From today’s San Francisco Business Times:
Hines, Boston Properties sling ceremonial dirt in Transbay ground-breaking
J.K. Dineen
Reporter- San Francisco Business Times
Mar 27, 2013, 3:45pm PDT
Boston Properties and Hines are the official owners of 101 First St., a 50,000 square foot parcel next to the Transbay Terminal that will some day be home to the west coast’s tallest tower.
The sale of the property was celebrated today when Boston Properties and Hines today passed a overblown check over to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority Executive Director Maria Ayardi-Kaplan.
The check weighed in at $191,816,196.57. The money will help pay for the Transbay Terminal at First and Mission streets, a $4 billion transit hub that is under construction.
“Bob Pester of Boston Properties actually said ‘do we have to give you the 57 cents?’” said Ayardi-Kaplan. “I said ‘yeah, Bob, you do. We raise money penny by penny.’“
The land deal, which marks the transference of 50,000 square feet at First and Mission from the TJPA to the developers, was also marked with a ceremonial ground-breaking — which if you have not been to one is a ground-breaking where no ground is actually broken. Instead at ceremonial ground-breakings, developers, architects and elected officials make speeches and then use ceremonial gold-plated shovels to toss around a bunch of ceremonial dirt that is sitting in a box.
Still, the reception drew globe-trotting architect Cesar Pelli and two international real estate superstars rarely seen in San Francisco — Hines Chairman Gerald Hines and Boston Properties Chairman and CEO Mortimer Zuckerman. Zuckerman, whose company will have 2 million square feet of construction underway by the end of the year, joked that he was “looking forward to expanding the company name to Boston San Francisco Properties when this building is finished.”
Pelli said he has “been dreaming about this tower and this transit center for six years.”
“We have designed a tower appropriate for the city. The tower will be svelte but dynamic, elegant, and very gracious,’ he said. “The gateway to the city and the tallest building in the city side by side. It’s a fabulous combination.”
Mayor Edwin Lee, who has been pushing the Transbay project since his Department of Public Works days two decades ago, inadvertently referred to Mortimer Zuckerman as Mister Zuckerberg, perhaps thinking of the Facebook Chief Executive Office Mark Zuckerberg. Later on in the ceremony Zuckerman seized on the slip and told the mayor that “actually Mark Zuckerberg will be paying the rent on the building,” suggesting that Facebook could become the Transbay Tower’s anchor tenant.
Now that would be something to celebrate.