"This may be the most beautiful commute in the world."
My father sometimes said that back in the 1970s when we were driving from our home in San Rafael to my high school in San Francisco's Sunset District.
San Rafael was founded in 1817 when Spanish Franciscans established a mission there. St. Ignatius College Preparatory, my high school, was founded by a Jesuit priest in 1855.
The route we took from San Rafael to St. Ignatius, when I started school there, went down Highway 101 through the southern end of Marin County. To our right was Mount Tamalpais, which rises nearly 2,600 feet above the Pacific Ocean. To our left was the Tiburon Peninsula, Angel Island, Alcatraz Island -- which once served as a federal prison -- the East Bay hills, the Bay Bridge and downtown San Francisco.
When we reached the end of the Marin peninsula, we would cross the Golden Gate Bridge. From that bridge, the view widened to the West. In addition to the spectacular scenes to the East, you could then also see the headlands of Marin, the open Pacific and the Western neighborhoods of San Francisco.
When we reached the southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge, we would turn right into the Presidio, a military facility founded by Spain in 1776, and follow a winding road that ran along a ridge above the ocean and then down into the Richmond District. From there we would travel south to Golden Park and then through the park to the Sunset District.
St. Ignatius was eight blocks south of Golden Gate Park and 10 blocks east of Ocean Beach.
The Great Highway ran along that beach.
The City of San Francisco held a great celebration on June 9, 1929, when construction of this highway was completed. "Thousands Cheer as Great Ocean Esplanade Is Opened," said the next day's headline in the San Francisco Examiner.
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"Shifting sands no more! San Francisco has laid a million dollar pavement upon her Pacific shore," said the first paragraph of this story. "The little road that Adolph Sutro built in 1887 is now a magnificent stretch of boulevard, 200 feet wide and three miles long."
"San Francisco went wild," it said. "Cheers, shouts, laughter -- auto horns -- band instruments -- hailed the opening of one of the most beautiful ocean driveways in the world. The Great Highway and Beach Esplanade, complete from the historic Cliff House to Fleishhacker pool, was at last a reality."
"Among the engineering features that have attracted widespread interest are a series of underpasses, through which pedestrians may reach the beach without encountering traffic, and an equestrian ramp over which horsemen may ride down the face of the esplanade to the ocean," said another Examiner story. "Parkways, for two miles, between the two roads of the Great Highway from Lincoln way to Sloat boulevard, have been beautified by John McLaren, superintendent of Golden Gate Park, with flowers and shrubs."
It was a great day for San Francisco. But then, quite a different day came last year.
While San Francisco seemed to be united in celebrating the opening of the Great Highway in 1929, the city was profoundly divided in last November's election on the question of whether the Great Highway should now be closed.
Proposition K on the San Francisco ballot called for closing the Great Highway to private vehicles. It won with 54% of the vote -- but lost by a significantly larger margin in those parts of the city closest to the highway itself.
"The result of the Proposition K vote is a tale of two cities," reported KQED, the local public television station. 'San Francisco's westside residents in Districts 1, 4, 7 and 11, encompassing the Richmond, Sunset and Excelsior neighborhoods, voted overwhelmingly No -- 61% against to 39% for the proposition. The results were the opposite across the rest of the city to the east, with 64% of voters approving and 36% opposing."
The Great Highway is scheduled to permanently close this Friday. That is expected to cause a diversion of traffic onto the until-now-quiet residential streets of the Sunset District and increase traffic on Sunset Boulevard and 19th Avenue, the other two major north-south thoroughfares through this part of the city.
The San Francisco area is not just losing a road; it is losing people. Marin County, on the north side of the Golden Gate, had a population of 262,321 in the 2020 Census. By 2023, that had dropped to 254,407. San Francisco County, which will no longer allow traffic on its Great Highway, dropped from 873,965 in the 2020 Census to 808,988 in 2023.
This region of California still has the beautiful scenery it had in 1929 -- but it has very different voters and worse politicians.
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