floor all windows double paned...my chunk dated 3-9-92 just memories.not ugly,just utilitarian. thanks😮
@@mikeh.7499the overall look of that monstrosity was straight gray concrete lines, nothing aesthetically nice or matching the surroundings. Nobody's making fun of your artifact
@infinidominion well, thank you now. I look at the one picture of freeway across Ferry Building, and yes I can see its bleak.
Really funny how the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle was built and ended in the same way as the embarcador freeway.
@@jimpawa5793 Mainly because Seattle didn't get the massive earthquake that's coming before being torn down in large part due to knowing that it would pancake the same way the Nimitz did in 1989. There are aspects of the viaduct that I do miss, it was an incredibly view in one direction, although there were a bunch of other issues with it beyond just how unsafe it would have been had we gotten the expected earthquake first.
In 1989, my office, near the Embarcadero, overlooked that hideous structure. When it was being razed, that office was a popular viewing sight for colleagues from all over the building. One of my colleagues had an apartment at The Golden Gateway, on one of the higher floors. He set up a movie camera that looked down the freeway for almost a mile. He took 3-4 pictures, each day, for weeks of deconstruction. When he, ultimately, ran them together, it was quite entertaining to see that monstrosity disappear.
He should post those online.
@@catylynch7909 Contact him to ask him to post that sequence, please.
Yeah sounds like some very cool footage, he still have it?
My family lived in Berkeley from 1959 until 1971. We would occasionally make trips to The City to shop at Cost Plus or have ice cream at Ghirardelli Square. I remember the area under the Embarcadero freeway being dark and noisy. I came back for a visit in 1994 and was pleased to see that the “Cementapied”was gone! A major improvement.
As a kid, I actually thought it was cool driving on it and under it, just felt like it was in SF.
In November 1990, I was on a school field trip, and the point where we walked to Justin Herman Plaza at Embarcadero, the CA-480 freeway was still "standing", but was no longer in use. I saw some graffiti saying "Worse than useless".
Glad to see mother nature step in to remove what never should have been built.
I remember driving on it. The view of downtown was awesome. It was like driving in the sky.
I rode my motorcycle on it an it was a little scary but like flying through SF.
Yes.. The lone saving grace was the arrival into North Beach on a Friday evening. But I'm still glad it's gone.
@@MarinCipollina Yeah, the Embarcadero looks much nicer without it.
I visit the Ferry Building weekly. I am an SF native and used the freeway often in the 80s. It’s hard to exaggerate what an improvement not having the freeway is to the waterfront. The area is gorgeous and, despite what one hears from certain, unreliable news sources, it is a very lively and pleasant place to spend time. It’s unthinkable that anyone saw that freeway as desirable in the context of a livable, walkable city. It’s always a good thing to get out of our cars and onto the streets!
The waterfront is pleasant. Go in a few blocks and those "unreliable news sources" are actually pretty reliable.
Don’t need unreliable news sources. I’ve seen for myself that it is slowly becoming a dump like the rest of the city.
Except it is not 'always a good thing' to get our of our cars - Every time I have to pass through SF I'm shocked that there is no way to get through except to sit in gridlock on surface streets. Whether from the GG to the penisula or the bay bridge you're in for a hell trip pretty much any time of day. The old freeway may not have been the answer, but there really needs to be a way to get through the city without bogging down all local traffic.
@@donhappel9566 Or maybe, just maybe, a city prioritizes livability for its residents and visitors over people simply passing through?
@@PhilosopherKing73 it doesnt though lol, sf is the worst of both worlds
What a massive eyesore that thing was. So happy the city (and earthquake) got rid of it. The Embarcadero is a great place to walk with beautiful views.
This highway and its story is similar to the I-93 Central Artery in Boston. I-93 was a similar looking double decker highway that cut through the middle of downtown Boston, cutting it off the waterfront just like in San Francisco. It was nicknamed “The Other Green Monster” because the highway’s pillars were painted the same green shade as Fenway Park’s famous Green Monster. Bostonians hated this highway. By the mid nineties, they started an ambitious project to get rid of it and replace it. An underground highway nicknamed “The Big Dig”.
I think this story would make a great future video.
There is also a double decker monstrosity in Seattle, that could tie into the story.
@@rjohnson1690 it isn't there anymore.
Yes, but in both of those cases they were smart enough to know they didn’t want to dump interstate traffic onto city streets and spent billions to build underground replacements. Both Seattle and Boston were smart enough to know that their freeways are not local infrastructure but used by buses, trucks and cars from a entire region that will not just go away because you got rid of the road. And someone traveling from Eastern Canada to Cape Cod couldn’t just take the Metro through Boston. For all the pushback, cost and delays, I can say that the Big Dig was worth every penny!
NYC… very similar story. Mixing dilapidated piers with aerial highways… followed by modern ferry service, and modern use of the rebuilt piers…
Nothing lasts forever, as population growth makes things undersized….
