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This just in: Fisherman's Wharf is a tawdry tourist trap that San Francisco should be ashamed of.
Oddly, it took a visiting Danish urban design professor's acerbic observations to awaken the Chronicle to a fact that most of us have known for, oh, four decades. Jan Gehl, here recently as a guest of the Planning Department, did not think much of our Fisherman's Wharf, mostly because the aforementioned fishermen are nowhere in sight, obliterated under an avalanche of cheap souvenir stores, bike rental outlets and bad formula shopping. Unless you're fishing for a cheesy T-shirt or a lot of bad chain-restaurant food, you're gonna come home with an empty net.
"There's too little water, and too much of everything else," Gehl told the Chronicle. That pretty well sums it up. Little else need be said. Except, perhaps, that there still is a tiny sliver of Fisherman's Wharf still worth seeing. You'll find it back off the street near Scoma's, usually after the sun goes down.
(But I like the idea of the Planning Department inviting an urban design expert to town to have a look around. Considering their work of late, that's like handing your best friend a loaded pistol, having him place it against your temple, and saying, "Go ahead. Pull the trigger.")
I'm assuming Gehl didn't pick up any "Get Crabs at Fisherman's Wharf" T-shirts to take back to Copenhagen.
North Beach's proximity to the Wharf, of couse, is always a cause for wariness, which is the real point here. Lord knows there are plenty of people who claim to love North Beach who'd sell out our history and our heritage in a New York minute if they could make a few bucks doing it.
One of Gehl's admonitions to the planners was to "celebrate the things that give a place its special character.... If it's nice for the locals, visitors will love to come there also."
Danke, Herr Gehl. (My Danish is a bit nonexistent, so German will have to do.) Do the Danes have an equivalent for "experience sector"? I think not. That's why they're Great Danes, and we're not.
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