ConnectingCalifornia.org

-
How a San Francisco Sand Dune was Taken Back from Development

http://www.earthjustice.org/about_us/our_stories/she-went-for-it-and-won.html

In the 1980s the U.S. Army was turning the Presidio of San Francisco over to the National Park Service. Legislation written by local conservation activists and pushed through Congress by Representative Phil Burton directed that the Presidio, when no longer needed by the Army, would become the country's first urban national park. One of the Presidio's most notable and promising features didn't look very promising at the time. It was the roughly 100 acres along the bay known as Crissy Field. Crissy Field was an area of former dunes that had served as an Army airfield in World War I and the years shortly thereafter. It had never recovered. It was simply a large open expanse of decaying asphalt and oil crust, overgrown with whatever invasive species could grab hold in the cracks. But it was large, adjacent to the water, commanded magnificent views of the Golden Gate and the Marin Headlands, and was accessible to millions of people a year. Unfortunately, the U.S. Postal Service and the city of San Francisco were just at this time looking for a place to build a new mail facility -- a gigantic, block-like structure for the sorting and bundling of mail. To them, Crissy Field looked like the ideal place: it was already on federally owned land, so it wouldn't reduce the city's tax base; it was flat and cheap to build on; and there was lots of space around it for food franchises and the other sorts of activities that a new federal facility would bring...

for whole story, click on the link above.