😃
Think of all the union jobs needed to build it. And remove it.
There are foundation footings still left behind from the Embarcadero Freeway. They're just covered by parks and earth. There are small portions of the whole freeway system still in use. I-80 ends at 9th St. The other portion is the Central Freeway. It's not the double deck design, but a steel structure supporting the freeway. The Central Freeway is another eyesore. If you need to travel south there is Highway 101, some of it is elevated. Then there is I-280, most of which is elevated and there is a mile or so stretch that is of the double deck design.
I walk every morning along a trail beside the Napa river. North of San Francisco. Large sections of the riverbank are lined with gigantic cement blocks and rebar. It is clear that these blocks are chopped up pieces of roadway and railings, etc... you can see road paint and such on some of the pieces. There's twisted rebar everywhere.
Anyway, the old folks in this area tell me that all this concrete used to be the Embarcadero freeway, and this is where they dumped a lot of it. There's something for you 😊
I'm old enough to have driven on this. The views from that upper level were spectacular, so much it was very easy to get distracted from looking where you were going. but at ground level it was a wasteland to be avoided. It's SO much nicer now that the freeway is gone.
I used to find tourist's luggage under the ruins. I managed to even return some of it!
That area provided some great scenes in Bullitt. The hotel where they kept the bogus Johnny Ross I believe is gone now. Ross' window looked out at the Embarcadero.
Some great scenes too in The Streets Of San Francisco tv series
Ross was being kept in a cheap hotel South of Market near where the old YMCA used to be.. That whole area was long torn down, replaced by glass and marble towers, for CHEVRON, BECHTEL etc..
The opening shootout sequence in Bullitt was done at the back entrance of 450 Sutter, the Medical-Dental Bldg.
While the Marina District was damaged, the Embarcadero Freeway never made it to the Marina. THe freeway was in the Downtown Core and SoMA as well as what is now Mission Bay.
There is no trace of the freeway left today. There are some freeways that used to connect to it, but they are now merely freeway exits that are just a few blocks from Oracle Park.
SF also built a subway extension/exit that connects the light rail to the metro system.
To just barely inside Chinatown. And that's it.
@@mgescuro It boggles the mind that the freeway was ever proposed to run through the Marina district. Not only because of the aesthetics but because the wealthy residents would have been sure to mount a well funded opposition to it.
I was working as an engineer for SF Muni. We were in the design phase of the new subway extention from the Embarcadero Station (at the time, the terminus) to 4th and King when Loma Prieta hit. I remember the agency's design consultant had to redesign much of the tunnel from the Embarcadero Station to where it surfaced at Gordon Biersch (where Folsom Street ends at the Bay), once the decision was made to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway rather than repair it.
The video failed to mention that there was very, very strong opposition from the leaders of the Chinatown community to the demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway. That stretch of monstrosity brought drivers from the East Bay directly into Chinatown; seen by the leaders of Chinatown as an income stream.
The project managers and the engineers working on the new Embarcadero Roadway (and Muni's F-Line, the new street car line that runs in the middle of the new Embarcadero Roadway) did a fine job. The new Embarcadero Roadway has been a beautiful part of the City ever since.
Very interesting, seems like you know that first 🤚
If I'm not mistaken also a large reason for the Central Subway to appease Chinatown community leaders unhappy with the loss of the Embarcadero Freeway
I drove on this many times in the late 70's. An eyesore for sure but very convenient back then to get to North Beach etc without using surface streets all the way through the city. Ultimately, they did a great job with the new setup.
Taking a completely different perspective, and it won't be popular with this crowd. I'm a person who uses the City for commerce not culture. Living in the Bay Area, SF has to be the most inconvenient City in the Western Hemisphere.
The only thing left of it are earth humps kept to make the grassy park look interesting.
@@timberrr1126 ain’t it some dead end roads that broke off like by the the entrance to the bay bridge on the city side
@@cookiemoney7451 The ramps for the Washington St exit are somewhat still there. They were cut 1/2 way down. The Broadway exit used stilts.
The grassy park has bumps in it and this is where the freeway was.
They did the same with the cypress freeway in Oakland . It clasped the same day .
That one went a way first. I was not aware that the one is SF had been damaged. It had not collapsed as the Cypress had.
They young boy that lost his arm under that past graduated the same class as my niece. The boy lost both of his parent's on that freeway I was happy to know the kid was living his life to the fullest. I'm shire he is doing good thing's.
I remember when the 1989 earthquake happened when I was 7 years old. I remember watching the Bay Bridge Series in the World Series, the San Francisco Giants vs the Oakland A's. A portion of a highway in Oakland was demolished and rebuilt after.
I was in high school then, and remember smelling the dead people that died on the Cypress.
