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Old Posted Aug 17, 2008, 3:53 PM
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From: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...BACV12AFKH.DTL

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Smart growth at the San Mateo racetrack
John King, Chronicle Urban Design Writer
Sunday, August 17, 2008

When it opened in 1934, the Bay Meadows racetrack marked eastern San Mateo County's evolution from a quiet outpost of San Francisco into a busy corridor of the metropolitan Bay Area.

After today's races at the San Mateo County Fair - fittingly titled "The Last Dance" - the track becomes history. Bay Meadows will begin to symbolize something else: the evolution of suburbia.

An 83-acre site dominated by asphalt and bleachers will be cleared to make way for 19 blocks of office buildings and multi-unit housing accompanied by parkland and plazas. Many buildings will be 55 feet high, tall by local standards, and they'll line streets that tie into the existing city grid.

Where midcentury suburbia came with spacious yards and low-slung homes with wide driveways, the Bay Meadows plan is designed to encourage transit use and errands on foot. It trades private space for a well-landscaped public realm.

"You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend nothing is going to change," said Robert C. Gooyer, an architect who serves on the planning commission and has lived in San Mateo since 1982. "Not everyone wants or needs to live in a 1950s ranch-style home."

From the start there's been opposition from residents who see this sort of district as antithetical to the community they chose to live in decades ago. But the San Mateo City Council approved the overall plan in 2005, and the specific designs for the 21-acre western portion of the site in April.

Often called smart growth or New Urbanism, this model of development has made inroads in the Bay Area during the past decade. The difference here is location: Bay Meadows not only sits in the heart of the settled and affluent mid-Peninsula, it's next to a Caltrain stop with direct access to San Francisco in one direction and Silicon Valley in the other.

Because of this, the developers say they're striving for a true mixed-use district - one distinctive enough that people and companies will want to put down roots.

"It's the physical manifestation of a variety of people doing a variety of things," said Keith Orlesky, design director for Wilson Meany Sullivan, part of the development team that purchased Bay Meadows in 1997. "We want to make a place that gains authenticity as it ages."

The centerpiece will be a four-block stretch of Delaware Street that will parallel the Caltrain tracks and begin north of the housing tracts along Hillsdale Boulevard. One side will be defined by four-story office buildings, the other by two-story commercial buildings with a "town square" on the south where condominiums would top a general store and cafe.

That scale continues to the east, where four-story condominium buildings would frame a linear park modeled on spaces like the mall running down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. Beyond the park, buildings would shift to three-story townhouses and be aimed at families, with a kid-friendly green as a centerpiece.

Scale isn't the only thing setting the Bay Meadows plan apart from older neighborhoods in San Mateo and nearby suburbs. The architecture along Delaware Street and the linear park consciously avoids such historical styles as the Spanish revivalism associated with Stanford University.

The office buildings designed by Hellmuth Obata + Kassabaum, for instance, could be caricatured as Crate and Barrel modern rather than Santa Barbara lite; they're glassy and streamlined, though most are clad in terracotta as a nod to the past.

"There's nothing wrong with traditional buildings - we just didn't want that to be the theme of the place," Orlesky said. "The Peninsula today is not defined by this or that style. It's very eclectic."

A lawsuit to stop the project was filed in May by opponents citing flaws in the environmental impact report, a common tactic in California's growth wars. But the developers are confident enough of the outcome that they've scheduled an auction of racetrack equipment on Saturday. After that, asbestos removal will begin the demolition process.

Then comes the hard part: translating pretty pictures into a district that doesn't have the formulaic monotony found in other smart growth enclaves.

One tactic is seen on Delaware Street, where the four-story L-shaped office buildings will bracket one-story retail buildings. It's a way to show off the shops that also will add variety from the pedestrian perspective.

For the residential buildings framing the park, Wilson Meany used a variety of architects in an attempt to mix things up. But with a 55-foot citywide height limit imposed by a 1991 voter initiative, it will be a challenge to keep them from looking interchangeable - especially because they're all the same dimensions and will be clad mostly in stucco.

"People here understand it's all in the detailing," Gooyer said. "I plan to look at the documents ... 20 or 40 years from now, people should look around and see a nice homogeneous community that doesn't feel like a project."

What's in store

The 74-year-old Bay Meadows racetrack will make way for a district with up to 940,000 square feet of office space, most of it in large buildings aimed at corporate tenants; up to 1,253 housing units, all but 24 in townhouses or stacked flats; and 112,000 square feet of retail space along Delaware Street.

There will be 18 acres of open space, including a 12-acre community park on the north edge of the site and smaller parks and plazas within the district.

The commercial buildings and at least some residential ones will be designed to be certified for sustainability by the United States Green Building Council.

When it's coming

Developers say they will start dismantling the racetrack by Labor Day, with construction to start by next spring. The first batch of buildings could open by the end of 2010; the pace of construction after that will be determined by San Mateo's real estate market.

Who's involved

Wilson Meany Sullivan is the developer for site owner Stockbridge Capital Partners. Cooper Robertson & Partners is the planner and master architect.

As for the architecture of individual structures, the office buildings are by the San Francisco office of HOK while the retail buildings are by San Francisco firm BCV. Six other architecture firms have been hired to design the residential buildings.

The landscape architect is CMG of San Francisco.
More renderings here: http://www.wmspartners.com/project_d...c9ead93d074f31
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