The plan made a lot of sense. If you were going to have a freeway running right through San Francisco’s Panhandle, which itself connects to the eastern end of Golden Gate Park, why not partially cap it off?
Edmund G. Burger, principal at Burger & Coplans, wasn’t the bad guy here, not by any stretch of the imagination. Burger, born in 1930, was a renaissance man, an innovator who seemed to excel at every thing he tried: basketball scholarship, founder of the Grow Homes movement preceded Habitat for Humanity, and architect for the American Pavilion at the 1992 Olympic Games, in Barcelona, among many achievements. Yet to freeway-sensitive San Franciscans, anything related to a freeway, even a sensible mitigating device such as this, was a no-go.
Burger’s defense of the high cost of capping the Panhandle Freeway was that freeways running through difficult topography in open areas often incur extra costs to bypass, remove, or ram though those obstacles. Burger felt that dealing with a city’s topography and the related costs shouldn’t be viewed much differently.
The cap would have run along a four-block section at the end of the Panhandle, partially covering a recessed freeway. Cantilevered concrete walls 60 feet high would have slanted inward 24 feet on each side over this freeway. These walls would actually be the backs of three story apartments for moderate-income residents. While the walls would have been concrete, the apartments were designed to be constructed of wood.
The 90 foot-wide slot above the freeway would have given drivers light and air, and would have allowed exhaust fumes to escape. The walls and ground-level garages were estimated to cost $1 million per block.
San Francisco and freeways don’t mix. The Panhandle Freeway and Burger’s cap would politically go down in the Freeway Revolts of the 1960s. That eyesore, the Embarcadero Freeway, literally came down during the 1992 San Francisco earthquake.
Panhandle, 1938
The idea of a Panhandle Freeway wasn’t so far-fetched. While not quite a freeway, there was a road running through the Panhandle, as shown in this 1938 photo, above.