I was in high school also. I was doing my homework in front of the TV, waiting for the World Series to start. I felt a rumble and it felt like the house was swaying back and forth. I looked outside, but didn't see anything falling. Then the swaying stopped, and I heard a loud crash. I'm not sure what it was from. Probably an accident. Our house (in San Rafael) suffered only minor cracks and settling.
@@LoyaFrostwind I still have the math homework that I was doing.
The people living at the homeless shelter saw this "Special Report" on TV and kept asking why this even matters...
You really need to include mention (and photographs) of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland. The collapse of that freeway directly contributed to the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway. Swap out the bay bridge earthquake photos for some of those. It was devastating.
Why don’t you do a history of the bay bridge and the debacle that ensued building a new bridge. 19 years after the 89 quake it took to erect that structure, when in LA they rebuilt roadways in a matter of weeks/months.
A bridge over a major waterway is not like a roadway. But, true, they can build bridges so much faster in other countries.
@@billmoran3219 since it was finished in 2013, you're saying they didn't start doing anything until 1994, 5 years later?
Umm what? They bay Bridge was built in the 1940’s
I remembered this place when I rode my bicycle across the country in 1987. I stayed one night in the Youth Hostel on Embarcadero, which was located across from the Embarcadero freeway. In 2011, I visited San Francisco, and I was confused and surprised to find no Embarcadero freeway and no Youth hostel there either. Wow! Thank you for your video about the Embarcadero freeway.
Drove this freeway the 1980s a few times. Will say while ugly from street level, it was faster then taking 101 through SFO city streets, and have beautiful views from the upper deck.
I'm 78, worked all over the City from 1965-1970 and this is a little misleading. Though the original plan may well have been to connect the 2 bridges, it never even approached that goal. The Embarcadero Frwy ended and dumped all cars off at Broadway, less than 1/2 mile north of the Ferry Building and close to Pier 5 or 6, no where close to what is now Pier 39 or to Fisherman's Wharf and maybe 5% of the distance to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was just an ugly eyesore, mini freeway that went nowhere and created a slum area underneath that ugliness.
Damn, had you not mentioned San Francisco those opening pictures could have been Boston, the city planners built a similar double decker highway in 1951, called 'The Central Artery,' the Central Artery carried Interstate 93 cutting off Boston's waterfront and North End from the rest of the city and towering over historic neighborhoods. The style is exactly the same as well, so much so that there were exits/ramps that were never built just like in your pictures.
And Boston is likewise far better off without the Central Artery, despite the cost of the Big Dig.
They were both part of a nationwide mania for urban freeways in the mid-20th century - one of the biggest disasters in history, that wrought more destruction on more American cities than all the earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, etc. in that period combined. And we're only starting to even think about reversing that mistake and repairing that damage, against much resistance.
@@dwc1964 I wish we could tell our 1950s selves that they were costing us billions per highway to reverse the damage.
@@theontologist Very much so.
the Embarcadero Freeway NEVER went all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge! What other errors are there going to be if the first happened in the first 15 seconds?
This channel has all kinds of errors. See the video the other day saying how a shipwreck was "lost forever" when in reality it's not lost its just difficult to salvage or recover. I have a history degree and I've noticed every comments section has these kinds of corrections
@@RobertMarshall he mentioned how they stopped the project at some point
@@hugoestrada2089 yes he certainly did. However that was several minutes into the piece. At the very top he said it went between the two bridges, which was factually incorrect.
You posted this video just in for the 86th birthday of former 39th Mayor of San Francisco, Art Agnos on September 1st, who served as the mayor of San Francisco during the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989 and ordered the freeway to be torn down.
I remember Art! I lived there then!
@@rogerdale5451 I lived in Oakland, but I remember him too
What a nutty liberal he was…
It had to be torn down - because of the earthquake - ffs
@@stevelarkin5987 What California politicians aren't nutty?
In a way, I'm glad they took down the Embarcadero Freeway. It freed up the Embarcadero from the Bay Bridge all the way north beyond the Ferry Building and made the SF Muni "F" line with its historic trolleys such a pleasure to ride.
Another legacy is that the Ferry Building went thru a later remodel well after the demolition of the freeway and is a very nice terminal and mall. When I commuted on the ferry in the first decade of the century, it was kind of dumpy, and the clock hadn't been fixed. It was still stuck on the time the Loma Prieta quake hit.
Here in Spain we used to have a lot of bridges and double decker freeways inside our cities as well. We jokingly referred to them as “Scalextrics” (the name of a famous local toy brand that sold “slot cars”). I believe it was a worldwide trend of the 50-70s that thankfully has mostly fallen out of favor.
A big problem is US101 dumps onto city streets. Then there is I80 that dumps onto the streets.
That’s not actually a problem.
@@theontologist explain to me how cars doing freeway speeds filtering into city streets is not a problem?
