For Presidio’s Tunnel Tops parkland, it’s still a long haul

At the Main Post of the Presidio, you can explore a former Army base reborn as a national park — and see why there still are battles to be fought over its future.

Old military buildings hold museums and historic displays. Half of the parade ground has been converted from asphalt to a lush green lawn. But on the northeast edge, where acres of colorful gardens and meadows should tumble toward the bay, we’re confronted by bare dirt and a chain-link fence.

It’s a construction site, even though most construction came to an end in 2015. It’s also a reminder not to take the enticing landscape at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge for granted, because progress is never easy.

Including now.

“People have been backing the rehabilitation of the Presidio for decades, and here we have this huge scar running through a very valued landscape,” Amy Meyer, one of the original board members of the Presidio Trust, the autonomous federal agency that manages nearly all of the 1,491-acre park.

“This” is a reference to the Presidio Parkway, the primary link between Marin and downtown San Francisco. It replaced Doyle Drive, a tall, seismically unsafe viaduct from 1940, with new structures that descend from the Golden Gate Bridge to a route below the Main Post that twice passes through tunnels.

The “parkway” opened in June 2015, and the idea was that by now the 70-acre project area would be on the way to full rebirth. The marquee attraction would be a 14-acre park spilling from the Main Post toward Crissy Field — the first and still most popular success story in the 23 years since the U.S. Army handed the Presidio to the National Park Service and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Nope. There’s a lot of dirt and the occasional bulldozer pushing it around. Halleck Street, the most direct route from the Main Post to Crissy Field, is still closed. So is the historic pet cemetery on McDowell Avenue.

What we have instead are tense negotiations between the Presidio Trust and Caltrans, which built the parkway. Also involved is the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, which helped with the environmental clearance.

The main sticking point, apparently, is that Caltrans and the trust don’t agree on what the state highway agency should be handing over to the trust (and, let’s not forget, the National Park Service). The quality of the soil, for instance. The extent of prep work regarding the piped creek that the trust wants to reopen as part of larger environmental restoration efforts.

If this sounds vague, that’s because the agencies won’t talk about what’s going on behind the scenes.

“The Transportation Authority and Caltrans are in negotiations with the Presidio Trust on the final landscaping, environmental mitigations and civil works to reach final completion and coordinate with the trust” on restoration efforts, said Eric Young, a spokesman for the county authority. “We hope to reach agreement soon.”

Caltrans’ official statement uses the same words but adds: “Negotiations are expected to conclude by the end of the calendar year, leading to permits and other agreements so that respective parties could go back to their governing bodies for approval.”

And the trust? Here’s the carefully innocuous statement from Michael Boland, the Presidio’s top planner — “We continue to work with Caltrans on issues related to the restoration of the Presidio after the Doyle Drive expansion.”

Boland was much more expansive this week about the ongoing evolution of the design for what’s called the Presidio Tunnel Tops, by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architect selected in 2014.

In place of the fenced-off acreage that begins by the recently opened Presidio Visitor Center there’d be native grasses rustling along paths of decomposed granite. Sculpted bluffs would offer glorious vantage points on the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate.

At the bottom, as much as 45 feet below the Main Post, a 3-acre “playscape” would educate children about the outdoors. In the best possible setting — outdoors.

“We’re pleased with the progress we’ve made,” said Boland, who voiced optimism that work on the tunnel tops would begin by early next summer. “They’ve really anchored the design in the site, adjusted the topography, softened the details.”

And the price tag has doubled.

When the current plan for the Tunnel Tops was conceived in 2013, the budget was $50 million. Now it’s $100 million.

The good news is that $54 million has been raised by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. But there’s still a long way to go. The focus right now is on donors likely to chip in $1 million or more, with an emphasis on aspects beyond the drop-dead views.

“This is an educational and civic project, not just a park project,” said Mark Buell, who is leading the fundraising campaign with Lynne Benioff, a member of the trust’s board of directors. A veteran of such efforts, Buell described the current stage as “that tedious level where you set up meetings and talk with people about the potential.”

If there’s a bright spot, it’s that the long transition from military post to national park has been bumpy each step of the way.

With regard to Doyle Drive, Caltrans’ intent after the 1989 earthquake was to rebuild the viaduct. It took local landscape architect Michael Painter’s enlightened vision of a parkway in 1993, amid community meetings and bureaucratic tussles, to start turning things around.

A tunnel-top park on the scale of what’s now planned wasn’t in the mix back then. But you know what? Crissy Field as we know it didn’t exist, either. It was a former Army motor pool and derelict airfield, covered in asphalt and dotted with storage buildings.

The same type of transformation can take place beyond the Main Post.

“We have a chance to make the Presidio whole again,” Meyer said. “There’s so much potential.”

In the meantime, there are rumors of lawsuits and fading memories of the hundreds of trees that once lined stretches of now-gone Doyle Drive.

“None of these big projects ever go exactly as planned,” said Greg Moore, president of the conservancy since 1985. “You have to persevere.”