"Vertical, expansive, ecologically minded, expensive ... and surveilled"
December 11, 2019 4:26 PM Subscribe
Anna Wiener, who files the New Yorker's "Letters from Silicon Valley" explores the five and a half acre rooftop park developed in the shadow of Salesforce Tower, Salesforce park, writing about the juxtaposition of the plants called "dinosaur food" and the tech companies ringing the park.
Citylab had covered Salesforce Park previously -- "The Salesforce Transit Center, San Francisco’s new bus and (someday) high-speed rail terminal, has been billed as the Grand Central Station of the West. But it might just become the Bay Area’s answer to the High Line" -- looking at San Francisco as optimistic about the new bus terminal beneath the park and the park itself. Wiener asks how the park's development reflects the city, writing:
Citylab had covered Salesforce Park previously -- "The Salesforce Transit Center, San Francisco’s new bus and (someday) high-speed rail terminal, has been billed as the Grand Central Station of the West. But it might just become the Bay Area’s answer to the High Line" -- looking at San Francisco as optimistic about the new bus terminal beneath the park and the park itself. Wiener asks how the park's development reflects the city, writing:
Taxpayer-funded, corporately branded, suspended above the homeless, the park is an irresistible metaphor for the city’s socioeconomic tensions. It also feels like a bid, or a prayer, for a certain vision of its future.(Wiener also wrote the Personal History, "Four Years in Startups," with delightful asides on scale and homogeneity in tech reflecting scale and homogeneity in tech workers' lives.)
I mean, at least in Paris they put the monstrous Les Halles underground as if they were secretly ashamed of it. But the blight of the Transbay will stand there for decades, with "hors service" signs posted on its stupid "aerial tram" to its inaccessible and disused rooftop "park"
posted by sjswitzer at 6:00 PM on December 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by sjswitzer at 6:00 PM on December 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
I was going to get hostile about gunnera being described as "dinosaur food", but according to here fossils have been found as early as the Late Cretaceous. So maybe dinos ate them a bit but it was still mostly a diet of araucaria.
That "park" is garbage though.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:18 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
That "park" is garbage though.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 6:18 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
The excesses of the first dot com boom seem like child's play in comparison to what is happening now.
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:16 PM on December 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 7:16 PM on December 11, 2019 [4 favorites]
Does the New Yorker no longer employ editors? "Salesforce Park has nearly five hundred trees and pines" - pines are trees! And if they were really interested in attracting birds to the space, they should have planted native plant species, not the godsawful amalgam of notably odd species they seem to have planted.
posted by mollweide at 7:22 PM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by mollweide at 7:22 PM on December 11, 2019 [2 favorites]
Speaking of editors, the sheer overload of superfluous commas in that article make it so aggravating to read that I almost forget to be aggravated about that stupid techbro-filled "park".
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:28 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:28 PM on December 11, 2019 [1 favorite]
Upon opening, the walkways in the “park” started to immediately crumble. Then they found cracks forming in the huge support girders of the building itself. This shut the place down for a very long time. They patched the cracks but I never heard of a reason for the cracks.
Meanwhile, the Salesforce Penis next door, in order to fulfill some required art need in new buildings has this limp excuse of a live video feed from here or there, featuring faint shadows of something moving sort of over the glans of the building.
This city promises a lot. What it generally delivers are disappointments.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:29 PM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]
Meanwhile, the Salesforce Penis next door, in order to fulfill some required art need in new buildings has this limp excuse of a live video feed from here or there, featuring faint shadows of something moving sort of over the glans of the building.
This city promises a lot. What it generally delivers are disappointments.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:29 PM on December 11, 2019 [5 favorites]
"Salesforce Park has nearly five hundred trees and pines"
It has nearly five hundred trees, and a broken heart.
posted by moonmilk at 7:32 PM on December 11, 2019 [32 favorites]
It has nearly five hundred trees, and a broken heart.
posted by moonmilk at 7:32 PM on December 11, 2019 [32 favorites]
This part killed me, "At the western end of the park, a yoga class performed synchronized contortions on a large lawn facing an amphitheatre. Against the backdrop of the corporate logos, the scene felt like sponsored content."
I visited this manufactured "place" recently in decent weather, fully of ... curiosity (?), hope maybe. I didn't like it. Something deeply strange about it. It is very beautiful, but also disturbing. This park belongs to a city that has no past. San Francisco definitely has a past!!
I have complicated feelings about that city I love, though not thru having lived there, but from visiting my sister frequently/sporadically for something like the last 40 years. Every single last thing that gave that city it's character has been badly altered if not destroyed by the 2 separate tidal waves of money that have swept over it. Strangely the earthquake helped the city a bit: nothing felt more natural than the disappearance of the couple of stacked elevated freeways that dominated the waterfront and punched into the guts elsewhere. The de Young Museum is a national treasure and SF is still awesome and beautiful, but holy shit a lot of crazy wonderful creative beautiful people got pushed out of the city and the most vulnerable of them got pushed onto the streets.
