United Nations Plaza (often abbreviated UN Plaza or UNP) is a plaza located on the former alignments of Fulton and Leavenworth Streets—in the block bounded by Market, Hyde, McAllister, and 7th Street—in the Civic Center of San Francisco, California. It is located east of City Hall and is connected to it by the Fulton Mall and Civic Center Plaza. Public transit access is provided by the BART and Muni Metro stops at the Civic Center/UN Plaza station, which has a station entrance within the plaza itself.
UN Plaza was designed by a joint venture of firms led by the noted architects Lawrence Halprin, John Carl Warnecke, and Mario Ciampi; Halprin designed the large sunken fountain. The plaza was dedicated in 1975 to commemorate the formation of the United Nations and the signing of the Charter of the United Nations on 26 June 1945 in San Francisco. Since its dedication, the plaza was refurbished in 1995 and 2005, and in Spring 2018, three redesign proposals were proposed for public review.
Location and history
After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed the old City Hall, the city rebuilt it and other administrative buildings as Civic Center; the key access route to the new Civic Center from Market was along the east–west Fulton Street, which lay parallel to and between McAllister and Grove. East of Van Ness, the rebuilt City Hall (1915) and Civic Center Plaza (1911) take up two city blocks each between McAllister and Grove, so the two-block eastern portion of Fulton began at the intersection with Larkin and terminated at Market. Currently, the western half of Fulton (from Larkin to Hyde) is known as Fulton Mall; the eastern half (Hyde to Market) is UN Plaza.
UN Plaza also includes a north–south segment built on the former alignment of Leavenworth, which continues north of McAllister. The Leavenworth and Fulton alignments of UN Plaza meet at a right angle; the United Nations Plaza Fountain and entrance to the transit station are where the two alignments meet.
Concept development
An east–west pedestrian mall featuring "great bands of trees, a grass mall and paved areas accented by lights and banks of flags [to] expand and extend this central park area [Civic Center Plaza] from the City Hall down Fulton Street to Market" was first proposed as part of the 1958 Civic Center Development Plan. At the time, a new long-distance subway system was being studied with an alignment along Market Street, which would eventually become the Market Street subway serving both BART and Muni Metro. In the following 1962 report What to do About Market Street, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin described his initial vision for the proposed pedestrian mall: "... when the Hyde–Larkin block [of Fulton] is reconstructed (as proposed in [the 1958 Civic Center Development Plan]), views into the Civic Center should be created. Thus our Civic Center, one of the most beautiful in America, could give tremendous support to Market Street." The proposed pedestrian mall was included in the September 1963 Downtown San Francisco plan prepared by Mario Ciampi for the Department of City Planning.
Independently, in 1965, the first concepts for the Civic Center Station Plaza were sketched out in the Market Street Design Report written by Ciampi and John Carl Warnecke. The concepts for a plaza at Seventh, either straddling Market or south of Market, would serve the future underground transit station and connect to both Fulton Mall (to the west) and the Greyhound bus terminal (to the south). Warnecke and Ciampi updated the concepts for the new plaza in the 1967 Market Street Design Plan, which called for "a major civic sculpture" to dominate "the central space and [create] the focus for the activities of the Plaza". The commission for that major civic sculpture was realized as a fountain, designed by Halprin and completed in 1975.
The architecture firm headed by Halprin joined those led by Ciampi and Warnecke in 1968 to form the Market Street Joint Venture Architects, which were responsible for the overarching Market Street Redevelopment Plan. UN Plaza was designed as part of the Market Street/Civic Center Station portion of that plan. The same architectural joint venture was also responsible for the design of the other two large plazas completed earlier along Market: Hallidie Plaza (1973) next to the station and Embarcadero Plaza (1972) at the eastern end of Market near the Ferry Building. The Market Street Redevelopment Plan was implemented throughout the 1970s, and was substantially complete by 1979, when Joshua Friedwald documented the results for Halprin & Associates.