more Minna Street secrets
31 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
in31 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
in31 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
in17 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
inIf you decide to come down and visit us at Site Club — or just to visit the Site — you will need somewhere to take a bit of a rest after lots of walking and gawking.
This little POPOS – privately-owned public open space — is a great place to sit back, have a snack, chat with Site Club members, and watch and listen to the sound of our beautiful new Transit Center rising from the rubble. Located next to the 555 Mission Building, there are interesting and comfortable wooden benches, ginkgo trees, an incredible living wall, a colorful vertical art fixture, and some whimsical stone-like heads.
Grab some lunch, and sit on the benches facing Minna Street and you can catch some views of the construction in progress, or else gaze up at the beauty of 140 New Montgomery Street rising to the west.
17 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Natoma Street Blues
in17 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
inIf Millennium Tower is not your style, you can consider moving into The Infinity.
And if you live here, as you drift off to sleep at night, you can think about the old wooden whaling ship that was buried for over 100 years beneath the building’s location. It was called the “Candace“, and was one of four ships abandoned in a “ship-breaking” yard that was located at the southern end of Yerba Buena Cove back in the late 19th Century. While the remains of other wooden ships have been discovered during excavations around the Financial District and SoMa areas, this was the first largely intact ship to be unearthed. The wooden hull was lifted from the excavation and put into storage, and hopefully it will reappear if/when the Old Mint of Fifth Street is refurbished and turned into a San Francisco History Museum. Amazingly enough, a whale’s tooth was discovered inside the ship’s remains, identifying the ship from among the four that were listed in surviving records.
For a small view of this fascinating story, do stop in to the lobby of The Infinity, where some artifacts are on exhibit.
17 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Demolition
in17 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
inAlthough SoMa is now a hip and trendy place, every once in a while you get a little throwback to the old days when some areas were considered a “skid row”.
And how dare someone defile my beautiful 140 New Montgomery Street building. On second thought, it must have been a hipster trying to channel some of the old denizens of Third Street.
09 Saturday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
in09 Saturday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
in09 Saturday Oct 2010
Posted Around the neighborhood
inA quite attractive building. Joe Montana and his wife agree.
Too bad the timing of things didn’t work out a bit differently. This building opened in 2009, but if the new Transbay Center had been built first, perhaps the most complicated portion of the Transit project would have either not been necessary or maybe it would have been less somewhat less complex. A buttress wall with 207 shafts will be sunk into the ground behind the building to ensure its adequate support. This work will require about 18 months of effort, and represents the critical path for the overall project.