This is the second part in a Viewpoint series to look at the
development proposal for the Curtis Park rail yards from the point of view of
neighborhood architects.
The focus of these articles is on land uses, design issues and circulation plans
of the proposed Curtis Park Village, which could incorporate 239 single family
and 310 multi-family residential units along with five acres of park space and
14 acres of commercial uses.
Readers are encouraged to go to the Web site: www.curtisparkvillage.net
to see color versions of the site plans discussed here. The developer has publicly
committed to cleanup of the site to unrestricted land uses.
Pam Whitehead and Paul Almond moved to 11th Avenue in 1995. In 2001, they formed Sage Architecture, a practice that focuses on high-end residential and retail commercial development.
Both Pam and Paul are very pleased to see housing backing up to the current residences on 24th Street, something they believe will help make 24th Street quieter than it is now. They favor a pedestrian/bike connection between the new development and the existing neighborhood at 10th Avenue but not a vehicle connection.
They are comfortable with fewer vehicle connections between the old and new neighborhoods as proposed. They believe that most traffic from the new development will exit onto Sutterville Road.
That said, they think the proposed commercial area suggests too much suburban big-box retail and not enough true mixed use. Paul recommends that the largest store need be no more than 25,000 square feet and the others much smaller.
"We have recently designed a shopping center in the Auburn area that is total of 80,000 square feet with 20,000 square feet for the largest user; the rest of the store spaces are 9,000 square feet or less and the brokers are selling these spaces without any problem," she said.
To lessen the visual impact of the anchor tenant, Pam suggests flipping the big store away from existing housing and putting it closer to tracks. Both suggest expanding the mixed-use area to create more of a buffer between the commercial and housing and running the mixed use street north-south instead. There are examples of this type of development -- using mixed use as a buffer for nearby commercial -- in Emeryville, which has a new mixed-use street with retail on either side, a restaurant and residential uses.
Pam is disinclined toward what she identifies as a big parking field in front of the retail area. She suggests that a parking garage up against the tracks be considered to reduce the amount of area used for parking, taking care to provide for adequate parking to serve the commercial.
"A parking garage would yield a few other benefits such as a more pedestrian layout with the freed up space and it would prevent student parking in the commercial parking lot," she notes.
She encourages the developer to ask the City for a reduction in parking requirement in exchange for designing a more pedestrian friendly environment. Circulating around the Village should be as good a pedestrian experience as possible in her view. Adding trees and designing and building on a smaller scale will go along way to improving walkability.
"If they are calling it Curtis Park Village, make it feel like a village," she said. "Don't design it around the needs of the car."
Pam and Paul advocate multi-family on top of commercial so the whole commercial area could be more alive. "Look at how old towns developed before there was master planning," Pam said. "There were no dead areas after the stores closed because people lived in and around the commercial area."
Paul and Pam are huge fans of Sarah Susanka's book "The Not So Big House," making it required reading for their clients. The key theme of the book is a focus on quality not quantity and making sure the house reflects the personalities and life style of its occupants. They believe this should be the guiding architectural principle of the single-family residential portion of the new development.
Andrea Kincaid, Principal Architect of Acanthus Studio and husband, Brent Thrams -- a landscape architect live on Portola Way. Their multi-disciplinary design firm specializes in architecture, landscape architecture, planning, high -end animation and 3-D modeling.
Brent applauds the developers for tackling this type of development in this in-fill location and offers only positive criticism regarding the still-early designs.
"The two alternative plans are so similar that they are not really alternatives like CEQA requires for the alternatives analysis," said Brent. "I would like to see at least one full-blown alternative that offers a different approach. Such an alternative might include a fully integrated mixed-use plan rather than multiple, segregated uses on one site."
Brent regards the current plan has a bit too much of the magic-marker approach to land use. "You get bubbles of single uses that are adjacent but not mixed," he said.
"Cut up those colored bubbles into confetti and sprinkle them over the site so there's more texture. Mix the uses together. Put multiple family in with single family using four-plexes on corners. Put in higher (not high) density in with the single family."
Commercial uses don't have to sit at one end of the property, he offers. Some neighborhood serving commercial uses could be at intersections in the northern part of the site as is done with Café Melange and Curtis Park Market at Second Avenue and 24th Street."
Brent also favors a mixed use street and thinks it should run north-south and serve as the spine of the development. "Make it longer, more substantial and emphasize it, he said. "Use it as the organizational element that the rest of the design can pull from."
He advises increasing permeability- with respect to both vehicle and pedestrian circulation to create more connections with the existing Curtis Park and Land Park. He thinks a pedestrian bridge to City College is essential. Maintaining the Curtis Park grid to the east is tough but important and should be attempted even it means buying up some of the 24th Street houses and putting some of the current streets through to the new development.
"Curtis Park would be enhanced by this type of extension rather than creating Curtis Park Village as an appendage," he says.
"I do believe that Curtis Park has had too much of a NIMBY reaction and has shot itself in the foot with respect to limiting access to the new development. Good land use planning dictates maximum permeability and connectivity. It's a mistake to have too few access points. Everybody -- neighbors and the developer and the new residents -- would benefit from more connectivity."
"Is this plan any different than a suburban design?" asks Andrea. "I see the same formula as you find throughout the region only on a more constrained piece of land. I can't fault the developer too much for not being too visionary at the outset because of the vituperative response to the Union Pacific plan by some in the neighborhood. I would like to see a much more traditional land use plan like we already have in Curtis Park and Midtown."
She believes that this location for commercial adjacent to Curtis Park, Land Park and the up and coming Hollywood Park should be very profitable and should be able to attract high quality viable tenants who are willing to move into a higher density environment. She favors a Pavilions style arrangement where the streets meander around the stores with plenty of parking available but you don't face a huge yawning lot.
"Break down the parking into compact cells in front of the stores," she suggests. "It forces people to drive slowly."
Andrea would like to see the mixed use " Main Street" bleeding into the multi family and commercial, more like Newberry Street in Boston -- a very vibrant, higher density residential upper level over commercial scenario including office above mixed use.
"I would like to see the multi-family reconfigured to front onto the park," she said. "The idea of smaller parks spread throughout the development like you find in New York, London and Paris could be done here. Nice four-story multifamily units that are on a street that rims a park would be very appealing and could easily increase the people in the area making the park safer with more eyes on the park.
A very big park is out of scale with the neighborhood; she thinks it would be more beneficial to spread the park space allocated around the development.