![]() ![]() After the freeway was damaged in the earthquake and then razed, the ramps served no purpose.Īnother decade passed before planners focused on the leftover land. ![]() They had connected the Bay Bridge to the Embarcadero Freeway. Those ramps and others were torn down following 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake. ![]() The site of 280 Beale was bare land, having been covered by freeway ramps until 1993. Postal Service, which had a processing center next door. Ten years ago, the block where Lumina now stands was a parking lot for the U.S. The penthouse at Lumina on Folsom Street, waiting to be sold and custom-built for a new buyer. He described the clientele as “a lot of tech professionals and people who live in the nearby towers. “There are fewer kids here than we’d see in Marin - that was to be expected - but a lot of these people have pets,” said Woodlands owner Don Santa. In spring, the market will add a small pet shop. Shelves are one row taller than when the market opened in August. In a locked display case are $260 bottles of Cristal Champagne, while the beer display includes Icelandic White Ale. The freezer holds $13 pints of sheep’s milk ice cream. The shelves include the basics, but also jars of marinated anchovies from Italy. It’s just 9,000 square feet, but that’s enough to make it the largest market in the area by far. This helps explain the instant popularity of Woodlands Market in Lumina, a branch of the small Marin grocery chain. At the first complex to open on Folsom Street, the block-long Infinity, the retail tenants are a cosmetic oral surgeon and Prospect, a restaurant whose appetizer menu includes “crispy pig trotter and Spanish octopus.” The takeoff is spotty: Many of the retail spaces are vacant or cater to specialized niches. “I remember driving here 20 years ago and thinking it was a no-man’s land. ![]() I feel plugged into the pulse of the city,” said Sara Barnes, 71, who retired after a career in organizational management. Couples walk dogs or push strollers on weekends. People spill from towers and stride toward the Financial District in the mornings. Other shifts are perceptual, signs of life amid construction and “coming soon” advertisements. $190 millionImpact fees that will be paid by developers to fund open space and transportation. It’s an environment more akin to New York or Chicago than Nob Hill or Noe Valley - and city planners already are applying what they see as its lessons in two other nearby districts. Still, things are far enough along to get a sense of the new urban landscape. Others are just beginning to climb out of the ground. Three huge buildings near Fremont and Mission streets, two extra-tall towers and the quarter-mile-long transit center itself, aren’t quite finished. Sidewalks and traffic lanes are open one week, closed the next. It’s a still-ragged transformation of the area around the new Transbay Transit Center. But only in the past five years have the plans begun taking form in real life, with short buildings making way for tall ones and parking lots becoming construction sites. Part 2 focused on Salesforce Tower and how it reflects today’s San Francisco.Īll this is the fulfillment of 15 years of planning based on the premise that a high-rise neighborhood, where people of all incomes live and work near transit of all kinds, can be a good fit for San Francisco. Part 1 examined the new Salesforce Transit Center and its troubled history. This is the third and final installment in The Chronicle’s exploration of the changes reshaping the blocks west of the Embarcadero. ![]()
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