Not so long from now, Candlestick Park is going to be demolished. The implosion is going to take about 30 seconds and it should be pretty awesome to watch. A few years after that, on the ashes of the 49ers and the Beatles and 3Com, a billion-dollar development will rise.
Should you be thinking, “Oh great, another mall. Will it have three Sunglass Huts, like the Westfield?,” there is actually some good news about this 500,000-square foot “urban outlet.”
First, to put that number in context, the Ferry Building has 65,000 square feet of retail space and the Westfield Nordstom is 350,000 square feet. So this is pretty big. And the initial renderings show a neighborhood with mid-rise buildings, which is great.
No word yet on who the actual tenants will be, but the Chronicle reported that it will have “neighborhood retailers, restaurants, an African-themed diaspora marketplace, movie theaters, a performance venue and a hotel” along with housing, with the parking below ground. (Bye-bye, 10,000-space lot.) Between this and the nearby Hunters Point Shipyard project, there may be as many as 12,000 units of housing, one-third of them below market rate.
The possible tensions are obvious, however. The Shipyard was conceived as an “innovation hub,” with its proximity to the 101 and the Peninsula a main selling point. Yet Hunters Point is otherwise a low-income, majority-African-American neighborhood whose inhabitants have put up with everything from geographical isolation to crime to radiation. Hopefully Pier 70’s almost-too-good-to-be-true cooperation between residents and developers can be the model to avoid displacement.
The other potential downside is that this new mall doesn’t seem very transit-friendly (not that Candlestick was, either.) The developers behind the Hunters Point Shipyard are mulling over a ferry and a private shuttle system, but otherwise it looks like cars, cars, cars. Practical solutions to that might be challenging, considering it’s a peninsula jutting out of another peninsula, although the flat terrain is highly bike-able. We have until 2017 to figure it out.
[Via SFGate; photos by amehdiza and rulenumberone2 via Flickr]
