In The News : 2002

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Brownfield to Bay Street

December 1, 2002
This article also appears on another site: Shopping Centers Today

By Rick DelVecchio

While surrounding cities developed their downtowns layer by layer over decades, tiny Emeryville, east of San Francisco Bay, didn't have the time. It was busy carving its own smoky niche as a haven for heavy industry.

But now the industry is almost gone, the ground it sat on has been scraped clean of toxics, and "downtown" Emeryville is springing up in its place almost overnight. And even though this downtown is not an amalgamation built up over time, it is meant to look like one. It's a $400 million, 1 million-square-foot mixed-use development called Bay Street. Set to open in October on 20 acres of recycled waterfront industrial land, it will have restaurants, shops and a cinema complex on one end and a hotel on the other.

In the middle will be one block of restaurants and two blocks of stores with a focus on fashion, topped by housing and with a parking deck sandwiched in between. The sides of this corridor will range from 40 to 80 feet high to reflect a traditional Main Street's jagged rooflines, and the exteriors will be largely of brick and plaster, playing off the warehouses that are the city's architectural signature.

Running down the center will be Bay Street - a real street, with sidewalks, parallel parking, meters, trees and cafés. The developers say the street will be indistinguishable from any public downtown shopping thoroughfare, except that it will stay in private hands.

"Our goal is to make it look like a public street," said Eric Hohmann, project manager for master developer Madison Marquette, Cincinnati. "If you think it's a private street, we've failed in our design intent."

The key element in realizing the project was the city of Emeryville's role in clearing the site of abandoned industrial works and their waste. The $27 million public effort was one of the nation's most ambitious examples of recycling "brownfields" - urban industrial lands shunned because of perceived or real contamination.

Madison Marquette, whose portfolio includes the upscale Gardens on El Paseo open-air retail and entertainment center in Palm Desert, Calif., has entered into partnership with California Urban Investment Partners for the project's construction and development. California Urban Investment is a joint venture formed by San Francisco-based MacFarlane Urban Realty Co. and the California Public Employees' Retirement System.

"We are creating a real neighborhood and a real place, not a mall," said the project's designer, Charles Pigg, of Charles Group International, Los Angeles. Formerly, he was a principal at The Jerde Partnership International, which is still the project's architect of record.

Hohmann calls the concept a "neotraditional Main Street block." There are a growing number of examples around the country, including traditional malls redone as open-air promenades, and sections of faded downtowns turned into retail and entertainment zones. A sampling of these includes TrizecHahn's Hollywood & Highland in Los Angeles and Paseo Colorado in Pasadena; Simon Property Group's Bowie Town Center in Prince Georges County, Md. and its proposed Firewheel Town Center in Garland, Texas.

There are examples of this kind of development closer to home, too. In the retail market east of San Francisco Bay, there's Berkeley's Fourth Street, just north of the Bay Street. And in Oakland, the upscale restaurants and housewares boutiques on College and Piedmont avenues are largely new, sharing the sidewalks with such traditional retailers as a shoe repair shop, a neighborhood barber and an Irish pub.

But while neighborhood retail thrives in the Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville areas, Bay Street would be the first regional center in the market. It is a diverse market with wealth in the hills and youth attracted to the jobs, transportation, housing and excellent weather in the flatlands. Take a weekend trip to the IKEA store, which is next to the Bay Street site, and feel the floors rumble under the weight of thousands of shoppers, many of them ethnically diverse young couples with babies. It is odd to think that what roared in the neighborhood 15 or 20 years ago was a pigment plant and a foundry.

High household incomes and robust tourism make the San Francisco retail market strong despite slow population growth, according to Reis, a New York-based commercial real estate trends research firm.

But the faux downtown concept is not to everyone's taste. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has ripped such projects as monolithic and "decorated in saccharine images of the past."

Bay Street, though, on paper looks more like the new European retail centers that this critic holds up as antidotes to America's "gruesome" efforts.

"We're making a series of building shapes that are very similar to individual buildings along the street," Pigg said. "A little bit low-key and nicely detailed. Not Disneyland at all. … It's really about people coming there to socialize.

"It has a Main Street that will last forever," he said. "The storefronts will come and go."

Bay Street will offer fashion retail, offices, apartments and a place for people to gather.

The site will include a small park along Temescal Creek, which in historical times was a major shellfish-gathering spot for Native Americans. The park will display information about the area's history and the shell mounds left by Indian gatherers.

Pigg said developers are going to the downtown look because more people, especially in such sophisticated markets as San Francisco's East Bay, want to shop, socialize, relax and be entertained all in the same place. And many want to live there, too.

National retailers are following the trend, said Hohmann, who early in the project's development lined up such names as AMC Theatres, Ann Taylor Loft, Banana Republic, Barnes & Noble, Gap, Old Navy, Pottery Barn and Victoria's Secret. The retail space is now 72 percent leased, with 21 national and regional tenants. Some retailers are trying out their latest formats in Emeryville, including GapBody and Pottery Barn Kids.

The development's south end will feature an entertainment block anchored by a two-story Barnes & Noble and a 16-screen, 3,300-seat AMC movie complex.

Along the central corridor, such San Francisco regional restaurants as Buckhorn, MacArthur Park, Pasta Pomodoro and Prego will open outlets. They will be joined by national names including California Pizza Kitchen, Rubio's Baja Grill and Zao Noodle Bar.

Madison Marquette will work with Thompson Residential of Sausalito, Calif., to develop 360 units of rental and for-sale housing, including one-, two- and three-story units and town homes. Views, always a selling point in Bay Area real estate, will be part of the attraction: Only a freeway separates the site from the bay, and the Golden Gate is a postcard on a clear day.

The hotel section on the site's north will be built last. Madison Marquette has yet to select a developer for the spot.

Rick DelVecchio is a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle.