Transbay Blog

University & Bryant, in downtown Palo Alto. Courtesy of Flickr user ikkoskinen.

Has the new 17th Street pedestrian plaza in San Francisco’s Castro District set off a spark? San Francisco is not the only Bay Area city that dreams of creating bustling new pedestrian open spaces, nor is it the only one that isn’t quite satisfied with the current state of its main street.  But of all places, Palo Alto, which has of late gained more of a reputation for NIMBYism than for embracing progressive city planning? Well, sort of. Not surprisingly, this latest push for pedestrianization is of local collegiate origin, coming from students in a class at Stanford University’s design institute, but the idea seems to be catching on fast; the Facebook group created just this week has added on average more than 100 new members each day.  Right now, it is basically a brainstorm to close off several blocks of University Avenue, Palo Alto’s main drag, to cars — specifically, the blocks between High and Cowper streets, accounting for most of the downtown commercial strip. The plan, which is of course only a sketch at this point, suggests initially allowing cross traffic through the pedestrian zone, but then later transitioning to a bona fide car-free zone in which motorists navigate a counterclockwise loop around the zone using side streets.

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Courtesy of Greenbelt Alliance.

For those of us who call the Bay Area home, it can be easy to forget just how lucky we are — that we get to live, work, and play in an attractive, vibrant urban setting whose visual appeal is all the more enhanced by the region’s dramatic topography and inherent natural beauty. The panoramic vista of bay, parkland, and downtown high-rises from Skyline Boulevard in Oakland on a crystal-clear autumn day grows no less breathtaking upon repeated viewing. Nor do Marin County’s largely pristine hillsides, as viewed from atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill, in the middle of one of the country’s densest neighborhoods outside of Manhattan. The Bay Area’s abundant parkland and open space is an irreplaceable resource, and so much the better that it can be so easily accessed and enjoyed from the cities. But decades of non-planning have compromised some of that irreplaceable resource, as automobile-dependent sprawl has pushed the fringes of the Bay Area ever more distant from the namesake body of water that lies at its center. In 1930, 63% of the Bay Area’s population was located within the city limits of San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley; by 2007, just 19% lived in those three urban core cities. Within that span of 77 years, the collective population of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley increased by about 30%; but the population of the entire region increased almost 350% in the same span of time, reflecting the decisive outward trend that has had a profound effect on the landscape and travel patterns in the Bay Area of today.

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This past Friday, September 19, was Park(ing) Day, that day each year when parking spots are turned into miniature parks. Park(ing) Day is a nice reminder of the value of public spaces, and of how nice it can be to reclaim even small chunks of pavement from automobiles and return them to pedestrians, if only for a few hours. It also serves as a nice prelude to World Carfree Day, which falls every year on this day, September 22.

This year on Park(ing) Day, flowers bloomed from a parking meter in front of San Francisco City Hall:

And here are two other park(ing) spots — near Union Square, and across the street from the main branch of the public library:

For more: check out Flickr for lots of great photos of park(ing) spots in San Francisco. Streetsblog also put together its usual excellent coverage of Park(ing) Day in New York City.

A busy week prevented me from posting about this earlier, but better late than never: as you may have already read in the Chronicle, there have been favorable updates at the Board of Supervisors concerning the Market & Octavia Plan, which I addressed in a post a couple weeks ago. Supervisors Mirkarimi and McGoldrick had articulated competing visions for the contentious issues of affordable housing, parking, and density in the Market & Octavia plan area: more details are provided in that linked post. But the two proposals have since coalesced into a single compromise plan. Thankfully, Mirkarimi’s stricter parking requirements survived, helping to ensure that the Market & Octavia Plan maintains livability at its heart; the compromise also adopted Mirkarimi’s affordable housing funding plan, which set forth a tiered impact fee (of $0, $4, or $8 per square foot, depending on the location of the development) and the opportunity for developers to contribute to the citywide affordable housing fund in lieu of TDR fees. However, the compromise incorporates McGoldrick’s density cap, which will apply not just to Duboce Triangle, but to all blocks zoned as Residential Transit-Oriented (RTO), which includes most of the residential blocks deeper in the plan area, off of Market Street. These amendments were passed at first hearing at the Board last Tuesday, finally drawing some consensus on this comprehensive plan that has been highly contested in recent months.