And the 280
And the homeless taking dumps in the streets
@@jasonlarsen3515 they do that in every city that accepts the rural homeless. If rural communities would take care of their own, cities wouldn't have this problem.
The freeway was NOT built in the Marina District, it was built on the Embarcadero, hence the freeway's name. The Marina District is located at the northern edge of San Francisco, just east of the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Part of the 480 that got cancelled would have passed through the Marina District, but the part that was built didn't even come close to it.
The main thing left behind by the Embarcadero Freeway is the Vaillancourt Fountain. Widely derided as ugly today, it looked completely different under the freeway's shadow. An important reminder that context matters when it comes to art.
Elevated streets everywhere end up being barriers that bring poverty and pollution for the benefit of those that want to drive through other people's neighborhoods. When they're finally taken down improvements follow.
Nonsense. The columns used to support the torn-down freeways weren't barriers, but the city &/or calTrans fenced off the spaces under those freeways for parking and storage. Once the freeways came down, so did the fenced off areas.
@@r2dad282 we're not talking about purely physical barriers.
There’s almost nothing left of the freeway now, but if you know what you’re looking for, there’s a block of dead end street, paved in cobblestone now, that used to be the onramp from Clay st.
The boulevard is 1000x nicer now, in fact maybe one of the prettiest parts of the city.
In a counter-story from San Fran's counter-city across the sea in Sydney, there's a similarly loathed 1950s freeway overpass that feeds the Sydney Harbour Bridge but also cuts the city from its waterfront at Circular Quay which is the central ferry terminal and a major stop for the railway, buses and trams. This heavyset 2-storey structure is less than a mile long at that point, providing a marvelous 'flying' view for motorists and even pedestrians as they enter or exit the city, but in the drive to beautify the place ahead of the 2000 Olympic Games, a competition was run to find a way to make it look less crap. In fact no entry found a way to shrink it, only to draw more attention to it, and the debate was prettywell put to bed when its original designer said "we made it as small as we could make it, to do the job it had to do" so that was that. When you need it, you need it! It's still there.
The main reason for the demolition of Embarcadero Freeway was the collapse of the similarly made Cypress Freeway in Oakland. 42 lives were lost during the Loma Prieta quake of '89.
They wanted this Freeway to extend all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Chinatown wanted to keep it.
I still suspect the fact that "Chinatown wanted to keep it" helped motivated the official decision makers to demolish the Embarcadero Freeway.
@@timberrr1126 Hard to believe that but it is true. They also wanted the subway and now they have it.
Strangely enough, some of the less-detailed roadmaps dating back to the 1970s and '80s make it appear of a freeway extending from the GG Bridge to Highway 101.
A friend of mine from that time, driving from Washington state to San Jose (California) was unaware of the lack of a freeway and got very frustrated navigating through San Francisco.
Afterwards I suggested the next time to take the 19th Avenue route to Freeway 280 to San Jose.
@@bloqk16 Yes, 19th Ave is one of two major choices through the City.
The original plan was to have a freeway all along the waterfront. This is unthinkable. It would have trashed all sightseeing places.
Chinatown wanted the freeway to enhance business. However, where in Chinatown do freeway travelers park?
More beauty coming: an ugly fountain will be taken down at the foot of Market St.
@@2040wagon Yup, it's not a great place to put a new line compared with others, but it was what Rose Pak et al. brokered when the city wanted to take down the freeway. It'll be interesting to see how used it is if they extend it past Chinatown.
Another Great One that I knew absolutely nothing about prior to watching this. Well Done 👏
It very nearly collapsed on its own. It was the twin of 880 in Oakland.
Robert Moses in the east side of Manhattan wanted to do the same thing but was defeated in court although he did it in the Bronx unfortunately.
The central bronx never recovered from the disaster caused by stopping the 3rd ave el. Working people served by the 3rd ave el moved near other el and subway lines dooming the abandoned area to decades of decline
The Dodgers would have stayed in Brooklyn if not for that SOB Moses!
Seattle built the same. Everyobe wanted it gone but they earquake proofed it anyway and then proceeded to trar it down. Now it is a blvd on grade with Hwy 99 in a tunnel under it. Must pay a toll now.
Visited SF for the first time long after this freeway was gone, but can I just congratulate the city on how beautiful the Embarcadero and Ferry Building are now. I sat over the road on a low garden wall and it just felt so "Californian" with the beautiful avenue of mature palms and the water behind.
There's plenty of hideous highway and blight between Bryant and Harrison along the 101 elevated highway. It's loud, polluted and economically depressed
It's an emotionally barren place, day or night.
You're either driving into your garage or driving out. No stopping.
Here in São Paulo City (Brazil) the most known elevated freeway is the Minhocão (“Big Worm”, in Portuguese), built in the center region of the city during the military dictatorship in the 1970s (when mayors were appointed by the regime and public discontent could not be voiced).
