(rshsdepot) Transbay Terminal - San Francisco, CA

[I95BERNIEW_@_aol.com]

From The New York Times.
 
Bernie Wagenblast
 
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
Trying to Build the Grand Central of the West  
By LISA CHAMBERLAIN
 
SAN FRANCISCO - The Transbay Terminal is sometimes referred to by planners  
and developers here as the missing tooth in a smile. Situated in the rapidly  
growing South of Market neighborhood, the once-busy rail hub has slowly  
deteriorated into an underused bus station even as surrounding areas have been  
transformed by office and residential towers; SBC Park, where the Giants play  
baseball; and cultural institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  
The first plan to redevelop the Transbay Terminal into the "Grand Central  
Terminal of the West" was released in 1967 and many plans since have collected  
dust. But the formation of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority in 2001 to push 
 the project has begun to produce some notable results.  
The authority announced this month an international competition to select an  
architect and developer to design and build not only the five-level, 600,000  
square-foot terminal but an adjacent 850-foot tower that is expected to be as 
 symbolic for South of Market as the Transamerica Pyramid is to the central  
business district, which is north of Market Street.  
The competition, guided by conceptual designs unveiled on Dec. 19, is a  
result of two advances: the settlement of a major lawsuit over a land dispute  
that had the potential to delay the Transbay plan for years, and the adoption of  
a high-density master plan, devised by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, to  
redevelop the surrounding 40 acres and provide much of the financing for the  
terminal and tower.  
"Having worked on this for 10 years, once you start unveiling conceptual  
designs, you really start to see the value and the impact this project will have  
on the entire region," said Maria Ayerdi, the executive director of the 
Transbay  Joint Powers Authority. "But it took time to get here. Some of the 
transit  groups I work with have been working on this since before I was born. The 
reason  the project had languished is because there are so many stakeholders 
that need  to talk to each other and agree." 
The Transbay Terminal - expected to be complete by 2013, three years sooner  
than previous projections - will serve nine Northern California counties and  
various transit agencies both public and private, including trains, subways,  
buses and ultimately, it is hoped, high-speed rail to Los Angeles. The  
surrounding 40-acre area, much of it opened up after highways damaged in the  1989 
earthquake were demolished, is to become San Francisco's most densely  
populated neighborhood, based on a planning model known as Vancouverism.  
Named after the city in British Columbia, Vancouverism is characterized by  
tall, but widely separated, slender towers interspersed with low-rise 
buildings,  public spaces, small parks and pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and facades 
to  minimize the impact of a high-density population. The Transbay 
neighborhood  would have an estimated 350 people an acre, whereas the typical 
residential  neighborhood with four-story flats has about 60 people an acre. 
"In San Francisco, there's been a concern about high density and its impact  
on the historic character of the city," said John Kriken, who developed the  
Transbay master plan at Skidmore Owings & Merrill.  
"One of the keys to the plan's acceptance," he said, "was that we added  
parks, little narrow-lane streets, and instead of allowing tall buildings to  
block sun and views, we proposed very slender and widely spaced towers so the  
views could continue to the bay." 
The entire project - the terminal, adjacent tower and the accompanying  
infrastructure - is projected to cost $4.35 billion, with roughly half of the  
financing coming from private development in the Transbay master plan area and  
the rest from local, state, and federal governments and from user fees.  
While the Transbay plan has dragged on and even seemed to teeter on the edge  
of extinction, development South of Market has marched forward. With  
long-planned projects finally coming to fruition, coupled with the more recent  hot 
development market, the distinction between north and south of Market Street  
has blurred considerably. Once considered a less-expensive alternative for  
low-profile companies and high-tech start-ups, South of Market has recently  
welcomed notable corporations like Deloitte & Touche, J. P. Morgan Chase and  
KPMG, who all moved south into new and redeveloped towers.  
"It was a daring move for a law firm," said Joseph Malkin, a partner at  
Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, which moved from the central business  district to 
a 10-story Class A space South of Market in 2004. "The location is  
nontraditional and the building itself is quite a departure from the firm's old  
offices." 
According to Newmark Pacific, San Francisco's largest commercial real estate  
brokerage firm, 23 of its major financial, legal and brokerage clients have  
relocated from the central business district to South of Market in the last 
five  years, absorbing more than three million square feet of Class A office 
space.  While there is still a difference of about $10 a square foot in annual 
rent  between Class A space in the traditional central business district and 
South of  Market, real estate developers expect that gap to close as the Transbay 
Terminal  area fills in.  
"If we start seeing brand-new high-rise buildings being built only South of  
Market, rents could surpass downtown," said David Wall, president of Fremont  
Properties, part of the Freemont Group, which has developed an estimated four  
million square feet of commercial space South of Market since the 1960's. In  
fact, the last suitable parcel for a high-rise office tower in downtown San  
Francisco is under development, rendering South of Market not just an  
alternative but the only alternative for new development.  
Entirely new neighborhoods South of Market are, meanwhile, progressing  
rapidly. Mission Bay, for example, is preparing for 6,000 new residential units,  
over 50 acres of parks, six million square feet of commercial space, and a  
43-acre medical campus for the University of California, San Francisco. Nearly  
2,100 units of owner-occupied, rental, low- and moderate-income and student  
housing are already done or under construction, and more than a million square  
feet of commercial and academic space is in motion as well, according to a  
report issued by the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a  
50-year-old nonprofit planning group. 
Last May, the city adopted a plan for Rincon Hill, just south of the Transbay 
 Terminal area. The plan calls for 2,200 new housing units in addition to the 
 approximately 1,500 already approved or built. "The most dynamic area right 
now  is Rincon Hill," said Jeffrey Heller, principal of Heller Manus, an 
architecture  and development firm based in San Francisco. "We have three major 
residential  projects in Rincon Hill, one under construction. South of Market is 
finally  blossoming as the urban center it should be."  
The other major site of redevelopment just west of Transbay, which was 30  
years in the making, is Yerba Buena, and its final piece has just been finished  
with the December opening of the St. Regis Hotel. Yerba Buena, a huge  
redevelopment area, includes the Moscone Convention Center, the museum of modern  
art and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. 
"The naysayers said Yerba Buena would never get done," said Monica Finnegan,  
managing principal of Newmark Pacific. "The same is true with Mission Bay, 
which  was just a plan on a roll of paper 15 years ago. It will be rewarding to 
prove  the naysayers of the Transbay Terminal wrong, too." 


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The Railroad Station Historical Society maintains a database of existing
railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

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