Now last I heard, a few years ago, the powers that be were going to earthquake safe the Japantown parking garage on Post and then during construction people would be able to park their cars on the northbound lanes of excessively-wide Webster Street. But I suppose that got replaced with this linear park idea.
Today, June 27th, 2011, from exactly 6:30pm – 9:10pm, will see yet another BNP meeting for Japantown.
As with many of these kinds of meetings in the 415, the big decisions have already been made and your input is as a kind of focus group participant, you know, do you like the lighter beige or the darker beige swatch kind-of-thing.
For one thing, Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans, who are already there in J-Town…
San Francisco’s Japantown at night:
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…have been left out of the process, by design.
Oh well.
Anyway:
Location: JCCCNC – Issei Memorial Hall
Time: June 27, 6:30pm – 9:10pm Topic: PUBLIC REALM/TRANSPORTATION & CIRCULATION
Japantown Landscape Vision:Install professional, well orchestrated Japan-influenced landscape vision to increase canopy, greenery and Japanese botanical species.
Public Open Spaces:Use the Japantown landscape vision to enhance our central core of existing gathering spaces and create transition areas to other public open spaces.
Transportation/Circulation:Leverage all city projects to fund improvements to traffic, pedestrian safety, signage and connections to adjucent neighborhoods and parks.
Community Meeting Issei Memorial Hall @ JCCCNC 1840 Sutter Street, SF (between Buchannan & Webster Streets) Date: June 27, 2011, 6:30-9:10 pm
Topics: Public Realm/Transportation and Circulation
Japantown Landscape Vision: Install professional, well orchestrated Japaninfluenced landscape vision to increase canopy, greenery and Japanese botanical species.
Public Open Spaces: Use Japantown landscape vision to enhance our central core of existing gathering spaces and create transition areas to other public open spaces. Transportation and Circulation
Leverage all city projects to fund improvements to traffic, pedestrian safety, signage and connections to adjacent neighborhoods and parks
Basically, San Francisco Government, the people who brought us Redevelopment, the people who tore down perfectly good houses (or “drafty old Victorians,” in their words, back in the day), the people who still haven’t apologized for that, the people who messed up Japantown big time with the whole concrete and clay and general decay motif, well, they’re back and they have a Plan.
Now, if you want to affect the plan, you need to be part of the leadership element of an area “community group.” It doesn’t matter all that much how many people are in your group, but you’re going to need a title and a group name to matter. If that’s not the case, then the best you can hope for is a chance to voice an out-of-the-box idea that’s slightly novel or crazy enough to work.
But I’ll tell you, the big decisions have already been made.
Here are the final ten minutes of last night’s meeting on Sutter, with three kind-0f focus group leaders offering feedback on what the audience members were saying. (Don’t mind the alarmingly loud iPhone buzzing at the end…)
Anything that the Planning Department has decided that’s not appropriate for this particular part of the Western Addition (like young people from South Korea, or China, or Taiwan opening up businesses on or near Post Street or a taller building (you know, one that could actually pay for itself and Other Things Too) that could block the view of that horrible Peace Pagoda*) is considered contagion. Oh well.
Click to expand
On It Goes…
*I looked it up once and that Peace Plaza pagoda thing actually is Ur-Japanese, it actually is just like some stuff that was all over part of the southern part of Japan’s biggest island, but it seems more Pan-Asian or Chinese to most Japanese people that see it. They don’t recognize it as anything Japanese at all. This concrete thing is the Vaillancourt Fountain of the West Side.
Anyway, feel free to rubber-stamp what, apparently, has already been decided for you starting tonight.
Here’s the sked:
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The 1st Community Meeting
Wednesday, June 1
6:30 to 9:00
JCCCNC- Issei Memorial Hall
1840 Sutter Street
* Food and Refreshments
* Japanese Interpreters will be at each meeting
Special Guests:
Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi
Planning Director John Rahaim
Agenda:
6:30 to 7:00 Registration and Food
7:00 to 9:00 Program
► Facilitated Breakout Sessions for Public Input
1. Community Land Use:Maintain current building heights and scale with a focus on business and residential mix — No highrises.
