An impromptu town center opens in California
Developer Tom Weigel has an unusual answer: Create an “appetizer plate” of town center ingredients, using “just stuff that sits on the ground” — such as shipping containers and vintage Airstream trailers — rather than buildings on permanent foundations.
On May 1, Weigel’s Red Barn Company opened a temporary retail and civic space called Market Hall on land acquired last August from the Redevelopment Agency of Hercules, California. Red Barn had been working for five years on plans to develop a town center on the land near the Hercules waterfront, in the northeastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area. The center will be part of a large new urban project, whose first two neighborhoods were reported on in the March 2005 New Urban News.
“In the middle of the worst economic condition in over 60 years,” it was impossible for Red Barn to start building the town center last year, Weigel says. The interim solution, as he explains it, consists of “a little bit of dining, retail, office, open space, town square, recreation, cinema (yes, we even have a one-screen cinema going this summer …) and a really cool coffee house.”
At the entrance from San Pablo Avenue sits the Main Hall, an open-air market shed featuring local food vendors and a covered dining hall filled with oversized communal tables. The Main Hall connects to a series of landscaped courtyards where people can relax by an outdoor fire pit, read a book on an Adirondack chair, or play bocce ball.
An area called the Lawn ends in a stage for live musical entertainment, movie nights, and creative readings. A “Play Grounds” area offers café seating overlooking a tot lot, where parents can watch their children play. Six shipping containers and four Airstream trailers have been turned into retail shops.
The impromptu center occupies one acre, plus parking. Nothing was allowed to be built into the ground.
Steve Lawton, the Redevelopment Agency’s economic development director, says the movable, temporary center is unique in the Bay Area, and occupies a former park-and-ride lot. When economic conditions improve, Red Barn will build a permanent town center on 6.62 acres.
In May the State of California raided $2.05 billion from local redevelopment agencies, including $4.9 million from the one in Hercules, placing additional stress on funding to build a station in Hercules’ waterfront district, where Capitol Corridor trains would stop. Nonetheless, the rail station project is on schedule, with construction to begin this fall and completion anticipated in 2013, Lawton says.
John Baucke, president of New Urban Realty Advisors, who is leading work on the 167-acre Waterfront District for developer Anderson Pacific LLC, expects that when entitlements and environmental reviews are completed, the District will be allowed to have 1,687 residential units, up from the 802 units originally anticipated. Instead of two-story residences on top of tuck-under parking, the village will probably have podium-style mixed/flex-use buildings ranging from two to eight stories. The plan includes 134,000 sq. ft. of flex space, 81,000 sq. ft. of non-flex office space, and 74,500 sq. ft. of non-flex retail. Before development can get under way, real estate conditions will have to pick up.
