From the 74-acre expanse of Marina Green, visitors can enjoy what some consider San Francisco’s last unspoiled waterfront vista – with unobstructed views of the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz and Angel Island.
Not far from the greensward, lies the polluted site of Gashouse Cove, where a 19th century plant made gas to light and heat homes. It operated until just after the 1906 earthquake.
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WATCH HEREA plan in the works to clean up some of the waste from that plant has neighbors outraged. They say it will not clean up all the waste in the cove, and will force relocation of more than 200 boats that will block what has long been unspoiled bay views.
“The Marina Green is my front yard,” said Erin Roach, who has lived alongside Marina Green for three decades. She watched as her neighbors have fought to make PG&E clean up the toxic residue left in the area from the gas plants that were torn down long ago. “We have a long legacy of battles with PG&E,” she says.
The cleanup is to isolate or remove contamination from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a class of chemicals that turns up in the soil and water surrounding the plants and is tied to birth defects and cancer. Some of that waste still bubbles up at the Gashouse Cove next door to the Marina Green.
Roach says she was relieved when the city reached a $190 million deal with the utility to pay to clean up the cove. But then she learned that the settlement came with what she considers an unthinkable price – the loss of the park’s expansive views of the bay.
“When I heard that they want to put a new harbor in front of the Marina Green,” Roach said, “it kind of broke my heart.”
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The plan calls for closing much of the harbor in Gashouse Cove and moving boats from there into a new larger one, running along the green. Neighbors responded by forming a group called “Keep the Waterfront Open.”
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SIGN UP “Let’s face it, San Francisco's not the most popular city in the country right now -- and this is a really beloved spot,” Roach said. “It's a bad time for us to be giving something away that San Franciscans actually really care about and love.’’
“There’s magic here,” said Bill Clarke, who lives in the city’s Mission District, but has volunteered in the past to keep the park clean. The retired restaurateur says he has a boat docked nearby and joined the movement when he heard what park planners had in mind.
“It's not just for the neighborhood,” he said. “It's not just for San Francisco. It's for all kinds of different people coming from all over the place.
“It's such a treasure,” he added. “I can't imagine them taking it away.”
At a Recreation and Parks board committee meeting this month, city officials hailed the Marina Improvement and Remediation Project as an historic deal that breaks a two decade long legal logjam over cleanup with PG&E.
“This settlement agreement helps the city achieve its goals of addressing the pollution and reinvesting in the Marina,” said Kelli Rudnick, deputy director of capital for the Recreation and Parks Department.
There will be new amenities, like kayaking and paddleboarding in the partially restored gashouse cove, she told residents, as well as revamped bathrooms serving the park. The goal, Rudnick told residents, is to make the waterfront more accessible to everyone.
The parks department says that cleanup plan involves covering toxic sediment beneath the bay with clean material -- rather than dredging up and hauling away vast amounts of toxic material. That strategy, they say, will both reduce collateral contamination and allow the clean-up to finish in just four years.
Still, neighbors who attended that hearing were not satisfied.
“This room is full of people who don't want you to build a boat harbor on the Marina Green,” said one of the harbor front group’s organizers, Dan Clarke. Clarke had been engaged in a long legal battle with the utility over cleanup around his Marina home, which he ultimately sold to the utility as part of a legal settlement.
Others urged that the Marina Green project be sent “back to the drawing board.” One calling it, “an incredible waste of city money” and “a project that is flawed in many ways, unsafe and unwanted by the majority of our citizens.”
The deal faces a key hurdle on Oct. 19, when the city Recreation and Parks board conducts a hearing on next steps, including whether to authorize environmental studies needed to move the project forward.
