Presidio Museum better off downtown, group says
By: Joshua Sabatini
Examiner Staff Writer
October 3, 2008
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| Gap founder Don Fisher’s proposed contemporary art museum for the Presidio would be better placed downtown, not on federal parkland, neighborhood groups told city legislators Thursday. (Examiner file photo) |
SAN FRANCISCO — Gap founder Don Fisher’s proposed contemporary art museum for the Presidio would be better placed downtown, not on federal parkland, neighborhood groups told city legislators Thursday.
The Presidio is a former military base that was designated a national park in 1994. As a condition of its preservation, the federal government is requiring that the 1,491-acre park become financially self-sufficient by 2013. It is governed by a seven-member board called the Presidio Trust.
Last year, Fisher announced an offer to fund the building of a contemporary art museum to house his personal art collection at the Presidio’s Main Post, an area comprised of historic buildings and a large parking lot on land that was previously used as the military parade ground.
The 100,000-square-foot Contemporary Art Museum at the Presidio, or CAMP, would disrupt the historic setting of the Presidio’s Main Post and create “severe parking and traffic problems both in and near the park,” according to the recently re-established Presidio Neighborhood Representative Working Group, a coalition of 13 neighborhood groups and other organizations.
The group was first established in 2001 to offer streamlined feedback on Presidio development projects, in particular the building at that time of George Lucas’ digital-arts center at the Letterman Complex.
Speaking before the Board of Supervisors City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee on Thursday, the chair of the neighborhood coalition, Redmond Kernan, said Fisher’s gesture was praiseworthy, but the museum would be more appropriately placed downtown by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and other cultural institutions, not within the historic heart of the Presidio.
“The transit infrastructure is available downtown and it would increase tax revenues to The City,” Kernan said. “We think that the Presidio should focus on its main mission of being a national park.”
Public affairs consultant Alex Tourk, who is representing the Fisher family, said it’s premature to discuss abandoning the Presidio location as the Trust is engaged in closed-door meetings to discuss project details and address
concerns.
“The Fisher family wants to play this out,” Turk said.
On Oct. 14, the Presidio Trust is hosting a community meeting on the Fisher proposal.
