New Presidio Visitor Center offers guide to park

By its nature, any large development project comes with false starts and crossed fingers. The unexpected twists that cast long shadows across the best-laid plans.

Even when the development in question is San Francisco’s Presidio — a 1,491-acre national park that predates the city around it, yet still is being reimagined before our eyes.

The newest attraction at the onetime Army post, the Presidio Visitor Center at the north end of the Main Post’s grassy parade ground, has its official ribbon-cutting Thursday. Saturday, there’s a full day of family activities open to the public.

Opened in 1900 as a guardhouse complete with barred windows, the building at 210 Lincoln Blvd. has been renovated to be the X that marks the spot where first-time Presidio visitors can begin to make sense of the offerings around them.

Step through the restored front door, past brick walls with deep arched windows on either side. Before you on a raised table is a topographic model superimposed with a photograph showing trees and buildings and trails and roads. The wall beyond displays a multi-panel video screen that lists the day’s events or the next departure of the shuttles that loop through the park or head back downtown.

The room in back, where military prisoners were kept under watch until 1951, dives deeper into Presidio lore. Four displays fill visitors in on the park’s quartet of newly christened regions: the Main Post, Crissy Field, the Golden Gate (the bluffs along the coast) and Southern Wilds. Besides text there are items to touch, such as the shining brass musical instruments floating above the Main Post graphics, or the replica of a small green frog at toddler height in the Southern Wilds display.

All this is eye candy, the user-friendly interface in a $5 million orientation point conceived by the National Park Service, the Presidio Trust and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. But if the displays by exhibition designer Macchiatto are of-the-moment, the architectural upgrade by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson is subdued. It restores a sense of order without trying to take you back to another time.

“There was very little historic fabric left in the building,” said Michael Boland, the Presidio’s director of park operations. “The effort was more about restoring the spatial integrity.”

In other words, create a setting in which stories can be told. Yet the stories we don’t see can be as fascinating as anything within the visitor center.

The center suggests that the Presidio saga was an orderly procession. Native Americans preceded the Spanish military outpost established in 1776. Then Mexican rule and then the U.S. Army presence that extended from 1848 until 1994, when the post became a national park.

The curated tale comes with blemishes, including the role of the post’s Western Defense Command in the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As it should.

What you don’t get, though, are the messy dramas since 1994. Aspects of the park that now look preordained often were preceded by angry hearings and tense what-ifs.

In the back room, for instance, there’s a cool interactive table where bubbles float by with illustrations of people and places.

Tap the bubble with a smiling Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and read how “her innovative legislation, creating a partnership-based approach to managing the Presidio, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.” All true — but there’s no mention that a more ambitious plan for the Presidio, imagining it as nothing less than a “permanent installation serving a peaceful world,” was scuttled when the Republican Party won control of Congress in 1994 and threatened to sell the former post to private developers.

When the dust settled, Pelosi had crafted the format of today’s Presidio Trust — an autonomous body required to be financially self-sufficient. The Trust has done a remarkable job, as inviting trails and hundreds of restored buildings bear witness. But the bottom line is also why many of those buildings are leased to investment firms and the like.

As for the Southern Wilds, some hillsides and nooks covered by native plants spent decades buried beneath military waste. They were were off-limits. Wilds of a different sort, which makes today’s landscape even more of a revelation.

And there’s no bubble for “Star Wars” creator George Lucas. He was the developer whose Letterman Digital Arts Center replaced a military hospital, providing a revenue stream to the park when its financial prognosis was frail. His ill-fated and self-absorbed quest to build a personal museum near Crissy Field, meanwhile, prodded everyone who cares about the Presidio to focus on how the Main Post and Crissy Field will someday meet.

At the back of the visitor center, a former loading dock offers a perch to look at bare dirt behind a rickety fence. That dirt is where the Presidio’s next major initiative will sprout — a “tunnel top park” cloaking tunnels that commuters pass through on their way from Marin to the Financial District.

Once there was a view-blocking elevated roadway. Now there are plans for a voluptuous landscape cascading down to Crissy Field, designed by James Corner Field Operations, best known for New York’s High Line.

Back in 2015 the budget was $51 million and the target opening date was next year. Today the budget is $80 million, with no groundbreaking date.

Mark my words. The tunnel tops will be reclaimed. They likely will be embraced. And before too long, the delays that now loom large will be a footnote to the story that the visitor center tells.

Opening celebration

The completion of the William Penn Mott Jr. Presidio Visitor Center will be marked by a day of tours, music and activities in the restored building at 210 Lincoln Blvd. For a full schedule, go to http://bit.ly/2kVUKvX