Quote:
Originally Posted by ArquitectoMontenegro
Did anyone read the article and notice that they said the spire would replace Ruocco Park? Ruocco Park is barely 6 years old and they are already planning on getting rid of it- I don't understand how the Seaport Village re-do planners can assume this is ok. Not to mention that privatizing public space is infuriating in itself...
And why isn't there a residential component? With the whole Seaport Village re-do, and Manchester Pacific Gateway's 8 blocks--it's going to be 10 blocks of hotels and commercial projects, with an office building or two. I can't believe there is no residential aspect to either of the two projects.
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Just a couple notes:
-The spire isn't going to replace Rucco Park, it's going to be placed to the east where the shops of the current Seaport Village are today. The article doesn't state this explicitly, but implies it when it fails to list the spire in the list of things going in that area. The
maps released as part of the board meeting make this clear though.
-The so called "Blue Campus" is directly replacing Rucco Park. This features an aquarium, a learning center (think the fleet science center in balboa park), and a startup incubator (essentially free office space for students/recent grads of UCSD). The area will be built by the developers but run by UCSD and Scripps, both non-profits. There will be fees to enter the learning center/aquarium, but they will only be based on the cost associated with running these facilities. This is basically the exact same way Balboa Park developed from a grassy hill outside of downtown into what it is today, and under most definitions after this development Rucco Park will still be considered a public space much like Balboa still is.
-There's currently sort of a glut of non-active public spaces on the downtown waterfront (ie grass fields), more than people are really interested in using. When I walked down by the waterfront last weekend I counted maybe a half dozen people in Rucco Park mid-day on a Saturday, which is pretty appalling tbh. In-between the Tuna Harbor park, the Embarcadero Marina parks, the County Admin building parks, the Lane Field park, and the under construction park right across the street to it as part of the MPG there is a huge amount of open space in the area (and there's about the be more with the in concept parks on the Navy Pier and the expansion of the County Admin Building park). An aquarium/learning center could educate and entertain hundreds in the same space, while people looking for a less active experience would have plenty of options just a short walk away.
-Under CA state law it would be illegal to build permanent residences at either the MPG or Seaport Village (or anywhere else south of W Harbor Dr and west of Pacific Hwy for that matter). From the 1920s-1960s the Navy dredged thousands of tons of mud out of the bay to make it deep enough for the latest warships, and they dumped a lot of the fill they pulled up around downtown to provide more land (along with building Harbor Island, Shelter Island, attaching North Island to Coronado, etc. The Navy did a
massive amount of dredging). The legal terms are a bit complex, but essentially these days you're not allowed to build housing on that reclaimed land.