Wouldn’t take much to make Ocean Beach fun again

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July 14, 11:20 PM

by , Fault Lines

 

 

For the first, swimmers must be able to suck in and retain large quantities of air. For the second, people must learn to not hold their breath.

For years now, we’ve been hearing hints about the possible revival or imminent makeover of The City’s long-neglected beachfront, plans that have been long on beautification adjectives and short on any pertinent details. A few months back, Mayor Gavin Newsom and officials from the Golden Gate National Recreation Area announced the formation of a “vision council” to look at ways to tidy up our soggy and shabby coastline.

This news was brought to our shores by The Examiner last week, updating the proposals that apparently include everything from commercial development to more garbage cans. But history suggests any transformation plans will erode more quickly than the battered beach itself.

I say this as both a longtime observer of civic bureaucracies and as someone with great personal knowledge of Ocean Beach.

In the last four decades, the only thing that changed at the beach was the installment of a new sewage-treatment plant at the site of the former Fleishacker Pool — and with it, the loss of the wondrously scary pedestrian tunnels that used to exist between the Great Highway and the sand absorbing the ocean’s waves.

Having grown up two blocks from one of those tunnels, I can say that they are missed. And so far any big ideas for how The City and the federal government will make Ocean Beach better are still missing in action.

There’s a simple reason that all the attempts to improve the beach have washed ashore. City officials and most especially the benign bobbleheads who steer federal park property guidelines don’t treat the place where the ocean hits our shores as a beach. It’s as if that big grayish mass of water that laps at our shores were more of an intrusion that requires a host of rules telling us which fun-filled activities are prohibited.

Welcome signs have never been visible in those parts of sandy San Francisco. And that alone makes it unique among all of the big city beaches on the West Coast. Unlike San Diego, Laguna Beach, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz, where beachgoers are invited to enjoy the coastal joys of swimming and surfing and snacking, San Francisco tries to deter visitors from participating in the obvious.

The GGNRA has consistently refused to provide lifeguards on the beach, offering the mind-boggling reason that if it did, it would give the impression that swimming there is somehow safe and encouraged. I would counter that because the riptides at Ocean Beach are so dangerous, officials should be required to place lifeguards at the most popular sites, and that not doing so is the equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand.

And make no mistake, Ocean Beach is one of the most dangerous places to swim in the country — I can’t tell you how many people have needed to be rescued from the churning surf over the years, including at least a half dozen of my friends. Even some of the best swimmers meet their fate to its unrelenting currents — a talented young surfer named Charlie Lopez drowned there when we were teenagers — as if those of us who swam there regularly needed such a grim reminder.

Yet no matter how many warning signs are posted, it’s not going to stop people from going in the water, especially when a rare warm front blows into town. And by treating Ocean Beach so indifferently — a five-mile stretch of oceanfront property that would be considered a civic gold mine in other locales — city and federal officials appear intent on ignoring the obvious.

Instead of concentrating on what people are prohibited from doing, as in leash laws and bonfire restrictions, perhaps it might be a good idea to actually provide a small incentive, like maybe even a concession stand. Ocean Beach may be the only stretch of big-city coast without one in California — and while I’m not trying to chip away at the business of the Beach Chalet, the Cliff House or Louie’s, a Tiki hut at Kelly’s or Sloat Beach offering some form of nutrition or a rentable surfing bodyboard seems like a swell idea.

Clearly, San Francisco will never have another Playland, and since that amusement park’s demise, Ocean Beach has officially been slated by its caretakers as a no-fun zone.

It wouldn’t take a lot to brighten its appeal. The locals here don’t even need sun.

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