2. Cultural Character: Establish architectural standards to maintain the Japanese/Japanese American character of the community core.
3. Japan Center: Retain the malls’ basic scale and rehabilitatestructure; support business that perpetuate Japantown’s cultural authenticity.
I know where you’ll be this coming Wednesday after work – you’ll be at the San Francisco Neighborhood Summit near Sixth and Folsom, natch.
And you know who else will be there? Numerous members of the San Francisco Entertainment Commish, plus that dude what’s from the SFPD Alcohol Liaison Unit, plus a Sound Technician, plus NAYYYYYYbor “Advocates.”
So let’s see here, we’re going to have The City, the SFPD, a sound guy, and officially-designated NIMBYs all meeting South of Market just a few weeks after the Slim’s Nightclub / Jeanmarie Guenot / Other NIMBYs* L’affaire Du 2011. Gee, I’m thinking that the topic of the ABC’s recent action against Slim’s just might come up.
When: April 6, 2011 – Wednesday 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Where: Gene Friend Community Center Auditorium, 270 Sixth Street, San Francisco
What: San Francisco Entertainment Commission in partnership with the San Francisco Police Department and the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services invite you to the San Francisco Neighborhood Summit. Organized to nurture relationships between the SF Entertainment Commission, City Departments, community leaders and neighbor advocates. Meet, exchange ideas and explore opportunities for collaboration to foster healthy, safe and vibrant neighborhoods in San Francisco
Speaker’s Panel Inspector Dave Falzon - Alcohol Liaison Unit, San Francisco Police Department Vajra Granelli – Sound Technician, SF Entertainment Commission Audrey Joseph – Commissioner, SF Entertainment Commission Jocelyn Kane (moderator) Executive Director, Entertainment Commission Kirsten Macaulay, Neighborhood Liaison, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Service Cmdr. Greg McEachern, Entertainment Liaison, SF Police Department Jim Meko, Commissioner, SF Entertainment Commission Edgar Oropeza, SF Planning Department Al Perez, Commissioner, SF Entertainment Commission
Price: Free – open to the public
RSVP sfec.info@gmail.com “
See you there!
*Leave us not forget the other NIMBYs of SoMA, of course.
“NIMBY People are easily startled but they’ll soon be back, and in greater numbers…”
[Someday, somebody will learn me why we call Central Street Central Avenue - I'll bet, in some areas, it's just a skosh wider than its siblings like Lyon or Baker, or maybe there were grander plans for this nothingburger street at some point...]
Get up to speed here on how some jackhole in the North of Panhandle Area part of the Western Addition painted white marks on Central Avenue so that each parker had a regulation 20 feet or something of room. They looked like capital “T’s” to me.
As is typical with neighborhood activists who don’t know what the frack they’re doing, the neighborhood activist who painted the marks didn’t know what the frack he (and it must have been a he, am I right girlfriend?) was doing.
Anyway, you can see the result – appears as if DPW applied paint thinner to each of the T’s yesterday, thusly:
Click to expand
Now, here’s the Minority Report. Let’s say somebody in government wants to put parking meters on each and every residential block in San Francisco. Would that person have DPW or someplace put the parking marks down as a test to see how parkers responded? If such a test lasted three months, would the marks come off on the last day of a quarter, like March 31st, something like that? Uh oh…
Or, these were marks put down by aliens for the coming invasion, ala M. Night Shamalan’s Signsmovie? (The secret to stopping the spread of aliens is water, but it’s unknown at this point how to stop the SFMTA from metastasizing…)
Either way, with these last two theories, all’s I can say is courage.
O.K.? And, according to simple-minded former sportswriter C.W. Nevius, the reason why San Francisco Shadow Mayor for Life Gavin Newsom hates the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council Recycling Center is because, because:
All right. But, hold on a second. Does this add up?
Now, maybe I’m just a simplecountry lawyer,* but didn’t Supervisor Gavin Newsom vote in favor of the HANC Recycling Center a decade back? Check it:
Let’s see here, isn’t the HANC RC just as noisy a “bone of contention” in Golden Gate Park now as a decade ago? Yup.
