The prize for the wonkiest park(ing) spot may have to go to the San Francisco Planning Department, which set up shop behind Caffe Trieste, at Gough & Market. The Planning Department corner featured a “build your own urban environment” exhibit that even attempted to get visitors excited about transit and the density bonus:

A park(ing) spot of wholly different character in the Tenderloin, featuring bales of hay on Leavenworth between Turk and Golden Gate:

A crowded lunching spot on New Montgomery — and around the corner from that, the park(ing) spot at SPUR’s new Urban Center on Mission Street:

And finally, North Beach, where merchants lost no time in appropriating the extra sliver of captured street space to expand the seating capacity of their cafes and restaurants:

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.

Similar car-free experiments have been tried repeatedly in cities large and small throughout the United States and beyond — sometimes successfully, and other times not, although success does not necessarily turn on whether the pedestrian mall is in a suburban or urban area. Still, there are reasons to believe that pedestrian space, even if it did not extend the full length of downtown, could become a valuable civic amenity. University Avenue is not a major transit street (Palo Alto’s primary transit corridor is the pedestrian-unfriendly El Camino Real), but it is a relatively narrow, traditional main street that has active retail uses at the street level, with ample off-street parking tucked behind the storefronts that could absorb an estimated 120 displaced on-street spots. The street connects to the Palo Alto Caltrain station — a regional bus hub, and the second busiest station on the line — and it leads straight into the Stanford campus. So University Avenue generally enjoys a healthy level of pedestrian activity, but it is also subjected to considerable vehicular congestion, particularly at rush hour, when a long line of cars waiting to merge onto Highway 101 sometimes protrudes westward into the street grid. Merchants on Market Street in San Francisco have been slow to realize that closing off car access could actually increase traffic to their businesses, but even they are finally coming around. What will the learning curve be in Palo Alto? It just so happens that the students have already approached some Palo Alto city officials, merchants, and their customers. The response: “most of the merchants are especially enthusiastic.” You don’t say.

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.

By promoting the construction of compact infill development near transit nodes over remote residential subdivisions, we can reverse the sprawling trend by giving more people a real choice between living a suburban lifestyle, epitomized by the two-way solo auto commute, or living a more urban lifestyle that is characterized by shorter trips on foot, bicycle, or transit. But building the right type of development in the right places is no automatic guarantee that we will stop building the wrong type in the wrong places. In order to encourage the former and discourage the latter, effective policy and advocacy are needed on both ends of the stick, and Greenbelt Alliance, one of our personal favorite local organizations, happens to excel at both. Greenbelt also recently released an excellent report, “Golden Lands, Golden Opportunity,” prepared jointly with ABAG and the Bay Area Open Space Council. The report presents conservation priorities for each Bay Area county. The realization of these goals would help create a continuous system of land that minimizes the extent to which sprawl interrupts the natural environment. Doing so would help protect the region’s natural riches for future generations, in spite of the challenges posed by projected population increase and continued pressure to build new exurban development. The report’s recommendations are as varied as the natural resources it seeks to protect, which include watersheds that are critical to California’s water supply, open space, the agricultural land that supports the region’s local food movement, urban parks, regional trails, recreation areas, and wildlife habitats. The report (link to 6 MB PDF), complete with beautiful maps and photography, is well worth a read.

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.

While on the subject of Market & Octavia, an additional topic we cannot neglect is the 55 Laguna redevelopment of the UC Extension site (pictured in the above two images), which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In December 2003, the UC Berkeley extension relocated off the 55 Laguna site, which lies near the geographic heart of the Market & Octavia Plan area. The AF Evans 55 Laguna development has been the subject of separate but concurrent discussions at City Hall.

A controversial issue was the need to rezone the site from public to a designation appropriate for a mixed use neighborhood. The project was protested and appealed on several bases — including compliance with CEQA, the National Historic Preservation Act, and NEPA on the basis of potential HUD funds for the affordable housing component — expressing concern that the demolition would constitute a substantial adverse change that would cause the site to lose historical preservation tax credit and to be de-listed as historically significant resource. But while the appellants disapproved of the project’s current incarnation, their contentions did not unearth any true inadequacies in the EIR, and so the requisite zoning amendments eventually passed through committee and onto the full Board, where they were first passed last week — creating a special use district bounded by Laguna, Haight, Buchanan, and Hermann Streets to facilitate the 55 Laguna project. This replaces the site’s public zoning, but merely zoning a parcel as public is no guarantee that the land will actually enjoy vibrant public use, as this site clearly demonstrates. The UC Extension’s blank walls have had a deadening effect on the surrounding neighborhood, giving the institution the feel of a fortress.

