As Burton had hoped, the base was marked for closure at the end of the Cold War in 1989, and the Sixth Army formally left in 1994. The closure unleashed the city's energy. The Sierra Club's Michael Alexander organized a walking tour for 35 people; ten times that many showed up. San Francisco, as it does, held meetings. The famous, devoted, and accomplished, like director Francis Ford Coppola, the late Transamerica CEO James Harvey, and architect Maya Lin, worked on a plan. Studies were conducted, models studied, butcher paper filled and distilled and emailed to graphic designers. The Presidio was assigned a grand new vision that, if somewhat cloudy in detail, still reached for the sky: "to become a global center for exchanging ideas on critical societal challenges and environmental sustainability."
Idealism bubbled in San Francisco, but in Washington, trouble boiled. Newt Gingrich's revolution swept the elections of 1994, trumpeting the virtues of austerity and limited government. John Duncan Jr. of Tennessee stood in the House holding a sign with a picture of the Presidio's pet cemetery: "Is this your idea of a national park?" it asked. Duncan made hay of the kookier ideas that surfaced for the park, like bungee jumping off the Golden Gate and an extraterrestrial communications center at Crissy Field.
Pelosi employed the Presidio as its own spokesperson. She brought key representatives, including Duncan, to the park to show off its biological and historical riches. The land is home to several threatened and endangered species, including the only wild Raven's manzanita in the world, and rare eco-niches: porous serpentine rock areas and the remnants of dunes that once covered the Peninsula, surrounded by resilient plant survivors of the violent sea winds. The Presidio's forest of eucalyptus and Monterey cypress curves back against the Golden Gate, the buena vista mailed on postcards to families back home in Des Moines and Shanghai and a backdrop for countless newscasts and car ads. Thousands of locals and tourists hike or bike the park's many trails, play on its fields, comb its beaches.
The legislators were impressed by the land and by its military history, dating back to 1776, when Spanish captain Juan Bautista de Anza first scouted the land and successor José Moraga ordered the first dwellings built in what is now San Francisco. On this foggy, windswept tongue of land, where the mouth of the magnificent bay meets the sea, the Spanish army built a fort, El Presidio, to subjugate the native peoples and intimidate Russian or English challengers to the prize. Mexico, liberated from Spain in 1821, held the Presidio until Captain John C. Frémont's Bear Flaggers seized it for the United States in 1846.
However impressed Pelosi's colleagues were, the real problem was money. With its battalion of buildings, the Presidio would cost the National Park Service more to maintain than any other national park. "There were definitely people in Congress who wanted to sell this puppy," said Elizabeth Goldstein, the former regional director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation who's now a city parks executive. "That didn't rise to the level of an idea," Pelosi said.
The buildings would have to provide the solution. More than 400 were designated as historic--meaning they must be renovated according to strict standards. Many were in bad shape, and none were up to code. Despite its gorgeous setting, the post was more sprawl than park, and rotting underneath. The repair cost was a cool half billion. But if by leasing some buildings, enough revenues could be generated to fix even more, headway could be made without huge federal subsidies. The trick was in the execution: The more buildings that were fixed for the least amount of money, the more could be leased, and the more that were leased, the more could be fixed-and onward in a kind of virtuous circle of restoration. Eventually, the real estate revenues could fund nearly all the park's operations.
Pelosi believed the National Park Service had neither the entre preneurial culture nor the expertise to pull off the task. It could do wonders with the shoreline areas, including Crissy Field and Baker Beach, but for the buildings a new agency was needed. She called the Trust "a very sophisticated financial tool, a creative and imaginative solution" that would save the park without burdening taxpayers. Even people now critical of the Trust supported the bill. Urban Habitat's Carl Anthony said, "The National Park Service didn't have the competence to pull it off. And the Bay Guardian and other critics of the Trust idea didn't have any real program for the situation in Congress."
President Bill Clinton appointed the board, and it began looking for an executive director. Each of its members had slogged through late-night city-planning meetings, where big ideas meet fear and loathing; they knew the dull, grinding cynicism that often haunts public development in San Francisco, the love of process in service of delay. The Presidio, with its deadline, couldn't wait. "For us to reach 2013, we need stuff up and running and generating revenue. We have five to seven years," said Trust board chair Rosenblatt. Meadows, fresh from the conversion of Denver's Lowry Air Force Base, was an "easy choice," according to former board member and urban planning expert Ed Blakely. Meadows was bright and tenacious. Board members would handle the politics; Meadows would charge ahead. The happy ending would have extraordinary energy and beauty: one part 21st-century eco-development, one part raw nature. In January 1998, Meadows thus succeeded two centuries of generals who had commanded the Presidio, and in many ways he embodied the uneasy tension that has always separated the bohemian city from the fort and its military culture. San Francisco has known, hated, and loved many flamboyant mayors, but with a few exceptions--like General Frederick Funston, who built tent cities for refugees of the 1906 earthquake and fire--most San Franciscans don't know the names of the Presidio's generals. Few know Meadows' name, either. Yet Meadows, like the generals, wields great power, and with an impunity the mayor can only dream about.
http://www.sanfran.com/features/Troubleinthepresidio2.html
Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband is the President of Financial Leasing Services, Inc.
Hmmmm, a real estate deal, leasing, her husband, and Bill Clinton.....