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The concrete for the walking path is totally different from what they had 9 months ago.

There's a signage of "Salesforce Park Amphitheater" now in the... well Amphitheater lol. Lots of news crews and security were there at 6am, but not many people walking around. I saw on Twitter the Gondola is now working too

I will post a walk-through video and photos I've taken right after work

Quote:

Originally Posted by gillynova (Post 8620956)

I look forward to it. I hope the reopening stays open for transit users to enjoy. This hub needs to flourish for the well-being of a well-run city.

Salesforce Transit Center Park Walkthrough (YouTube Video - 4k)

Took a video of how the Salesforce Transit Center Park looks like this morning for those who are interested and aren't able to see it yet.

• Video Link

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https://i.imgur.com/2pQqtARh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/eS5a9ohh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/oXVWxHYh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/s5Efwhgh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/lLQx8iYh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/Q9NtTtph.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/knV6tmXh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/JVh2q7jh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/uQgXUt6h.jpg

^^I didn't have the patience to stand in line for that thing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pedestrian (Post 8626921)

^^I didn't have the patience to stand in line for that thing.

We really liked it. As you can see from my shot near the top, there were no lines last Saturday.

Map of the World

Light show 9/24/2019 - a map of the world rotating tonight. Something different but not sophisticated. I see it every night from my apartment but rarely look at it as it is mostly the same show every night.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...22691a72_b.jpg Salesforce

Thanks for the update. Yeah, whenever I go to SF it's usually people "dancing"

I believe the artist had first dibs at the display for one operating year, and now the display has been turned over to Salesforce. I do hope they get more creative in the future.

It's determined by the SF arts commission.

The New Yorker takes on a bit of New York's favorite little sibling-city: San Francisco's Salesforce Transit Center Park.

Quote:

THE FLOATING UTOPIA OF SALESFORCE PARK
San Francisco’s newest public space reflects Big Tech’s influence—and a city’s anxieties.
By Anna Wiener
December 11, 2019

Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. It contains a prehistoric garden of cycads, ferns, and Wollemi pines; plots dedicated to the plants of Chile, South Africa, and Australia; and a small wetland hydrated with gray water. It is a linear park—longer than it is wide—and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. Millennium Tower, a ten-year-old, fifty-eight-story luxury development near the park’s eastern tip, tilts to one side, because it is sinking.

On a recent afternoon, young professionals in microclimate business-casual ambled through the park. A thousand-foot “water sculpture” by the artist Ned Kahn, titled “Bus Fountain,” runs along its northern perimeter; from time to time, streams of water shot upward, triggered by the movement of buses through the terminal below. The benches, pathways, and bathrooms were pristine. The mood was peaceful and upbeat. Light bounced off the surrounding high-rises, scrambling the shadows. In the central plaza, by a cabinet of board games and a foosball table, children paged through books from a mobile library. Strollers were pushed. Knowledge workers in sunglasses and fleeces sat at primary-colored chairs, munching on takeout from a fleet of culinarily diverse food trucks stationed below. In front of the on-site Starbucks—located inside Salesforce Tower and marked, confusingly, with Salesforce branding, as the Trailblazer Cafe—a topiary bear stood in a fixed salute. Everyone seemed to be talking about work. Snatches of conversation floated through a bamboo grove: A.P.I.s, banking, Stanford.

San Francisco is famous for its parks, and for its beaches, secret gardens, and open expanses; it is perhaps the only city in America where one can wander through a eucalyptus forest, stop for lunch on a bustling commercial strip, reënter a two-mile stretch of pine and redwood groves, emerge at the Pacific Ocean, buy a cup of coffee, and then hike along shoreline cliffs. Today, when most public parks in the Bay Area also double as dwelling places, Salesforce Park feels like a slice of another reality—the Sky Club, not the gate. (The park’s designers—and signage—insist that all are welcome.) Beneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. It’s currently empty—slated, in part, for California High-Speed Rail, which does not and may never exist. Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.

Salesforce Plaza is in a rapidly developing part of South of Market, in a slice of the city that real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Cut—a rebrand spearheaded by the local Community Benefit District, conceived by the branding firm behind Chobani and Mailchimp, and affirmed by Google Maps. South of Market’s stark economic disparities, which see multibillion-dollar software companies standing catercornered to homeless encampments, are largely responsible for the ascent of juxtaposition as a literary device in writing about San Francisco . . . .

https://www.newyorker.com/news/lette...ark?verso=true

The SF Business Times last week ran an Op-Ed piece that I can't find online but it described a "gift" PG&E could make to San Francisco as it leaves town.

They could make the charitable donation of "a 25-foot wide strip of underground space in a basement of its two headquarters buildings linking Market and Mission Streets." According to the author, this would "creatively solve a decades-long downtown transportation conundrum": "Since at least 2003 the TJPA has planned to link its new Salesforce Transit Center with the Embarcadero BART/Muni Station with a 25 ft wide 850 ft long pedestrian underpass one level below Beale St, abuttin a basement of PG&E's soon to be vacated buildings."

In other words, rather than dig a new tunnel "adjacent to" the basements, use existing basement space and avoid the digging . . . plus PG&E could get a charitable donation tax credit. Sounds like a great idea to me--hope it happens.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pedestrian (Post 9012520)

... a "gift" PG&E could make to San Francisco as it leaves town.

... Sounds like a great idea to me--hope it happens.

me too, that would be a fortunate outcome! although I get the impression PG&E is not feeling favorable toward the City at the moment.

Unfortunately owners are usually pretty reluctant to do something like this. Most basement space is used for something, and carving a passageway means you have to move something, somewhere else. If that something is part of the mechanical, electrical, or plumbing systems, then moving it could be very complex and disruptive.

If you want underground passageways free of charge, the best way is to do what several cities did in the 60s and 70s - encourage teardown and redevelopment, then let developers build taller in exchange for public benefits like underground connections. Most cities still do this, but the "public benefits" extracted from developers are usually things with a social-justice bent like affordable housing. Cities don't really have the leverage to get public infrastructure from developers anymore.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ardecila (Post 9012667)

San Francisco is expert at extracting public benefits--maybe world champions (it already requires roughly 30% of new residential projects be "affordable" housing or a similar amount of housing be built off site). But these are large buildings--they aren't going to be torn down and redeveloped, especially not to avoid something like a 25 ft wide, 850 ft tunnel. I have no idea how practical the idea is, but it's worth exploring and I suspect the city could apply some form of pressure on PG&E without tearing down the buildings. They were just convicted in court of multiple felonies, after all, have lost 2 CEOs in a short bit of time and the city is considering siezing their power lines in the city by eminent domain to create a public power entity.

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