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"They'll never solve the traffic jams," opines Logue. "What we lack in open space, we will make up in convenience." Two Stories High. The third of the three top urban renewal men in the U.S. is San Francisco's pragmatic, perceptive and somewhat excitable M. Justin Herman. San Franciscans were shocked into action by the state-built Embarcadero Freeway, which they discovered was barreling along the edge of town, cutting off the view of their cherished waterfront. The resultant outcry halted the expressway (which now leads to nothing in particular), and incidentally aroused the city's leaders into more organized and enlightened planning. Herman presides over 991 acres of new projects that total $655 million in private investment, $81,720,400 in federal grants, $79,996,000 in noncash grants-in-aid and tax credits from the city.
Herman's most sweeping project is the "Western Addition" just west of the downtown business district, where a Negro slum, eleven by four blocks, is being leveled and replaced by apartment houses, office buildings, a hospital, a medical building, garages, a Japanese Cultural and Trade Center and a Roman Catholic cathedral, and a 299-unit, successfully integrated cooperative. But more conspicuous is the Golden Gateway project at the foot of Telegraph Hill. On the site of the fragrant old Central Market, which was moved, like Philadelphia's, to more efficient, truck-oriented quarters far from the center of town, three high-rise apartment houses have gone up with a cluster of little blue-roofed town houses in between. Both the houses and the apartment buildings rise from a platform two stories high; the covered area underneath will be used for parking, and will also serve as a pedestrian galleria of shops. San Francisco also has its own conservation program for neighborhoods of old houses that are going downhill, though not yet seriously substandard. In the first of these, the Pacific Heights area, almost all of 146 blight-touched buildings are now com pletely restored.
Mid-Century Urbanity. Spending the taxpayers' money is a heady pastime, and no town is too small to hanker after a bit of sprucing up when the price is as right as the URA makes it.
Cape May City, N.J., for instance, has applied for funds to restore the old Victorian mansions that were built in the 19th century when the place was a stylish summer resort. Portsmouth, N.H., has a grant to restore the town's colonial atmosphere. But certain cities can be taken as exemplary.
∙HARTFORD has recently completed what may well be, in a relatively small compass, the most successful redevelopment of a central city area. Constitution Plaza is a complex of five office buildings and a hotel surrounding a pedestrian terrace — an arrangement that produces a pleasantly cloistered effect.