Did it move or something? Nope.
So why then would Gavin Newsom vote in favor of the hated, terrible, hated recycling center back in 2001?
Was he for it before he was against it? Mmmm.
That’s something to ponder as you read the latest missive from the HANC. Sure looks like they have something cooked up for Judgment Day, aka March 4th, 2011:
“HANC RECYCLING & NATIVE PLANT NURSERY TO ACCEPT OLD CHAIN - FINAL DAYS APPROACHING?
HANC Recycling, under attack for years may go out in a blaze of glory if neighborhood NIMBYs ably led by CW Nevius finally get their way. HANC is seeking to acquire thousands of feet of old chain, padlocks with or without keys, so long as they are open to accommodate the more than 1000 people expected to link up in civil disobedience on the final day.
Executive Director of HANC Recycling, Ed Dunn says, “1000 people have already pledged to chain themselves together on our last day, so we’ll need a lot. But in any case, if things work out scrap prices for steel are through the roof, so this is a good time to recycle.”
All right then, the battle is well and truly joined.
(Ooh, ooh, let me answer my own question, me first.)
Residential parking permits don’t relate to “Transit First” AT ALL.
However, the NIMBYs just looooooove them and the NIMBYs are highly motivated to protect what’s theirs and grab more, more, more.
Ever more NIMBYs of San Francisco say, “Ooh, us too!”
Such is the state of middle class welfare* in the 415, where you can vote your neighborhood into the program but you can’t vote yourself out – it’s not allowed.
Uh, Danny honey, nobody said you caused “the parking crisis.” But back in the day, the Chronicle said you had 26 permits. Were they lying? Oh, I see, they weren’t. Your witness, counselor.
But what will happen when your neighborhood wins and the O.K. Go puts on a concert as your reward? Won’t your area NIMBY’s be all “nobody told us about this?”
Oh well.
Let’s let Yahoo! ‘splain what’s up with the BSD:
“The short answer is it’s a two-month citywide challenge that turns bus stops into social gaming hubs.
An even shorter answer is it’s something that makes waiting for the bus fun.
Most of us don’t really love our daily commute. And even though you soon recognize the same faces that get on the same bus at the same time every morning, it’s pretty rare that we talk to each other. We thought we could make public transport a little more fun.
So we put up 20 Bus Stop Derby bus stops with interactive 72-inch touch screens. We developed four addictive games that you can play right then and there while waiting for your bus—and since it’s even more fun to play together (and especially to beat someone), you can challenge players at other Derby stops to live head-to-head games. And you aren’t just playing for personal glory, you’re playing for your neighborhood.
The Bus Stop Derby pits 20 teams (20 San Francisco neighborhoods) against each other. So choose your neighborhood, rally your fellow commuters, and go break some high scores! The grand prize is a concert with OK Go that takes place in the neighborhood that wins the Derby. Have fun, and may the best neighborhood win!”
“Riders waiting for Muni buses at select stops in downtown will be passing the time playing video games, as well as the opportunity to win a concert by OK Go. The devices are being installed by tech giant Yahoo!.” From the San Francisco Examiner, click here for the full story.
“Yahoo’s involvement was the most interesting to me….is clearly a sign the company is still actively pursuing new and exciting opportunities.”From DailyDOOH , Click here for the full story.
“Games are the most popular type of mobile app, and to promote its own mail and other apps, Yahoo is putting a twist on mobile games.” From ClickZ, click here for the full story.
“Resembling giant iPhones (but 20x the size), these 72″ touch screens have been installed at bus stops in 20 different neighborhoods so that bored commuters waiting [for] the bus can play games and earn points for their neighborhood.” From Muni Diaries, click here for the full story.
“20 Muni bus shelters in San Francisco are getting a high tech makeover for two months as part of a the Yahoo Bus Stop Derby - a giant neighborhood vs. neighborhood challenge that ends with a huge free concert put on by Yahoo.” From Fun Cheap San Francisco, click here for the full story.
“Transit ads drive commuters to get their game on the go, vie for an OK Go block party.” From Yahoo! Advertising Blog, click here for the full story.