Up until today, many people here says that without the ugly Minhocão the local transit would fall into chaos. But I have serious doubts about it, since the elevated freeway is closed to cars at night and the weekends, and I noted that during weekdays many streets and avenues around it are underused by transit…
You call out John Shelly. Even tho he campaigned to remove the freeway, he can’t do it by itself, he needed a majority on the BOS no matter how much he wanted to remove it himself
There are some rectangular markers in the pavement of the plaza in front of the Ferry Building that show where the supports of the elevated freeway used to be.
The Loma Prieta earthquake didn't damage the Embarcadero Freeway. n It did collapse part of the east-bay freeway on Oakland, but anyone who ever drove on that stretch knew it had serious problems. One segment of the eastern Bay Bridge did fall, but that was repaired in a few weeks. The Embarcadero freeway was torn down to increase the value of real estate in the Embarcadero area. The eastern span o0f the bay bridge was replaced by a new bridge, not because of problems with the bridge, but because it was a boom for construction in the bay area. The loss of the Embarcadero freeway made a more scenic bay front, but left us with serious traffic problems which were not eased until the Covid pandemic killed much of the downtown business.
It's unfortunate there are almost no photos here of the earthquake-damaged Embarcadero freeway! The damage was quite significant. Why show the collapsed roadway on the Bay Bridge? The movie Fearless has a scene where Jeff Bridges' character walks on it.
I walked on it too in 1990. It was surreal.
8:55 Whoa. The Loma Prieta quake didn't "devastate" San Francisco. There was major damage in a few neighborhoods, but most were OK.
I remember after it was gone, you couldn't help but notice how much more beautiful the sunlight was in the area. The freeway blocked the sunlight. It looks so much better once it was gone.
The ferry building looks alot better without the freeway
As a truck driver- I'd rather drive thru Manhattan that San Fran.
The entire purpose of a freeway along the Embarcadero, for dockyard freight, evaporated with the invention of the container ship and the subsequent rise of the Port of Oakland, across the Bay. San Franciso's many piers became useless and a lot of them were decrepit and falling into the sea once the earthquake hit in 1989. I'm glad the freeway is gone. I can't understand why so many in the Chinatown area wanted to keep this ugly thing.
Because it brought people and business to the community from outside of Chinatown. Also, the mayor wanted to tear it down and that was that. No concessions or help to address the adverse effects it would have on the community.
There was also a plan to line the northern waterfront with high rise, view blocking condos. No view of the Bay and the Golden Gate, just miles of ugly slabs. Oh, yeah, and tearing down the Ghirardelli factory. And at one point the cable cars were recommended by some genius for removal.
Amazing to recall today…
I was a junior in college in the Bay Area when the quake hit. I have fond memories of getting drunk one night with friends (a bit later) and walking on to the closed-off Embarcadero off ramp before it was finally demolished.
I don’t know if it was done on purpose to drive engagement through comments but the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake collapsed a long upper deck stretch of the “Cypress Structure”(Freeway) due to liquefaction of the soil which was a twin to the Embarcadero Freeway. The Cypress Structure was located across the Bay in West Oakland and ran down Cypress street which is now called Mandela Parkway. It connected 880 to I-80. The Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco was torn down I believe a few years later. There is still one of these structures in San Francisco, it’s another twin structure that I absolutely hate driving under. It’s a small stretch of 280 going into downtown. In fact I think it was the southern part of the Embarcadero freeway So some of it remains. it’s just a matter of time before that one comes down one way or another.
I noticed every video almost has these kinds of important contexts or corrections in the comments and it's bothered me how consistently it's lacking. I may have been suckered too with engagement bait trying to improve the historical education outcomes via leaving comments which is very sneaky
I have nothing personally against these raised freeways at all, except for the fact that it’s such a heavily earthquake prone area! We’ve already seen what a good size earthquake can do to these raised freeways before!
You don’t actually like raised freeways in YOUR backyard. Nobody does.
Raised freeways are unattractive and unnecessary.
You can actually see a few small bronze squares on the ground in the area in front of the Ferry Building, that marked where the support columns for the freeway once stood. It's very subtle I lived in San Francisco for years and visited the Ferry building countless times and it took someone who lived there for decades who lived through the earthquake to point it out.
The 1950s were the start of the global architectural cancer also known as brutalism
Hopefully New York City will get rid of the FDR Drive one day. One of the reason cities like London and Paris are charming is that their waterways are accessible to pedestrians. Not so for NYC.
The Italian city of Genova has this kind of freeway dating from the 1960s along the waterfront, obstructing the view and disfiguring the urban landscape.
This brings to mind the highway 99 viaduct running along the waterfront in Seattle, also a hideous eyesore in such a beautiful city environment.
Now the homeless can have a fantastic view and clean air to breathe!
