Category Archives: Rincon Hill / Transbay / South of Market

Excessive Parking Creeps Up Folsom Street

900 Folsom and 260 Fifth, two mixed-use projects that are currently up for consideration, would occupy adjacent parcels South of Market, at the corner of 5th and Folsom Streets, with the northern edge of the project just one-half block south of the new Intercontinental Hotel. Together, they promise 466 homes and 10,396 square feet of [...]

Missing Geary Misses the Point

Over a year ago, before this website was born, the conceptual proposals were released for Bay Area regional rail expansion projected for the next 50 years. Included among the plans is a second tube for the San Francisco-Oakland Transbay corridor, providing additional core capacity for a crucial regional link that is already a bottleneck point [...]

Yerba Buena Cubed

A long-awaited cultural building has finally joined the ranks of the ever-growing collection of museums in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena District — a new home for the Contemporary Jewish Museum. The Museum was originally founded in 1984, but ten years ago, the Museum chose architect Daniel Libeskind to design a new structure to house the [...]

Future Muni Reroutes to the Temporary Transbay Terminal

Preparations for the replacement temporary Transbay Terminal are well underway and proceeding according to schedule, with a start to construction planned for later this year. The terminal is planned to be at least partially open for business starting in the summer of 2009. When the aerial structure hovering over a small portion of the site [...]

Gearing Up For Block 11

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, [...]

Extensions of Muni Lines 44 and 108 Start This Saturday

Extensions of Muni lines 44 and 108 start this Saturday. February 23, Muni will start running permanently extended service on the 44-O’Shaughnessy and 108-Treasure Island bus routes. The 44 will be rerouted off of Fairfax and onto Evans, terminating at Bayview Plaza, near the Evans T-Third station. The 108 will be extended to serve the [...]

Evolving Skyline: 2-12-2008

One of my favorite features of San Francisco’s downtown street map, two grids meeting at a diagonal, is that looking down just about any street yields a view not only of a streetwall, but also of a cross-sectional sliver of the skyline, offset at an angle. Now that Rincon Hill and South of Market are [...]

Temporary Terminal Referrals

I’ve gotten a couple email notes over the weekend from newer readers, wondering why the Transbay Blog has been apparently silent on an important Transbay-related issue: namely, the planning and upcoming construction of the temporary Transbay Terminal, which will be in use for about five years (from 2009 to 2014), while the new Transit Center [...]

Minty Fresh Plaza

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 [...]

Time Capsule at the Transbay Terminal

The Transbay Terminal, dark and uninviting though it may be, is downtown San Francisco’s hub for regional bus lines that connect the city to the counties lying east, south, and north. Many Muni buses also terminate at Transbay, and the terminal is just a short walk from a slew of other bus and train lines [...]