San Francisco Beautiful Debuts Market Street Visions Project

Following on the heels of last November’s defeat of Prop D which would have plastered the Central Market Street area with wall-to-wall billboards, San Francisco Beautiful has debuted the first annual San Francisco Beautiful Urban Realm Prize designed to create positive change in this neighborhood. The Prize was won by Cindy Talley, a recent graduate of the University of California Berkeley with a Master of Landscape Architecture, and provides a stipend for three months work. Teamed with SFB’s Public Affairs Committee, in cooperation with SFB Board member Scott Preston and his team at Design + Planning at AECOM and the San Francisco City Planning Department, we will present the city with a vision of what this troubled neighborhood could become. We are studying Market from Fifth to Van Ness, including the U. N. Plaza area and Fulton Mall, and Grove Street from Market to Van Ness.

The plan will present a conceptual vision, tying together ideas about how best to use the public realm – for pedestrians, cyclists, trolleys, and motor vehicles – to address what John King, Chronicle Urban Design writer recently characterized as “forlorn at one moment, threatening the next, and it has persisted for more than four decades …” He goes on to quote former long time planning director Dean Macris, “If there was ever a reason to rethink it, this is the time.”

Rethink it we are, including everything from sidewalk widths, traffic mix and location, lighting, landscaping, drainage, and ways to activate the sidewalk and plazas to attract pedestrians and ultimately economic activity. SFB’s work in the 1990s to make it easier to permit sidewalk cafes has paid off all around the city, and most recently even in the central market area which now has its fist and popular such venue.

Cindy will be adding to the San Francisco Beautiful Blog as she makes her way down Market Street. Come back to see what she is discovering.