San Francisco's last frontier

Even a famous city like San Francisco has obscure places, out-of-the-way neighborhoods where the past seems to be prologue to an uncertain future.

One of them is India Basin, a little cove on San Francisco Bay, on the way to the old Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. India Basin was once an important place in the southeastern part of the city, between the meat-processing plants at the old Butchertown and the Navy yard that once employed as many as 18,000 people.

Until fairly recently, they built wooden boats just off Innes Avenue, and the remains of the famous Anderson and Cristofani boatyard are visible through a chain link fence. There used to be a restaurant that did so much business it was open day and night, and also a brewery inside a stone castle. Water is the main ingredient of beer and the water in the hill behind India Basin was so pure they bottled it and sold it at premium prices.

India Basin has views of downtown San Francisco, the bay and the East Bay hills that would knock your socks off. It has two shoreline public parks with wildflowers and wild birds.

But it is also a neglected and nearly unknown corner of the city, tucked between the bay and a public housing project, windswept sometimes, the kind of place where someone could disappear.

It is a long way from India Basin to anywhere: 3.8 miles to the nearest supermarket, 2.7 miles to the closest bookstore, 3.9 miles to a movie theater. Vast distances in a city as compact as San Francisco.

"It is very much the last frontier," said Jill Fox, a member of the India Basin Neighborhood Association, a group of dedicated residents who see the area's potential.

"We are not one of those cranky-pants neighborhood organizations that comes in later and says, 'You should have done this, you should have done that,' " Fox said. "We want to be proactive."

The India Basin group has worked closely with residents and the city's redevelopment and planning agencies. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon change will come to India Basin, and the group wants to have its voice heard.

Fox carries with her a whole shopping bag full of drawings, plans and ideas all produced by the neighborhood association. Her organization sees a whole new India Basin, a mixed-use neighborhood that would be a San Francisco gem.

Restaurants, bike lanes, grocery stores, roadways, boating centers, kayak rental places, a public amphitheater, a dog run - the ideas tumble out. "You know something is going to happen out here," she said. "And we have a vision."

It is always hard to see into the future. India Basin now has a core group of mostly middle-class white folks who live near the edge of the cove. On the hills is the largely African American Hunters Point neighborhood with a lot of low-income people.

The trick is to produce a revitalized India Basin neighborhood that is racially and economically balanced. The result, in the language of the city's Redevelopment Agency and Planning Department, would "create a mixed-use community" with "a diversity of housing types and affordability levels." The neighborhood association sees the future as "a unique waterfront village for all San Franciscans to enjoy."

It is the chance of a lifetime for a neglected area. "How many places in the world are there like the San Francisco waterfront?" said Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

Meanwhile, the plans are grinding their way through the city bureaucracy. It takes time to plan a new neighborhood in the old city. You can hear the plans for yourself: SPUR is holding a lunchtime forum on India Basin at 12:30 p.m. Thursday at its headquarters, 654 Mission St.

Carl Nolte's Native Son column appears every Sunday. E-mail him at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.