["Sending Things Into This Giant Void," via Curbed SF Flickr photog Jeremy Brooks]
· Counterypoint to SF Weekly: San Francisco has its charms [Spots Unknown]
· Announced: Bay Area's sexiest Realtors [The Front Steps]
· Great America theme park sells, but 49ers lawsuit's' [...]
Architectural animations tend toward the utilitarian, with 3D flythroughs and such, but according to one professional renderpornographer, "People have become really anesthetized to architectural visualizations." Solution: up the ante, go artsy, or show something else entirely. One animation submitted by a World Trade Center redesign finalist [...]
Click the image above to view the full photogallery.
And this weekend's debutante is "Washington Place" in Nob Hill, whose "grand opening" celebrates the listing of Unit A, a 2-bed, 2-bath tenancy in common. The building has a total of seven units, all of which are [...]
Speaking of cottages, perhaps it's worth noting that a cottage has tipped the scales in a priciest burbs contest. Burbed.com has been scouring listings in New York and Bay Area suburbs this past week, and has declared something of a de facto winner in this Los [...]
Likely in response to Chron columnist C.W. Nevius' epic indignation yesterday at the Haight's endemic gutter punks, the police swooped in to clean house last night. According to an SFist commenter, "Haight street was absolutely clear of gutter hippies, I don't know how many were hauled" [...]
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"Perfect for pied-a-terre," reads the listing for the garden cottage at 685 7th Ave. For a little white shed being devoured by trees, the little place actually does seem pretty "light-filled." The tenancy in common has one [...]
The guy behind Fake Is the New Real is an urban planner and an artist (whom we had the pleasure of meeting this past summer). That explains the nerdy awesome infographics on his site — one of which pops metro areas out of their states and [...]
[A Condo-Ready Victorian Penthouse in the Lower Haight]
Not that there's ever really a silver bullet for budget probs, but Gavin Newsom's proposing killing the condo lottery, and instead replacing it with a simple condo conversion fee — a plan that could generate tens of millions [...]
["Mondo Condo," via Troy Holden]
· SF would sue to keep Oakland A's out of San Jose [SFBT]
· Our dirty streets: getting even dirtier [SF Examiner]
· Formulating plans for Mission Bay's police headquarters [Mission Loc@l]
· Penny-pinching tourists are slowing [...]
"I can't believe that any building in Las Vegas could be LEED certified. Simply being in the middle of the desert, dependent on dams and imported water, is not sustainable, regardless of how green the building itself may be. LEED just jumped the shark for me." [Las Vegas' CityCenter [...]
A pretty busy section of Washington Street in Chinatown's got a new building headed for it, in the place of the crusty Nam Yuen building at 740 Wash. The proposed building, the Tom Do Hing Senior Center, is a project of Self Help for the Elderly, and [...]
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The 16-unit building at 1000 Pennsylvania in Potrero Hill was built not too long ago, in 2001. Unit 15, a 1-bed, 1.5-bath, is now on the market, and showing the shabby Under 500s of Curbed's past how [...]
In other neighborhood clampdown news, a Nob Hill heiress is waging a battle to get dogs in Huntington Park leashed again. The SF Weekly reported a couple weeks ago that Marion Cope, whose husband co-owned Huntington Hotel, was mauled in November while walking her own, [...]
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It's not on the MLS, but the modern house at 622 27th St. in Noe Valley is workin' Craigslist anyway. The tri-level, 3-bedroom place got a couple words on SocketSite back in October, and has its' [...]
It's not just name-calling and scary pit bulls! The "young, aggressive bullies" of the Haight are completely out of control, says the Chron's C.W. Nevius. In a recent incident, a bunch of them attacked a Haight resident, causing "severe bite wounds and a gouged eye." Adding [...]
[Via A/N Blog]
How about a morning jaunt to Vegas today? The $7.8 billion just-launched CityCenter development is only "one of the biggest developments in the history of mankind." No, seriously. It's certainly been billed the biggest private one in American history. The conglomeration of glittery [...]
