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San Francisco’s Pier 39 opened in 1979 to a civil war, pitting brother against brother, columnist against columnist and a bathing-suit-wearing Dianne Feinstein against future Pulitzer Prize-winning Chronicle architecture critic Allan Temko.
New developments and buildings have been erected in San Francisco with bigger protests. New entertainment centers have been unveiled with more fanfare. But rarely have two such completely opposite narratives surrounded the same event.
We’ll start with Feinstein and the bathing suit because ... did that really happen?
The concept of Pier 39 was debated for years, a $30 million waterfront complex adjacent to Fisherman’s Wharf, filling a monetary gap created by the waning blue-collar port industry with tourism dollars. Feinstein bet Pier 39 forefather Warren Simmons that he wouldn’t make the deadline of late 1978, promising she would wear a bikini to the ribbon-cutting if he did.
The future mayor and U.S. senator (and former Cow Palace rodeo queen) showed up more modestly in a trench coat, taking it off briefly to reveal a tan body stocking and — very nice touch here — a one-piece Sutro Baths bathing suit.
“Since about half of the pier’s 103 shops and 23 restaurants will take another month to complete, Feinstein said, ‘I’ll only take off 50 percent of my clothes,’” according to The Chronicle’s Oct. 3, 1978, story, headlined “A Snazzy Opening For Pier 39.”
The Chronicle’s coverage of the opening was mostly fawning, listing all the jobs and tax money Pier 39 allegedly would provide, while burying the fact that several city workers had invested in the pier’s restaurants.
Temko, as he often did when he felt San Francisco had been wronged, came out with both guns blazing. Three weeks after the opening, he wrote a full-page scathing counterpoint, calling Pier 39 a “childish excresence, which was stupidly allowed to deface the northern waterfront.”
“Corn. Kitsch. Schlock. Honky-tonk. Dreck. Schmaltz. Merde,” began Temko’s review, emptying the English language Thesaurus before beginning in French. “Whatever you call the pseudo-Victorian junk with which Warren Simmons has festooned Pier 39, this ersatz San Francisco that never was — a chef-d’oeuvre of hallucinatory cliches — is a joke on the port and planning commissions … and especially a bad joke on the whole unfortunate city.”
The battle raged between San Francisco columnists as well, with Herb Caen (tolerant of the tourist trap and pragmatic about the need to change) trading broadsides across The Chronicle pages with Charles McCabe, who wrote a four-part series shredding the Pier 39 project and San Francisco’s increased resources toward becoming a tourism center.
“Tourism in San Francisco should have stopped at about 1965,” McCabe wrote. “Everything since then has been supererogation, encouraged by damn fools who literally do not know what they are doing.”
The rage was strong from the detractors, but it died down in time. The kitschy dreck of the pier became part of the fabric of the city. It certainly didn’t destroy the soul of San Francisco, and it provided some of the promised tax dollars for the city. It also never elevated beyond a running joke for residents, when they weren’t ignoring it altogether.
Since he was mostly right, we’ll give Temko the last word:
“Now, there is difficulty in writing architectural criticism about non-architecture. It is a little like applying literary criticism to illiteracy.”
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle pop culture critic. Email:phartlaub@sfchronicle.comTwitter:PeterHartlaub.
