UN Plaza's architect to fight redesign - SF plan no answer to drunks, homeless

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | Friday, April 18, 2003 | Ilene Lelchuk, Chronicle Staff Writer

[Reeses]

San Francisco's United Nations Plaza is a landmark in crisis -- overrun by drug dealers, drunks and homeless people. But a new plan to remake the plaza and fill in its spraying fountain has the original architect fuming.

"It's like saying we want to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa," said renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who was awarded the National Medal of Arts last month by President Bush.

[Reeses]

The socialist utopia of San Francisco is called "Baghdad by the Bay", and California is the same size as Iraq as Bush likes to point out. This article is accurate, crack pipe smokers sit in the open. The area around the 9th Circus Court of Appeals is even worse. This is the utopia socialists think so highly of. They think their enlightened UN approved values should be exported to the rest of America.

[KarlInOhio]

San Francisco's United Nations Plaza is a landmark in crisis -- overrun by drug dealers, drunks and homeless people.

And yet, for all of its problems, it is still a better place for our country than the UN offices in New York.

[The Red Zone]

They say the fountain attracts bathers and drug users

Can they add a refrigeration unit to chill that puppy down to, say, 40 degrees F?

[goldstategop]

hehehe... How apopros. Its as dysfunctional as the U.N and couldn't be more appropriately named in view of the denizens who hang around it.

[Reeses]

Chilling the water is a good suggestion except the socialists would never go for it as it would be "inhumane". The fountain design is actually quite nice, a small oasis. But it is an inanimate object that the socialists can blame their failures on. "Just pave it over and our enlightened solutions will start to work."

[Lee Heggy]

"overrun by drug dealers, drunks and homeless people"

The UN or the Plaza?

[SuziQ]

But a lack of pedestrians in the plaza and the presence of homeless people and drugs have led some neighbors, business owners and city planners to blame the design. They say the fountain attracts bathers and drug users and that the plaza is too big and boxed in by the blank walls of adjacent buildings.

Here's a novel concept. Arrest the folks doing drugs, loitering, and using the place as a public bathroom so that they won't spoil the area for the VAST majority of others who may like to use the place for the purpose intended!

[Reeses]

The UN or the Plaza?

To accurately describe the UN body you have to also add sex perverts, Scott Ritter types. They want the taxi route to Leavenworth opened up to facilitate their contact with hookers.

[archy]

"You'll be seeing a friendlier and more welcoming United Nations Plaza," said group chairwoman Lynn Valente of the Market Street Association, which represents merchants and property owners.

[jetson]

" get rid of a fountain..no problem"

[Reeses]

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand: life imitates art:

The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of those themes, along with the amazing stroke of Rand's writing, combine to give this book its enduring influence.

[First Amendment]

Bring back the stocks and public whippings. Not to mutilate or cause permanent harm, just painful enough to "inspire" more civilized behavior. Most of the so-called homeless problems are continuing because of alcoholism and drug addiction. Get farms or camps out in the woods and make the addicts stay there, working hard physically until cured. Execute pushers.