Hallidie Plaza

Hallidie Plaza — Powell Plaza before it was renamed for the cable car's inventor — was designed as the front door of downtown. A 1976 account of the Market Street Development Project calls it perhaps the major station on the street, the entryway to the downtown retail section, reached from an underground concourse serving the subway by a series of broad steps and escalators, with a tourist information booth proposed for it and a foreign-language booth on the mezzanine. Because it is a sunken public room in the middle of the tallest part of the city, most of its later record is an argument about sunlight. The 1982 Mid-Market conservation and development study treated the plaza as one of five project areas and recommended building heights for sun exposure around it. Each tower proposed nearby was then measured against it in turn: a 1980 report found a hotel would shade part of the plaza in early evenings in June and early July; the 1999 supplement on the Emporium site calculated that one option would add shade between about 8 a.m. and 9:15 a.m. in late winter and early autumn; and the 2002 report for 949 Market Street identified new shadow on Hallidie Plaza or Boeddeker Park as one of its three central issues. The city's property register carries the plaza across two lots of Block 0341. Keeping it swept has its own contract: the San Francisco Clean City Coalition was paid $242,367.57 across 2018 and 2019.