Thank You, Mayor Agnos

I've always felt that Mayor Agnos got a bum rap (no pun intended). The homeless population expanded enormously during his term (these were the Reagan/Bush I years, after all), and his social services-centered approach failed to make them go away. So Frank Jordan defeated Agnos by running on a get-tough-on-the-most-vulnerable platform (and, shortly after his inauguration, had the embarrassing honor of accepting a national award for the homelessness program devised by Agnos' administration)...but Jordan wasn't able to make them disappear. Neither was Willie Brown and neither, so far, has been Gavin Newsom.

And the fact that Agnos was unable to solve a problem that nobody else has been able to solve wound up overshadowing all the things he did right.

On Friday, the City of San Francisco opened a new pedestrian pier--Pier 14, seen above--dedicated to Art Agnos. As the Chronicle points out, Agnos led the effort to tear down the Embarcadero Freeway after the earthquake. He faced a lot of opposition, particularly from Chinatown and North Beach business interests; his resolution passed the Board of Supervisors by just one vote.

The freeway was a wall cutting the city off from its waterfront. If it had been left to stand, there would be no Ferry Plaza, no Farmer's Market, no crowds of joggers and strollers on the waterfront. You can take issue with some of the aesthetic choices (the bow and arrow I'm not so sure about, for example), but the important thing is that we now have a stretch of Bay shoreline that people can enjoy. For that, we should all thank Art Agnos.

[That's all, folks]