Word: downtown
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...reasonable scale and unreasonable hills, proud of the slightly loopy beaux arts buildings and the great swaths of pastel houses, altogether seduced by its own fey charms. It follows that San Francisco has a powerful sense of how San Francisco ought to look, and the new ungainly downtown skyline offends that civic vision...
...Earlier this month the board of supervisors passed an elaborate set of rules governing development in the 470-acre urban heart. The new code, sponsored by Mayor Dianne Feinstein, is more prescriptive and restrictive than any other ever adopted by an American city. At once radical and conservative, the Downtown Plan will permit only a couple of new towers to be built in the dense center of downtown. It will limit large-scale building citywide to an annual aggregate of 950,000 sq. ft., the equivalent of two or three medium-size office towers a year, and push the locus...
...ideology the Downtown Plan is sensibly deferential to the existing warp and woof of the city. In ambition, however, it is reminiscent of the Olympian urban-renewal texts of a generation ago, when planners presumed to know how to recast cities from scratch. It puts the city on record against unnecessary shadow and wind and disapproves of mirrored windows (visually off-putting), big street-level airline ticket offices (too boring for pedestrians) and the profusion of newspaper-vending machines (inconvenient for pedestrians). No San Franciscan, the plan continues, should have to walk more than 900 feet to find a sunny...
...plan is not gratuitous Utopian tinkering. There was plenty of provocation. After two drowsy decades when the city escaped the depredations of bargain-basement modernism, growth came all at once. Between 1965 and 1981, office space downtown more than doubled, to 55 million sq. ft. During the past three years alone, an additional 10 million sq. ft. of high-rise offices were finished. The result was flat gray street walls hundreds of feet high, darkness, traffic clots, noise: "Manhattanization," as the locals call...
...coming together in an arch or making points in precise order: one, two, three, four. It is shortly after 8 a.m. Two mornings back to back he has been discussing the effects of Hiroshima on the world and on the presidency in his office in a federal building in downtown Manhattan. The building's air-conditioning system is off because of the national holiday, but the room is not yet hot. Outside, the streets are empty and lifeless, except for a McDonald's. Nixon wears a blue-gray suit, a white shirt and a red-and-white-striped...