Towse: views from the hill

September 28, 2010

October 6th! A celebration!

Can you see this?

Can you see what I'm seeing?

Now can you see what I'm seeing?

Found on the Port site — when I was checking to see what line sailed the Zuiderdam, currently docked at P27, down the hill — was this announcement:

San Francisco will celebrate the inaugural connection of a cruise ship to shoreside electrical power on Wednesday, October 6, 2010, at 11:00 AM, at Pier 27.

Please mark your calendars.

… which means that cruise ships docked at P27 will no longer have to keep their engines running, and spewing crap into our air, to have electricity while they’re in port. Hooray!

(The Zuiderdam, for those interested, is a Holland America Line ship.)

February 27, 2009

Let us now gaze down on the Port of San Francisco

Specifically, Piers 23, 19, and 17. (Click on the photo to get an enlarged version.)

 

Posted by Picasa

Note the pilings on the north apron of Pier 23.

Note the shabby temporary patches on the roof of the Port building facing the Embarcadero where Pier 21 would be, if there were a Pier 21.

Check out the pilings on the north apron of Pier 19. You can barely see the pair of orange cones keeping you from accidentally walking where the worst of the damage to the apron is. (The apron has crumpled and is no longer horizontal.) What you can’t see in the picture very well is that the bulk of the apron to the west of the orange cones has disintegrated and fallen into the drink as well.

Check out the pilings at Pier 17 (the last pier you can see in the picture). They don’t look in very great shape either, do they?

To quote from a SPUR document, published in The Urbanist in August, 2007:

The Port’s 10-year Capital Plan is based on a comprehensive survey of the physical condition of all Port properties under its ownership. The Plan identifies the cost of bringing the Port into basic compliance with health, safety, seismic and Americans with Disabilities Act regulations, as well as fulfilling waterfront open-space needs, at nearly $1.5 billion. Almost one-third of the costs identified in this Capital Plan are for substructure repair and seismic strengthening of the Port’s pile-supported structures.

Something must be done.

What will it be? What to do, what to do, what to do. …

July 30, 2007

Creeping prosperity

Filed under: culture,photographs — Tags: , , , , — Towse @ 6:44 pm

Sectwanto’s HUGE tag on a brick building down by Potrero Point, was painted out last week. The brick building was originally tagged (according to this site) in 2005. Seemed a year or two earlier than that at least, but I have photos from July 2004 that show the brick building untagged. Memory’s a funny thing.

SECTWANTO always reminded me of RIGO’s TRUTH over by City Hall, “but different,” as they say.

Still, two years from tag date, SECTWANTO and the fribbly tagged crap beneath it were painted over.

Why now?

Well, perhaps because plans are afoot to revitalize Pier 70 and surrounds.

April 23, 2007

Dang! Meeting notes. Port of San Francisco: January 25, 2007

Filed under: damn,photographs,politics — Tags: , , — Towse @ 10:41 pm

Meeting notes. Port of San Francisco: January 25, 2007

I’d been searching for more information about the proposal to develop San Francisco’s new (and needed!) cruise ship terminal using the existing terminal at Pier 35 and the overflow terminal at Pier 27 (instead of Piers 30-32) when … buried there in the midst of it all in the January 2007 Port Authority meeting notes, “Port will fund demolition of P36 in Port’s FY 07-08 budget.”

No… no… nonononononono….

 

  Posted by Picasa  Posted by PicasaTaken 10 Aug 2006

Funny. We’d been at the Telegraph Hill Dwellers meeting on 26 Feb 2007. Monique Moyer, Port Director, was the speaker. I specifically asked during the Q&A session what was happening with Pier 36 and she did not say they were putting funding to take it down in the next budget.

sigh

I asked her later about it too after the meeting was over and she did not say it was a done deal. She said it would cost $5m to demolish Pier 36. She also said that if anyone wanted to refurbish it, they’d have to spend $5m to take it down and then spend whatever it took to rebuild it.

If I could only win the Lotto!

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