To answer your question about what if anything remains of the "freeway" is the park that was built under the freeway. There, on the side just northeast of the Ferry Building is a large green that has an interesting pattern of tall narrow birch trees that outline the off-ramp to Broadway. When standing on the green between the rows, you can visualize what is was like to have a massive road structure directly over your head. And just a comment as spent who has a signifiant amount of his childhood as well as adulthood (best weather in chilly SF!!) the freeway in it final and hated form was not really a freeway at all, just a really looooong off-ramp from the BB.
Smile, breathe and go slowly.
I am happy to say that i was here to see it go away as a result of the earthquake. Also they replaced it with a streetcar line! Thank you MUNI RAILWAY! TM SF resident
It's like it was supposed to be shipped to Newark, NJ and accidentally ended up in SF.
I moved to Silicon Valley in 1979 and drove on the Embarcadeo Freeway a few times on my occasional visits to "The City". With or without the Embarcadero Freeway the drive up the peninsula to the Golden Gate Bridge still requires going through the city on surface streets almost all the way to the bridge. It helped speed people to downtown locations, but not through the city. It only goes to show that freeways can be destructive in many ways. It does look a lot nicer without it. As to how many people are crossing both bridges in one trip compared to those who are only using one bridge? I think it is probably a lot lower than they originally thought. San Francisico is usually a starting point or a destination, and not a place you drive through.
Which begs the question: Why are cities expected to destroy themselves and endanger their residents for the lazy convenience of motoring suburbanites?
I agree with everything you wrote. However, taking a step back and thinking through it, I believe the original intent from the 1950s design was to facilitate freight traffic from the piers. Interestingly, these designs were being laid by the federal government just before the containerization revolutionized the port system, and thus bankrupted San Francisco's dockyards. Seattle and Oakland were designed in the same way, with regards to the expressways. Despite all that, its great some of these freeways are gone, in the case of SF and Seattle.
Yea anyone going between Marin and the east bay just uses the Richmond-San Rafael bridge. It’s one toll vs 2. Not to mention Marin south of San Rafael and Corte Madera has a pretty small population
@Gryphonisle Because the Bay Area houses 7.75M people and SF is only 1/10th of it. Planners and politicians could only manage a freeway to the Bay Bridge---a freeway to the GG Bridge was literally a bridge too far. SF would rather choke on all the emissions from idling cars that construct thoroughfares.
Of all places, I discovered that the double-Decker Embarcadero freeway had been removed while watching someone play a racing video game with San Francisco as one of the cities being raced in. It showed the Embarcadero area without the structure. I figured it had been removed due to what had happened to the Cypress structure in Oakland.
it was
Sort of. Since they tore down the freeway but not the buildings you can still find areas with curved voids in or near multi-lane streets. There are also areas where they left the approach slopes intact and undeveloped as it seems Caltrans decided to keep the land to themselves.
Not sure about any physical remains of the Embarcadero Freeway, but I know as an Australian tourist visiting San Francisco in the early 90s. I have lots of photographs and memories of the earthquake damaged sections of freeway where so many San Franciscans lost their lives. I was a little surprised that you didn’t pay a little more attention to the sections of freeway that claimed so many of those lives. Thanks again for another very informative and appreciated video.
@@peterharms3851 That was in Oakland, across the bay from SF. San Francisco had more damage in the marina district from fires and houses collapsing.
The Embarcadero didn’t collapse. I used it after the quake. It had some structural damage and sections were braced with massive wood. We called it the Redwood Highway 😂
It’s so overly crowded the only way to extend or build any new freeways is to rise them in the air!
I remember driving on this while going from Hayward to the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid each morning to drop my husband at work. It loomed very large!
San Fransisco has lost many treasures since mid-century but not all to renewal. Some of it was lost to changing cultural values or a changing economy. Fleishhacker Pool. Playland amusement park. The Fox Theater, (considered the grandest of the five across the country),. The emporium. And now macy's is leaving along with many other businesses downtown which is another topic. But if you want to discuss urban renewal blight and the same people that forced this freeway down everyone's throat,...don't forget the filmore district. Tunnels and freeway by-passes were a big thing back then. It was seen as a jetson's kind of shiney futuristic utopia. Details be damned. They did it here in our town. A tunnel, that really wasn't needed and tore down two thirds of our historic downtown section so people could speed up for thirty seconds to slow down again. It was open pit then covered tunnel construction. Don't forget corruption between politicians and contractors. Nothing has changed there. It's bigger nationwide than ever.
Trump’s corruption with contractors is legendary. It’s why he got so little of his border wall built despite billions wasted on it, and why his sections of the wall have already collapsed.
At night when you see that building outlined in blue along mid-Market that's Fox Plaza, where the Fox Theater used to be. Anton LaVey played the Wurlitzer there back in the day.