Though there's no word yet on when bulldozers and cranes will ever arrive on Treasure Island, the Chron this morning has more about the deal to have the artificial island swap hands. The two-part payment of $105 million — $55M now, $50M later — will actually [...]
["Sunlight through broken windows," via tangobaby]
· Parking sensors and iPhone maps: how it all works [GOOD]
· San Francisco: "worst-run big city in America"? [SF Weekly]
· Japan makes their high-speed train sales pitch [SFGate]
· Santa Clara city council defers [...]
Gavin's coming home with Treasure Island under one arm. According to a press release from the Mayor's Office: "The terms of the agreement include a guaranteed payment to the Navy of $55M followed by an interim payment of another $50M, plus an additional share of potential" [...]
"I'm a little bitter. Sorry. I just miss the city before. Life changes I know. Bitter, party of one, you table is ready ( at a trendy restaurant full of douche tards and their laptops)." —bluntcard [Our Soul, the Chron]
' [...]
Meet LindenHayes, the official knighted name of 231 Franklin. The building's website has just launched, complete with floorplan porn for every single one of its 32 units. Hayes Valley's newest kid on the block appeared all of a sudden in fall of 2008, and just recently [...]
An anonymous tipster frenzy at SocketSite points to some fallout from the high speed rail authority's proposed alternative to going into the Transbay Transit Center: demolishing the Watermark! Terminating in a "Beale Street wing" instead of the transit center proper on 1st and Mission would require [...]
In October, local designers Mike and Maaike staged a hypothetical intervention for the North Beach strippy strip of Broadway, installing neon fortunes and a San Francisco version of Rome's Spanish Steps. The real, years-long intervention by the Chinatown Community Development Center is still under way though, [...]
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The special pleasure of living right across from Ghirardelli Square can be sold: 961 North Point's Craigslist ad says that "you can vacation everyday in the best of both worlds." But factor out the tourist quotient, and [...]
It's been said before, and before the printed American newspaper meets it maker, God help us, it will be said again: a city's sense of itself is somehow magically linked to its flagship newspaper. And so in Harper's magazine's "Twilight of the American Newspaper" making the [...]
How much is fair market value for the whole of Treasure Island? The Navy has said $240 million, while in the effort to completely redevelop the former naval base as a sustainable pedestrian community, San Francisco says $11 $14 million. And thus the stalling of the [...]
["city of refuge," via Curbed SF Flickr photog real plastic trees]
· Restoporn: Danko's in Ghirardelli revealed [Eater SF]
· Endangered species: sky rooms disappearing [Bay Area]
· Brokers can have sexytime too: voting's open for hottest Realtor [tFS]
· Metreon continues [...]
"Anything is an improvement over what was there before. I walk through here every day for work and its a shooting gallery. Basically people cop drugs, park their cars here and shoot up. The people without cars do it on the sidewalk. Its depressing, sad and sometimes scary to" [...]
When renderporn galleries aren't enough: Core77 caught a demo of Zebra Imaging's holographic technology a few days ago — a pretty damn cool showing of 3D buildings magically projecting from a flat slate. Besides putting those poor model-building studios out of work, the screen also puts' [...]
Maybe it's not such a bad idea to reward a soldier from the front lines with the likes of a St. Regis condo. One asks The Front Steps exactly what kind of financial wherewithal it takes to get one: "My question for you is what types" [...]
Click the image above to view the full photogallery.
Two months ago, we noted that Civic Center's newest, squarest condo building at 77 Van Ness had scored somewhat of a bittersweet victory by selling nearly all of its units within half a year of launching. [...]
More architects say that the North Beach library, along with its other historically nominated library brethen, "has no architectural merit," and that designers Appleton & Wolfard "are not key names in the history of midcentury" here. Yet the point being made in creating a "discontinuous historic" [...]
Landscape intervention! An Asian Art Museum employee has noticed some sort of "herb garden" installation going on at the Fulton Mall in the Civic Center, that statue island surrounded by the parking spaces. Compared to what was going on in the roving Google Street View cam, [...]
