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Greenbelt Alliance In the News
December 14, 2007
Lawrence Livingston
Jr., 'Mr. Open Space,' dead at 89
John King
Lawrence Livingston Jr., a planner who left
his
mark on everything from San Francisco's Market Street to the Bay Area's natural
landscape, has died at his home in Tiburon.
He was 89 when he died on Dec. 5, his family said.
Mr. Livingston guided a 1971 study that made the then-radical case it would be
better financially for the city of Palo Alto to turn nearby hillsides into parks
than to let them be developed. That argument galvanized environmentalists throughout
Northern California and eventually brought him a National Distinguished Leadership
Award from the American Planning Association.
But in the 20 years before that, Mr. Livingston worked on such ambitious big-city
efforts as BART and Yerba Buena Center - and when he looked back at his career
in a 1980 essay, he questioned whether he and his profession had done more harm
than good.
"
I find myself disillusioned by the consequences of city planning in general and
with my individual contributions in particular," Mr. Livingston wrote in "Confessions
of a City Planner."
"
The best that can be said," he added, " ... is that the benefits
probably have outweighed the financial and non-financial costs by a slight
margin."
Though Mr. Livingston was a tough self-critic, people he worked with say he served
the Bay Area well: combining creativity and intellectual discipline with a genuine
respect for the region where he was born and raised.
"
He always wanted to bring out the sense of what the Bay Area is, the essence," said
architect Lawrence Halprin, a longtime friend. "He didn't want to turn
it into something else or turn it over to developers."
Mr. Livingston was born in 1918. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, he graduated
from Stanford University with a degree in history before serving in the Army
Air Forces during World War II; after his discharge he earned a law degree
from Yale and a master's in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
He returned to the Bay Area in 1949 with what he described in "Confessions
of a City Planner" as "as intoxicating blend of professional ambition
and reformer's zeal." After a brief stint as an assistant planning director
with the city of Oakland, he went into private practice, eventually forming
a partnership with John Blayney that became one of the region's most influential
planning firms.
When the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association issued the
report "What
to Do About Market Street," calling for widened sidewalks and a string
of plazas, Mr. Livingston was in the middle of it - a vision that formed the
basis
for today's brick promenade. He was involved with the planning efforts that
led to BART as early as 1953, as well as the original 1964 plans for today's
Yerba
Buena district south of Market Street.
That plan, unveiled by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, bore little
resemblance to the arts-infused district that exists today. It included a
sports arena and
an airline terminal, with no provision for housing the elderly people who
lived in the district's aging hotels.
"
The planners should not have been surprised, but we were, when residents of the
area organized to militantly oppose the project," Mr. Livingston recalled
in "Confessions of a City Planner." Writing in 1980 - when blocks of
land still sat vacant, with the residents gone and initial plans scrapped, he
concluded "The concept of Yerba Buena Center was not a mistake, but the
way the plan was carried out was a tragedy."
From 1970 on, Mr. Livingston's focus shifted.
For all his interest in urban redevelopment, Mr. Livingston also was active
with figures such as Jack Kent and Dorothy Erskine in debating how to keep
the region's
terrain from being blurred by low-density sprawl. Through the group People
for Open Space [Greenbelt Alliance's original name] they released
a study touting the benefits of empty land to a region's image.
Then, in 1971, Mr. Livingston and Blayney applied this idea to the city
of Palo Alto, where officials were deciding how much growth should be allowed
in nearby
foothills. The firm laid out conventional development schemes before concluding
that if the city bought the land, leaving it fallow would be a better deal
in the long run than the costs of adding new neighborhoods.
The study led the City Council to downzone the land, which sparked lawsuits
but also influenced how other cities and counties looked at the landscape.
"
The Palo Alto study opened a whole new way of thinking about open space, giving
it an economic rationale. It had only been seen as a recreational amenity until
then" said Larry Orman. Now the executive director of GreenInfo Network,
Orman was an early employee of the Greenbelt Alliance, an advocacy group
that evolved from People for Open Space.
Orman remembers Mr. Livingston as the best kind of advocate: principled
and pragmatic.
"
Larry believed in doing good, but he also wanted it done well," Orman said. "He
had a lawyer's incisiveness and a planner's dreaminess. It was an odd combination,
but it really worked."
In later years, Mr. Livingston worked as a consultant. In 1987, he received
the distinguished leader award from the American Planning Association -
which dubbed
him "Mr. Open Space."
Even in his final years, "he had an enormous intellectual curiosity about
almost everything," said Henrik Bull, an architect who would lunch with
him often at Rooney's in Tiburon. "He was never just a planner."
Mr. Livingston is survived by his sons, Mathew Livingston of Petaluma and
Jonathan Livingston of Mill Valley; his daughter, Eve Livingston Reeves
of Santa Paula
(Ventura County), and two grandchildren.
The family asks that memorial contributions go to the Greenbelt Alliance,
631 Howard St., San Francisco , Ca. 94105. Memorial services are pending.
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