Thrive City feels like a ghost town these days.
The central plaza that was designed to hum with activity is bare, since there are no games or concerts at Chase Center and few nearby workers in Mission Bay. Social distancing is easy at the Warriors’ gear and apparel shop. The lone open restaurant offers your choice at lunch from its seven outdoor tables.
The scene bears witness to the soul-sapping realities of 2020. And it’s not the only recent, major San Francisco project where you sense the pall cast by the coronavirus.
Two new complexes by a single developer — a residential tower near Mid-Market and a low-slung cousin on Potrero Hill — illustrate two sides of an urban truth that good times can conceal: It’s easier to build on success that already exists than to try and bring your surroundings to life.
Chase Center feels especially snakebit these days, and not just because of Klay Thompson’s season-ending Achilles tear on Wednesday. The 11-acre super-block opened only five months before the coronavirus led to shelter-in-place orders and a requirement that any nonessential businesses close their doors — edicts that, sadly but understandably, still shape our daily lives.
Far more than merely a sports venue, this area was conceived as a futuristic town square. The clientele was to extend beyond Golden State Warriors fans to include residents of the young Mission Bay neighborhood. Plus employees of Uber, which leased the block’s pair of 14-story office towers and is completing two other buildings across the street. Oh, and visitors to the ever-larger UCSF Mission Bay campus and its satellites to the west and south.
Think back to pre-pandemic San Francisco and such grand notions seem like slam dunks. Heck, health care giant Kaiser Permanente (cue a breathy “Thrive!”) reportedly pledged upward of $295 million for long-term sponsorship rights to what is billed as “The Official Surrounding District of Chase Center.” The huge block includes a half-dozen inviting pathways from surrounding sidewalks.
Now? Pedestrian stairways to the plazas are blocked off for safety reasons. Dumpling Time, which opened a month before the pandemic, is the only restaurant. Chase Center is off-limits to the public until further notice.
There’s a less-obvious variation of the Warriors’ predicament at Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue, where the 40-story Fifteen Fifty residential tower opened over the summer.
The site last held San Francisco’s largest Goodwill, but the eye-catching newcomer is worlds removed from thrifty threads and a cool holiday store in the back.
Designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for developer Related California, Fifteen Fifty extends the downtown skyline to the west with a suave form cloaked in light, precast concrete that unfurls to reveal a waterfall-like slope of glass on one side. The corner includes an artistic aluminum canopy above the sidewalk to diffuse the setting’s blustery gusts.
While the architectural show is on view for all to see, market-rate tenants have a private bounty of amenities inside. There’s a quarter-acre courtyard on the second floor, a fifth-floor dog run and an outdoor pool on the 11th floor. The top floor includes a small lounge with an outdoor aerie shielded from the wind.
This is the first new tower to open in the high-density zone for the blocks around Market and Van Ness that city planners bill as the Hub, and it’s an impressive start. But only about one-third of the 550 apartments are leased so far, in a building where 20% of the units are reserved for lower-income residents.
Given today’s realities, no wonder. Twitter is located two short blocks to the east, and Uber’s current headquarters are even closer, yet neither company expects employees to return to the office anytime soon. Buildings like this are conceived to be the center of the action — but if you’re working from home, why splurge on a setting where almost everything beyond the property line for now is boarded-up or grim?
Related California recently completed another ambitious apartment complex, Mason on Mariposa, with 299 units on the edge of Potrero Hill.
As with Fifteen Fifty, the urban ambitions are high. This location, however, doesn’t need a catalyst.
The project inserts a trio of four- and five-story residential buildings on a block bounded by 18th, Arkansas, Carolina and Mariposa streets. Potrero Hill’s parklet-lined commercial strip along 18th Street begins a (steep) block away. Anchor Steam’s distillery faces the complex on one side, Jackson Playground on another.
Amid this overlap of activities, the new complex places its buildings on either side of a jagged central greenway that’s open to the public — a picturesque landscape where sliced shafts of basalt are softened by mounds of salvia and other aromatic shrubs beneath birch trees.
Residents have access to private courtyards and a roof deck, but the public passage is the main attraction. It already feels established, even though the complex was completed only in June. After Tuesday’s rain there were bird-friendly puddles of water atop several of the upright scalloped slabs that roughly trace the path of a long-culverted creek.
“I didn’t want to be nuts about the creek, but we thought about eddies and the flow of people,” said landscape architect David Fletcher, who lives three blocks away.
While Thrive City and Fifteen Fifty showed few signs of life on my visits last week, Mason on Mariposa felt like part of a resilient city. A small but steady stream of people navigated the greenway, including a mother who had brought her toddler on a playful diversion. He scrambled on basalt slabs that rest on padded artificial turf and, Fletcher said, are meant to evoke the logs that might be left along a streambed after the surge of a winter storm.
The retail space where the passage meets Mariposa is vacant, but I suspect it will open before some of Thrive City’s promised big-name restaurants.
What sets Mason on Mariposa apart from Fifteen Fifty or the Chase Center superblock is that it’s a new thread in a comfortable fabric. Fletcher did a great job. The buildings by David Baker Architects and BAR are first-rate. But design only goes so far.
With time, I suspect, things will equal out.
The pandemic will end. Warriors fans will be allowed back into Chase Center, Thrive City will begin to pulse. Don’t count out emerging districts like the Hub, either.
“COVID will not go forever. The things that make cities attractive have not gone away,” said Related CEO Bill Witte, who came to San Francisco in 1981 to work on housing issues for then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein.
He’s right. Still, one of the many grim lessons of 2020 is that booms come to an end, often in unexpected ways. And the old real estate adage of location, location, location still holds.
John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic. Email: jking@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @johnkingsfchron
"center" - Google News
November 22, 2020 at 07:00PM
https://ift.tt/3nPS7MK
Reality check: Chase Center and other would-be S.F. icons are no match for 2020’s blows - San Francisco Chronicle
"center" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3bUHym8
https://ift.tt/2zR6ugj
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Reality check: Chase Center and other would-be S.F. icons are no match for 2020’s blows - San Francisco Chronicle"
Post a Comment