Curious reasoning from sports columnist Glenn Dickey about the 49ers' Santa Clara stadium: "No work needs to be done on the infrastructure. The roads and transit lines are already there. The San Francisco site, part of the Lennar development for the Bayview-Hunters Point area, would require'" [...]
Click the image above to view the full photogallery.
Then: $1,725,000
Now: $1,560,000
You Save: $165,000, or 9.6 percent!
Timed just right for a "holiday special," this remaining newly constructed townhouse at 1810 Pacific Ave., featured last month, just sloughed off a pretty big chunk of [...]
Good news and bad news from bullet train land. First, the bad news. In an updated business plan released yesterday, the California High Speed Rail Authority raised their projected SF-to-LA ticket price from $55 for the 2.5-hour trip to $105 — or about 83 percent of a plane [...]
["So Many Boxes," via Curbed SF Flickr photog eviloars]
· Obama's geothermal drilling project shuts down [NYT]
· Audits for energy savings: SF's proposed legislation [SF Examiner]
· Market Street vid: old-timey to traffic experiments [Streetsblog]
· Damn skinny: the FiDi's 20-foot-wide [...]
"Are you kidding? I used that thing like junkie uses dirty needles. I knew EXACTLY what to do with it. I'm kinda glad it was hard for others to figure out. I definitely made zipping around those slow moving herds a cinch." —redbearded [Powell's Weekend Sidewalk Widening Gets' [...]
Oh Wilmot Street, what a motley crew of houses you have. The alley off Fillmore has Victorians, warehouse-type buildings, this vegetation-shrouded baby door, and 53 Wilmot, our entrant of the day. The "modern designer house" has 2,100 square feet, 3 beds, 2.5 baths, and one parking [...]
So maybe solar panels can be dangerous after all, though not so much in the falling on pedestrians' heads way, or even in the dangerously ugly way. The SF Examiner reports that firefighters are encountering more and more of the rooftop panels thanks to the' [...]
Bay Area buyers are over vacation homes, and are instead opting for second homes in areas ravaged by the housing crisis: starting with Sacramento, then Vegas, followed by Stockton and Tracy. According to a Sacramento broker, most buyers are doing it in cash, rather than financing [...]
[Photo via SF Citizen]
The city's Better Market Street program crept upward along Powell Street over the weekend, closing a couple parking lanes for the holiday enjoyment of Union Square pedestrians. But as SF Citizen notes, pedestrians didn't really get it. Or they just had' [...]
Jane Martin, landscape architect and designer of the recently spotlighted alleyway behind CityPlace, gets some ink in the Chron today. Martin founded PlantSF, which pushes "permeable" landscaping on neglected concrete sidewalks around the city. There was resistance at first, but she got her start [...]
Click the image above to view the full photogallery.
Once: $4,998,000
Then: $3,998,000
Now: $3,850,000
You Save: $1,148,000, or 23 percent!
Not a pretty flip, this one. After selling on New Year's Eve 2008 for just a hair over $3 million, 1112 Lombard in Russian Hill hit [...]
[Barnes & Noble, now shuttered, via Jack London Square]
"I would say it's a possibility that the project will succeed. I would not say that it's a probability." So says a real estate consultant of the Jack London Square redevelopment in Oakland, in a Chronicle story [...]
["It could have been a brilliant career," via Justin.Beck]
· More Christmas-tecture: contemporary gingerbread house [ATSF]
· Daily uh oh: Four Seasons on the brink [SF Business Times]
· Hot wheels sighting! Ghostbusters car in the Mish [Mission Mission]
· Sausalito's stuff [...]
"gay marriage and parking: a generation from now we will look back at this time period in disgust and shame." [Eleven-Story Building in the Tendernob Has Parking Aplenty]
[...]
Residents and business owners near the planned Transbay Transit Center are grumbling a bit — some about about being forced to move, others about not being fairly compensated for being manhandled by the government. What it all comes down to: it's all eminent domain-able because 1) [...]