@@johnogrady2418 I did not know that about lavey playing the Wurlitzer. Wow. Guess he was into the whole phantom of the opera shtick, lol. Fits. Wonder how he manipulated them into letting him touch it? Even if the wurli and the fox were still there,..they'd be facing what all the other businesses are - failed politics. The silver lining? The wurli is still around playing in hollywood owned by disney as I understand it, (it was saved from the scrapper),...sadly another town facing failed politics. Cheers. 👍
More than anything else Anton was an entertainer. He knew how to work a keyboard.
@@ivanvanogre-nd1sw 👍
Great video. Brings back memories of the train tracks and the warehouses around the embarcadero where there are high rise buildings today. If you haven't already, maybe you'll do one on the old Key System, the pre-BART commuter trains that connected the East Bay with SF and ran across the Bay Bridge.
@9:35 RIP to that poor Ford Taurus!!! My first car was a 1990 Ford Taurus that my dad gave me. It was 6 years old when. He bought it at auction from the cable company he worked at. He had it for about 4 yrs before he gave it to me in 2000 for a graduation present. I loved that car. I had the Taurus GL model which is basically a mid level trim and accessory package for the Taurus. It had everything I could possibly want for a first car, Comfy seats, air conditioning, power locks and windows. The engine was a 3.0 liter V6. It wasn't fast or anything but it was faster then a 4 cylinder. As my first car I did all the typical things to a first car kids generally do to a first car. I added a new cd player and new speakers, raced it around with my dopey friends, wrecked it, fixed it. Finally the engine and tranny went on it and instead of paying to fix it I traded in for a 3 yr old 1997 Toyota Corolla. I only had the Taurus for a little over a yr but I had great times during that time even if I don't remember half of them. RIP BattleWagon Hopefully it found a new life living somewhere on road somewhere in South America or Africa. The dealer at the time told me they sent all their wholesale tradeins to South America. Hopefully my car is still living it's life somewhere in peace!!!
Also, Richmond-San Rafael bridge is a more direct route from Oakland to Marin
Embarcadero is such a beautiful and pleasant place these days. Hard to imagine it with this ugly towering road to nowhere.
San Francisco is one of a few American cities that is great for walking. There are many examples where freeways were planned and not built, or partially built.
The biggest lament about tearing down the Embarcadero Freeway seems to be, “I want to drive to the Golden Gate Bridge from the Bay Bridge,” or vice versa, but the Embarcadero Freeway ended at Broadway. What is that, ten blocks?!? All that blight for a freeway that goes ten blocks. It never went anywhere near the Golden Gate Bridge.
Not to mention that there is an all-interstate route that goes the same place! From the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge, you can take 580 all the way to 101 a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yeah, it has traffic. The 480 would have traffic too if it had been completed.
The idea that we should carve a path leaving a blighted scar directly through the core of our densest, most economically important areas is so nuts, you wonder how anyone ever thought it up.
I moved to the US shortly after the earthquake and never knew about the waterfront freeway until maybe 10 years ago, when I was already working in downtown SF. I was shocked to find out there was a bridge on Embarcadero, cannot imagine why they'd do that to a beautiful waterfront! Then I learned that it was not beautiful back then, like you said in the video, it was a very industrial area.
I remember that freeway well but always hated it. Better now without it.
Some old postcards still have the freeway in it
The Embarcadeo freeway was not in the Marina District.
That's exactly correct! I grew up in Chinatown and my late dad used to drive on the Embarcadero Freeway to/from Chinatown often, uses both ramps (on Broadway and on Clay/Washington) so I vividly remember where the freeway ended and it was defintely way outside of the Marina district.
Eh. True. But my understanding was the original freeway design would have gone through the Marina. You should check out the engineering diagrams that were planned--the freeway would have gone through the Marina and onwards to the Golden Gate Bridge.
He made a couple mistakes for someone who has not lived in SF. Understandable for a youtuber. The facts stated were still accurate. The liquefaction problem was the same along the Embarcadero due to it being bay fill. No mention of the many multiple citywide votes for/against removal before the final vote for removal, but that's another understable simplification.
@@stevens1041 It was assumed the actuality was described and not what would have been. I have seen what the freeway map of San Francisco could have looked like had the Freeway Revolt never happened. Although the rest are off-topic, I'm also also aware of the Panhandle Freeway and the Mission Freeway, and especially the southern crossing that is very much needed which could have connected I-280 with I-980.
@EricHunt liquefaction was not a problem along the Embarcadero. It only affected the Marina.
Once again, no freeway existed in the Marina District. A freeway running from the northern edge of the Marina District through the Presidio to the Golden Gate Bridge was constructed before the Embarcadero freeway was built and still remains.
They were intended to connect, as the city planners’ maps showed.
The freeway from the GG bridge to the Marina was called Doyle Drive. It was partially elevated and has been replaced by a surface road and two tunnels. It never connected to the Embarcadero.
