Museum obstructionists costing Presidio $1 million

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s mind-boggling that some misguided preservationists believe the Presidio’s nondescript bowling alley and uninterrupted Parade Ground lawn are more valuable to The City than a donated $100 million museum with a world-class modern-art collection valued at $30 million. If that kind of obstructionism won at the Louvre Museum in the 1980s, Paris would have been deprived of its most distinctive new landmark: I.M. Pei’s glass-panel Louvre Pyramid that dramatically juxtaposes the classical and the ultra-modern.

Here in the Bay Area, where any proposed change sets off paroxysms of uncompromising opposition, obstructionist bickering about the location, design and size of Gap Inc. founder Don Fisher’s proposed gift of a Presidio art museum is already pushing the planning costs above $1 million — a one-third increase in the past six months.

An amended budget from the Presidio Trust shows $1.02 million will be spent on the project by 2011, including $434,000 this year. The money comes from park tenant lease payments that could otherwise be spent on improvements to the vast, nationally designated park.

It was 2007 when Fisher and his wife first offered The City a 100,000-square-foot, two-story museum in the heart of the Presidio, where he had been on the Trust board. Predictably, this remarkable offer soon became mired in reflexive minority opposition. Preservationists complained the building’s architecture would compromise the historic Parade Ground. Neighborhood activists complained of possible traffic problems, the museum’s large size and a proposed demolition of some undistinguished buildings.

The Trust ruled in August that the gift museum would hurt the historical military appearance of the Main Post. Fisher was ordered to scale back or move the project, which he agreed to do. The latest rise in planning costs is due to museum plans and additional public meetings.

New renderings show a scaled-back museum design with 40,000 square feet of subterranean space, 30,000 square feet above ground and no historic buildings demolished. Even before the design was shown, the Presidio Historical Society pledged to continue opposing any new art museum because “it’s not legitimate to build such a thing in a
national park.”

Since the die-hard resistance will never be satisfied with any rational compromise, The Examiner urges the public to demand that the Trust board get behind this new downsized museum structure and just get it built — before Fisher’s irreplaceable modern-art treasures leave town for more welcoming climes.