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John King exposes San Francisco’s “Pockets of Peace.” John King, who handles the Chronicle’s output regarding architecture and design, came out with a nice piece today exposing downtown San Francisco’s public spaces, many of which are remarkably hidden and little known. Thanks to the downtown plan, which stipulates the provision of privately owned and maintained but publicly accessibly open space to accommodate downtown’s working population, you do not need to live atop a prestigious hill or in the penthouse of a luxury condo tower to get a great view of downtown. The view from the rooftop open spaces may lack the majestic panorama of a penthouse view, but they make up for it by providing a chaotic in medias res perspective of downtown’s density. However, because the article focused on San Francisco, it neglected to mention one of my personal favorite examples of hidden downtown public space: the rooftop garden tucked behind the Kaiser Building in downtown Oakland.
[San Francisco Chronicle: Map, Article]

Because most of the general interest in the Transbay redevelopment process seems to focus, quite understandably, on the Pelli Transit Center and its signature tower, it is easy to forget how much planning is required to deal with the rest (really, most) of the redevelopment zone — now-vacant lots once occupied by the Embarcadero Freeway, mostly located north of Folsom, with a couple slivers to the south. To jumpstart the various threads of the greater development process, each of these former freeway parcels will be treated to a separate RFP. Building a neighborhood from scratch in modern times is no easy task, and even small, peripheral parcels should be lavished with as much care and attention as we can give. Currently up for consideration is Block 11, whose RFP is in the drafting stage. Hugging the eastern corner of Folsom and Essex, Block 11 (outlined in red in the Google satellite image at right) is a more peripheral site, in the sense that it is not slated for a tower or a particularly high density of new homes. But to current and future residents of the neighborhood, it could prove more controversial than new additions to the skyline.

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Last Friday, an 18,000 square foot section of pavement was reclaimed for pedestrians, with the official opening of Mint Plaza, on Fifth Street between Market and Mission. The plaza occupies a former section of Jessie Street, right next to the Old Mint building. By 2011, this 1874 Alfred Mullett structure will house the Museum of San Francisco and the Bay Area, the American Money Museum, and the San Francisco Visitor’s Information Center (currently in Hallidie Plaza). Historically speaking, the Mint is one of the Bay Area’s most important buildings, at one point holding one-third of the gold reserves in the United States. The “Granite Lady”, as the building is fondly known, also managed to survive the 1906 earthquake and fire, when so little else did. The building has witnessed most of San Francisco’s history, sometimes actively and other times passively, but appropriately, when the Mint reopens, its museum will tell the story of this building and of the city that was born, destroyed, and born once again under its watch.

Although South of Market has more than its fair share of regional landmarks, this section of the city noticeably lacks public open space that interacts and synergizes with the life of the street. In that sense, the new Mint Plaza will be a welcome addition. The stark, simple design suggests that the plaza will not attract visitors of its own accord:

Rather, the vitality of this public space will depend on a critical mass of activity generated by the uses surrounding it. For the time being, that activity will largely be generated by Westfield shoppers, people who work in the area, and patrons of the commercial space ringing the plaza, once those storefronts are filled. However, Mint Plaza’s success will not truly be tested until the Mint building officially opens in 2011. By then, it will hopefully be a pleasant place to linger and enjoy one of San Francisco’s foremost civic spaces.

Rendering courtesy The Mint Project.

When you stop and think about it, it is amazing just how much space we have chosen to give over to automobiles. Certainly, there are the car storage locations: surface parking lots, street parking spots, driveways, and huge parking garages. But what about freeways? Entire neighborhoods have been sacrificed and razed to the ground to make way for these massive, intrusive structures, and the soul of the areas surrounding freeways is in turn sacrificed for the sake of increasing travel speeds for cars. Even more fundamentally, what about streets? So much pavement is given exclusively to cars, with comparatively little space for pedestrians, cyclists and street amenities like plants, greenery, and benches.

For a bit of historical perspective, check out this great link, which shows pictures of Park Avenue in Manhattan in 1922, both before and after the street was completely reconfigured to accommodate vehicles. As hard as it is to believe now, Park Avenue did actually once have a park!

Especially here in the auto-centric United States, we’ve come to be complacent about the large tracts of land we have handed over towards automobiles, but one day every year, we are reminded of what life might be like if we reclaim just a small portion of that pavement and return it to the people, in the form of green open space. That day is, of course, (Park)ing Day, in which cities all across the country and the world take over parking spots, lay down some grass, and set up a mini-park to be enjoyed and savored, if only for one day. This year, (Park)ing Day was this past Friday.

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