9/14/2023 0 Comments Salesforce tower new yorkRegardless of the skyline though, more neighborhoods of San Francisco still maintain dense walkability with a diversity of shops and parks connected with buses and light rail that make a good city. It would likely have built many iconic skyscrapers, a great transit network, so many of the important foundational bones of a healthy urban center that it lacks. Looking further south to San Jose, I’ve heard people speculate how that city might have been developed if it grew to economic prominence in the late 1800s or early 1900s rather than in the post-war era. It gives a few specific projects which galvanized public outrage, including the Fontana Apartment towers, the proposed demolition of the Ghirardelli Factory, and of course the prospect of a growing high-rise central business district that could resemble Manhattan, hence the term ‘Manhattanization.’ I find the book “Designing San Francisco” to be the best narrative of how that NIMBYism blossomed here in that period. Once developers and engineers got the confidence to build over 400 feet tall in SF either for economic or practical reasons, it was the 1960s that was admittedly not the most accessible period for architecture and public outreach. On top of that, SF has a long history of being a boom or bust city, and the earthquakes and lack of readily accessible bedrock I bet gave a lot of companies some reticence to build as tall as they could in NYC and Chicago. Just for some visual evidence, a good amount of our single-family homes and new apartments are built in the Spanish Revival Style (see here), and most of our single-family developments come from sold-off tracts of land from ranches, so the modern urban fabric reinforced the boundaries and landscape of those massive ranches. There’s a fascinating history there that I only know a slice of, but looking at the Bay Area’s urban fabric, it is still based on the Spanish missionary and Mexican ranchero system which pre-disposed the whole region for suburbanization.
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