![]() After the Loma Prieta earthquake, in 1989, damage spurred demolitions and redevelopment, and, during the housing bubble of the early two-thousands, condominiums bloomed.Ĭonstruction on the Transit Center began in 2010, with the demolition of the original Transbay Terminal, a hulking slab of a building constructed in the nineteen-thirties. In the second half of the twentieth century, the neighborhood was industrial, desolate, and considered seedy. South of Market’s stark economic disparities, which see multibillion-dollar software companies standing catercornered to homeless encampments, are largely responsible for the ascent of juxtaposition as a literary device in writing about San Francisco. Salesforce Plaza is in a rapidly developing part of South of Market, in a slice of the city that real-estate agents have taken to calling the East Cut-a rebrand spearheaded by the local Community Benefit District, conceived by the branding firm behind Chobani and Mailchimp, and affirmed by Google Maps. Photograph by Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / The Mercury News / Getty Snatches of conversation floated through a bamboo grove: A.P.I.s, banking, Stanford.īeneath the Salesforce Transit Center is a vast underground space. Everyone seemed to be talking about work. In front of the on-site Starbucks-located inside Salesforce Tower and marked, confusingly, with Salesforce branding, as the Trailblazer Cafe-a topiary bear stood in a fixed salute. Knowledge workers in sunglasses and fleeces sat at primary-colored chairs, munching on takeout from a fleet of culinarily diverse food trucks stationed below. In the central plaza, by a cabinet of board games and a foosball table, children paged through books from a mobile library. Light bounced off the surrounding high-rises, scrambling the shadows. The benches, pathways, and bathrooms were pristine. A thousand-foot “water sculpture” by the artist Ned Kahn, titled “Bus Fountain,” runs along its northern perimeter from time to time, streams of water shot upward, triggered by the movement of buses through the terminal below. On a recent afternoon, young professionals in microclimate business-casual ambled through the park. Millennium Tower, a ten-year-old, fifty-eight-story luxury development near the park’s eastern tip, tilts to one side, because it is sinking. The buildings that surround it are a kaleidoscope of black and aqua glass. Its lush, verdant lawns, deliberately overgrown, are two googly eyes short of a Jim Henson character. It is a linear park-longer than it is wide-and is elevated about seventy feet above the sidewalk. It contains a prehistoric garden of cycads, ferns, and Wollemi pines plots dedicated to the plants of Chile, South Africa, and Australia and a small wetland hydrated with gray water. ![]() It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center, above Salesforce Plaza, in the shadow of Salesforce Tower. Photograph by Karl Mondon / The Mercury News / Getty ![]() Salesforce Park, a lush rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows, quietly reopened this past July, after being shuttered upon the discovery of cracks in structural steel beams. ![]()
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