I used to live on Washington St and the Clay St on-ramp and Washington St off ramp were sure convenient. And ugly. 😂
9:15 - no part of the Embarcadero Freeway existed in the Marina district, though that had at one point been planned.
In around 1987, I saw an "underground" event by SRL beneath a segment of the Embarcadero Freeway. It was epic. Two giant hydraulic robots did battle.
I love SRL. Amazing engineering infused performance art. Do you remember their hamster guided exo-walker with flamethrower? Crazy stuff. Geez, I'm old.
@@memoryalphamale The battle I saw had the exo-walker with the flame thrower versus an articulated four-wheeled chassis on which was mounted a 20-foot articulated arm tipped with a mining drill bit. Slow and lumbering, but one blast of flame would be deadly, versus a nimble sting. It didn't take too long before hydraulic fluid was spewing every which way. I thought the nimble beast was gonna win but alas it caught a full-frontal blast of the flame thrower, which melted most of its hoses.
@@TheZipeedoo I'm jealous :) I only ever got to watch videos of their shows as I lived in Florida when they were at their peak. I moved to SF in 2017. Should have done it when I was still that young industrial-punk kid.
@@memoryalphamale It was a wild night. That stretch of the Embarcadero Freeway ran through an area that was, in those days, pretty rough. Mostly Asian garment sweat shops, junkies, etc. There were no lights except a couple of klieg lights set up by SRL. Highly directional. They had Bose speakers on stands about every 20 feet around the perimeter, playing "Flight of the Valkyries" at really loud volume. Speaking of perimeter, there functionally was none. When the giant four-legged beast blasted its military surplus flame thrower, it belched a horizontal column of flame about 3 or so feet in diameter that would go like 20 feet. The smell of burning kerosene stung in your nostrils and you felt like your eyebrows were singed from the heat. Even from the side. As the beast maneuvered around, wherever it was pointing, the crowd would part as people scrambled out of the way.
Meanwhile, the speedy little maneuverable robot was caroming its drill-bit-tipped arm helter-skelter, drilling anything it could touch. The bit was conical, about 3 feet long and a foot in diameter at its base. They had stacked a giant wall of pianos in the center that the two beasts could use strategically. Drilly was punching holes through them like a hot knife through butter.
Then, somehow, flame thrower beast got a direct shot at drilly guy. Hydraulic hoses were melted through. Hydraulic fluid was spewing and spraying everywhere, and that articulated drill bit arm was flailing about, completely out of control. People almost got hit. It would have almost certainly been fatal. Flame thrower took advantage, got closer, and belched its giant blast, finishing off drill-bit robot permanently. Then, flame thrower aimed the flames at the pianos, starting a giant bonfire. That was around when the police moved in and cleared out the crowd.
@@TheZipeedoo Seriously cool. Thanks for the details. Got me fired up - now I'm gonna go watch some performances on their channel:)
Not sure how I feel about a freeway I rode on and remember them razing after the Cypress Structure failure showing up on a channel called "It's History." Wasn't ready to get called old by RUclips today...
They needed more room for fecal matter
They should have saved a two block long section of the Embarcadero as an enduring memorial to government waste.
@@mnoliberal7335 freeways are government waste? Should we drive on dirt roads? You probably think we should get rid of cars right? How would you get your food delivered while the food is still warm?
The earthquake caused only one tiny upper section of the San Francisco Bay Bridge to collapse. That caused one or two fatalities. The elevated freeway in Oakland had several upper sections collapse causing dozens of fatalities. Accuracy in historical reporting, please.
There are plenty of small monuments to the old freeway including brass inlays in the walkway between the two directions of The Embarcadero that outline where the stanchions were. You merely need google it. (And you probably knew that, but you're just looking for comment traffic)
But parts are still there tho... The steep drop from 280 into Soma district is like descending a mountain and super cool to drive. Try it next time you're in 'Frisco. Fun fact: they planted LA style palm trees in Embarcadero...palm trees are cheap to plant as mature trees, you only need a helicopter to place them and they don't easily die.
I’m glad I can watch this video knowing most people here have some understanding of urbanism.
I loved that freeway, it was like flying between buildings all the way down to the waterfront. I figured they'd take it down once the oakland freeway 880? crushed so many people when the top deck collapsed, but nevertheless, the embarcadero freeway was a joy ride.
A better question was, why was it built. It was the true freeway to nowhere and a horribly ugly one to boot!
The movie Salvador has a scene at the beginning with James Woods and Jim Belushi driving on it.
I'm opposed to freeways passing through cities. Freeways should go AROUND cities, NOT through cities.
Instead, one-way roads with no parking and speed limits of 70 km/h or 40 to 45 mph could be created. One way would enable easy synchronization of traffic signals. And there could be grade separations between two perpendicular one way roads with ramps. Only 2 ramps would be required to go from one one-way road to another one-way road.