Photo du Jour 516
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Tiger Woods In "Serious" Condition After Car Crash
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Photos from Black Friday
SFist Interviews: John Ortved, Author of The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History
In a week or so, the opening of a public space in the Castro (!) will unfold. The small stretch of street where the F-line stops on 17th Street between Hartford and Castro streets will be blocked off from traffic, creating a small spot for passersby. Andrea Aiello, executive director of the Castro Benefits District (CBD), said, "I think that it will provide a place where people can congregate and have a sandwich or a cup of coffee. It will provide an outdoor destination; it's a great people-watching place. I think it will also encourage more foot traffic to the neighborhood."
Sandwiches AND a good place to put your penis inside someone's bottom. Oh, we kid! Sort of.
Scott Wiener, president of the Eureka Valley Promotion Association (EVPA), said that while "[t]here are concerns that the 17th Street Plaza may attract homeless people as well as intoxicated people when the bars close” and that "17th Street traffic will be diverted onto Hartford Street, which is a narrow residential street not designed to accommodate significant traffic," the need for any type of public space in the hood is needed, one that goes along with the Castro's "beautification plan."
Also, the Chevron station at 17th Street also agreed to lose the driveway for the plaza. Now we play the waiting game to see if this magical plaza actually happens, or turns into Tweaker's Corner.
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DPW employees were out this morning marking the road for the closure. All the naysaying that it will attract drunks, homeless and tweakers strikes me as a red herring. A few businesses (Cafe Flore, Harvest) already have built public seating which hasn't proven a homeless magnet.
Its the entrances to businesses that have closed and backstreets (take a look behind Baghdad Cafe) where homeless have set up camp.
Cafe Flore is a privately owned space where right to pass is subject to approval by owner. That's the key difference.
Why do some San Franciscans want to keep things so crappy that even homeless people won't want to hang out there?? It seems that every time an improvement is proposed to our sidewalks and public spaces, the horror of tweakers and the homeless is the overriding concern.
Why not instead make an area so nice that regular people will actually want to hang out there? What is proposed at 17th & Castro is a good start. Just look at all such improvements being implemented in NYC. If you can make it nice enough then enough "homefull" people will hang out there that it won't be a scary place.
I don't think it's a matter of being outnumbered. I think homefull People will tend avoid the plaza if there is even one shady/smelly/crazy person encamped there.
It's not that SFians want to keep places crappy. It's that we have no confidence whatsoever that any public space will be kept in good shape once the happy opening ceremony is done and the mayor is back at another DC fundraiser. This is particularly true of any car-free space at street level that is large and flat, allowing shopping carts.
They spent a bunch of money sprucing up UN Plaza for the UN 60th anniversary, even posting new station signs at Civic Center. It's still as terrible as ever.
This isn't civic center.
Right, there aren't any wide-open spaces there yet.
This isn't Civic Center because there actually is a good collection of interesting businesses which are open in some cases for 24 hours a day.
Civic Center is a wasteland for much of the day, and it's not surprising that the vacuum is thus filled. 17th and Market's intersection has a very high ratio of activity to space, and thus this actually has a good chance of succeeding, and I hope it does.
I hope it succeeds too. Just a bit skeptical, given SF's track record.