Fortress or no fortress, total demolition of this historic resource would be a highly significant loss; but the project plan is a far cry from total demolition. Although the plan calls for the demolition of Richardson Hall Annex and Middle Hall Gymnasium (the oldest building on campus), 83% of the historically significant square footage — located in Richardson Hall, Woods Hall, and Woods Hall Annex — will be retained and reused in the complex, which will also include seven newly constructed buildings. Unique features like the WPA-era Reuben Kadish mural, which was added in 1936, will also be incorporated into the new plan site. Meanwhile, the deadening retaining wall would be opened up to provide a retail frontage onto the street. Perhaps best of all, surface parking and chain link fences will be replaced with public amenities and a major housing component that received a booster shot of affordability from Mirkarimi: over 400 new rental units, of which 36-37% are affordable at 50% of AMI, including the Openhouse project, an eight-story building with close to 90 affordable units welcoming to LGBTQ seniors. In terms of public amenities, there will be about 5,000 square feet of commercial space, a 12,000 square foot community center in Woods Annex, and 35,000 square feet of public open space that includes a garden and a park bridging the two halves of Waller Street. Although Mirkarimi has expressed a desire for it to relocate in the near future, the UCSF Dental Clinic and its associated parking will also remain on the site.

On balance, the 55 Laguna project — which will inject higher density, active street uses, and publicly accessible amenities within immediate reach of Market Street transit — harmonizes well with the spirit underlying the Market & Octavia Plan.

Renderings courtesy AF Evans.

And bound to get more controversial, courtesy of the C.W. Nevius column that appeared in the Chronicle this week. The column painted a grim picture of The Plaza, a housing-first building at Sixth and Howard Streets. While it included a fairly meek rebuttal from DPH, the article mostly cited anecdotes which indicated that rather than providing proactive services to adequately encourage its formerly homeless residents to conquer the substance abuse underlying their unfortunate life cycle, the supportive housing experiment has only succeeded in moving the harsh realities of the street indoors — putting aside for the moment any architectural achievements of The Plaza.

Pursuant to both the project redevelopment plan requiring 35% affordability and the Mayor’s Consolidated Plan, a permanently affordable supportive housing project with on-site services in the vein of The Plaza is slated to be built on the northern portion of Transbay’s Block 11, fronting onto Folsom; construction is targeted to start in roughly 2011. The building, which would likely be about 80-85 feet tall, will include 100-120 units, 90% of which would be 400 square foot studios, and 525 square foot one-bedroom apartments for the remaining 10%. In accordance with the plan to transform Folsom into a new two-way neighborhood main street for Transbay and Rincon Hill, neighborhood-serving retail is planned for the ground floor of the building at the corner of Folsom. The RFP for Block 11′s supportive housing component will be finalized in upcoming weeks. Proposals submitted in response to the RFP will be collected during the summer and evaluated by the Commission later this fall.

As for the rest of Block 11, fronting Essex Street: the slice of land adjacent to the supportive housing site would support no more than a couple dozen homes, of the 35-50 foot townhouse variety that will be peppered throughout the Transbay redevelopment zone to lend a comfortably human scale to the alleys and narrower streets in the neighborhood; it has not yet been officially determined whether or not these units will be applied to fulfill the affordable housing requirement. Moving a little further south along Essex, the remaining slivers of land will become new open space for the neighborhood. The tax increment funds needed to make this open space a reality are available to be applied, pending approval from the Board of Supervisors. The park would ideally be completed in advance of the new housing.

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.

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.

Here is one such (park)ing spot at the corner of Fulton and Larkin, right across from the park in front of San Francisco City Hall:

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The theme for this particular park(ing) spot was sustainable roofing, so there was a solar panel in the northwest corner of the mini-park:

They were even a couple cute little fuzzy chicks wandering around in a cage:

They were quite friendly and did not mind that I took their picture.

While mingling at the park(ing) spot, I spoke with Jim Warshell, who is getting signatures for a petition to turn the block of Fulton Street between Hyde and Larkin into a permanent park. This strange block of Fulton has a wide street with the monument in the center, and very little car traffic, because on the east end, Fulton dead-ends at United Nations Plaza, and on the west end, Fulton dead-ends at the Civic Center Plaza park in the front of City Hall. The block is mostly just used for on-street parking and as an easy place for tour buses to stop while their passengers take photos. Closing this block off to cars and turning it into a park would provide a nice link between Civic Center Plaza and UN Plaza. If you are interested in this petition, Jim can be reached at jimwarshell [at] yahoo [dot] com. Please address the email with subject line “Re: Pioneer Monument to Park.”

For more photos of Park(ing) Day, check out Streetsblog for some New York pictures. Don’t forget to mark your calendars for next year’s Park(ing) Day!