The food court will open at the end of the month, but the really remarkable thing is that it will all be torn down in less than two years.
The "super pop-up" project at 1028 Market, dubbed the Hall, is developer Tidewater Capital's effort to solve a problem vexing city officials trying to redevelop blocks of boarded-up buildings along Market Street between Fifth and 10th streets. Despite the dozen proposals in the Mid-Market area, the reality is that the city won't approve most of them until 2015 or even 2016. Add 18 months or two years of construction, and you're looking at four or five years of vacant storefronts before much of the much-hyped revival takes place.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the north side of the 1000 block of Market Street, in the vicinity of Golden Gate Avenue and Jones and McAllister streets. Here Tidewater Capital has submitted plans to build 186 housing units over 10,000 square feet of retail. Next door, Shorenstein Properties is hoping to win approvals to build 301 apartments at 1066 Market St., a site that includes a sliver of Market Street but spreads back onto a large surface parking lot along Golden Gate and Jones.
"Our block has so much potential - what we are trying to do is to unleash that and harness the power of food to get people to come enjoy the site," said Tidewater partner Craig Young. "You show up three or four years from now and there is an apartment building and you remember the great event you went to."
Hollywood Billiards has been vacant for seven years. The ground-floor space, which used to house a strip club, was in such bad shape that Tidewater had to rebuild portions of the facade and put in new ceilings, walls, windows and concrete floors.
Each food vendor will have a large stall, and a prep kitchen will serve all the restaurants. There will be communal picnic-style tables both on the sidewalk and inside.
"The Hall will help activate a key block along Central Market while longer-term development at the old Hollywood Billiards site continues," Mayor Ed Lee said.
The development of the Hall is part of a wider effort to make Mid-Market safer and more vibrant. In addition, SF Beautiful is organizing a series of evening concerts at United Nations Plaza. The Rainin Foundation recently gave $100,000 to install two illuminated benches at Sixth and Market and light up the San Cristina building at 1000 Market St.
Shorenstein Properties is also working on a plan to make better use of its 1066 Market St. property, said Meg Spriggs, managing director of the company's apartment development arm. Shorenstein is storing 12 pianos at 1066 Market that will be periodically wheeled out for public use, including at Civic Center Plaza and the Hall next door.
Just two buildings will remain on the block once the two developments are completed. One is a mosque with retail downstairs, the other the San Cristina building, a former office building that Community Housing Partnership converted into studios for the formerly homeless. The lower floors of the flatiron building lease space to Showdogs, a gourmet sausage and beer joint, and Machine, a coffee kiosk.
David Schnur, Community Housing Partnership's director of development, said tenants in the San Cristina welcome new neighbors and retailers.
"It's a troubled block, and our tenants want to live in a safe, high-quality neighborhood," he said. "Eliminating vacant buildings and vacant storefronts will benefit our tenants as much as anyone else."
But he said that the new retail coming in needs to serve everyone - low-income residents as well as the tech workers making $150,000 a year at Twitter or Zendesk. "The neighborhood needs to remain a neighborhood for people of all income levels," he said. "We have been able to develop in that part of town because nobody with deeper pockets than ourselves was interested in it. ... Right now there is plenty of low-cost food in the neighborhood - it would be a problem if it were to all go upscale."
Mid-Market is still a tough place to operate a store. The 1000 block attracts a constant group of drug dealers - mostly marijuana - and their customers.
If the Hall concept takes off, the restaurants could move into other vacant spaces in the neighborhood and eventually into the new Tidewater project, once it is built, Young said. For retailers, it's a low-risk chance to test the market without signing guarantees or taking out construction loans to build out a space.
"Folks are not going to have to wait years before they see something - it's going to be a shot of electricity back into the neighborhood," Young said. "It's a ton of work up front, and we have a relatively short period of time to recover those costs, and we are taking risk, but we all realize that it's the right thing to do."
Tidewater has hired Ilana Lipsett of Free Space, which organizes cultural events in vacant spaces, to curate cultural activities in the 1028 Market space.
"It's going to be about using food, music and art to bring people together and help them express themselves," she said. "It's not going to change the cost of housing in San Francisco, but it could change the tenor of relationships between different populations."
Article and complete list of Photos can be found at: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Super-pop-up-food-hall-feeds-into-plans-for-5729488.php#photo-6805012
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