OTOH: my sister is now de-facto rich. After 15 years renting in the Tenderloin, she bought a house in the **really** nice bit of the Mission for something like $50k 30 years ago that's currently worth $2.4m. Someone from a big tech company bought 2 houses side-by-side on her block for several million each, just because they could really. I think her house might be the only one on the block that hasn't changed hands several times in the last decade. She swears they'll never leave, don't care about the money, but I'm curious to see how long she'll hold on though as just about all of her old friends have sold their houses and fucked off to wherever much cheaper and nicer places.
posted by ButteryMales at 7:41 PM on December 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
I visited this manufactured "place" recently in decent weather, fully of ... curiosity (?), hope maybe. I didn't like it. Something deeply strange about it. It is very beautiful, but also disturbing. This park belongs to a city that has no past. San Francisco definitely has a past!!
I have complicated feelings about that city I love, though not thru having lived there, but from visiting my sister frequently/sporadically for something like the last 40 years. Every single last thing that gave that city it's character has been badly altered if not destroyed by the 2 separate tidal waves of money that have swept over it. Strangely the earthquake helped the city a bit: nothing felt more natural than the disappearance of the couple of stacked elevated freeways that dominated the waterfront and punched into the guts elsewhere. The de Young Museum is a national treasure and SF is still awesome and beautiful, but holy shit a lot of crazy wonderful creative beautiful people got pushed out of the city and the most vulnerable of them got pushed onto the streets.
OTOH: my sister is now de-facto rich. After 15 years renting in the Tenderloin, she bought a house in the **really** nice bit of the Mission for something like $50k 30 years ago that's currently worth $2.4m. Someone from a big tech company bought 2 houses side-by-side on her block for several million each, just because they could really. I think her house might be the only one on the block that hasn't changed hands several times in the last decade. She swears they'll never leave, don't care about the money, but I'm curious to see how long she'll hold on though as just about all of her old friends have sold their houses and fucked off to wherever much cheaper and nicer places.
posted by ButteryMales at 7:41 PM on December 11, 2019 [8 favorites]
I guess I'll be the schmo who admits to liking Transbay Park. Whatever its deficiencies as a public park, it is squarely above average among roofs of bus terminals.
My question is, what happens to it when Salesforce is no longer footing the bill? A lot of San Francisco's now-loved past began as a manufactured present -- Victorians were the original tract housing and endured much disdain as such. IMO the test is not whether our buildings acknowledge the past, but what use the future can make of them, and I wonder if such a managed place can degrade into something rich and strange or if it will simply decay.
posted by aws17576 at 9:11 PM on December 11, 2019 [11 favorites]
My question is, what happens to it when Salesforce is no longer footing the bill? A lot of San Francisco's now-loved past began as a manufactured present -- Victorians were the original tract housing and endured much disdain as such. IMO the test is not whether our buildings acknowledge the past, but what use the future can make of them, and I wonder if such a managed place can degrade into something rich and strange or if it will simply decay.
posted by aws17576 at 9:11 PM on December 11, 2019 [11 favorites]
That was part of my point: it seems bound to decay.
(Or, perhaps, in the dystopian future someone will build a staircase out of, I dunno, stacked container boxes to get up to the “park” for the occasional samizdat rave or something.)
posted by sjswitzer at 9:51 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
(Or, perhaps, in the dystopian future someone will build a staircase out of, I dunno, stacked container boxes to get up to the “park” for the occasional samizdat rave or something.)
posted by sjswitzer at 9:51 PM on December 11, 2019 [3 favorites]
Then they found cracks forming in the huge support girders
FWIW/IMHO, Herrick failed to grind certain weld access holes (which were thermally cut, which should thus always be ground to remove the heat affected zone). That was/is frankly a beyond-juvenile mistake for a company like Herrick. They simply should have known better; they’re not Joe-with-a-welder-and-a-ladder. Like, literally the same guy that cut the hole should have ground it.
Then again, the detailers, EOR, GC, special inspectors, and maybe even the damn erectors should have noticed the mistake — it's fucking obvious when a hole hasn’t been ground.
So, multiple people fucked up in a huge way, but also these specific holes had a geometry that was not expected of “normal” weld access holes (odd design, from what I’ve seen of the drawings) and so people looking for weld access hole problems would not have paid careful attention to these holes because obviously they weren’t weld access holes (which, while defensible, is another fuckup of a different sort because they effectively were weld access holes despite the geometry). Full-penetration welding is a tricky bastard, and sequencing can make a surprisingly large difference in your outcomes.
...so, as usual, sort of a perfect storm of missed opportunities and fuckups. An aggro QA/QC person should have caught this, but only if they were also senior enough for the shop guys to give a single flying fuck what that QA/QC person said.
...which is a different problem.
posted by aramaic at 10:31 PM on December 11, 2019 [17 favorites]
FWIW/IMHO, Herrick failed to grind certain weld access holes (which were thermally cut, which should thus always be ground to remove the heat affected zone). That was/is frankly a beyond-juvenile mistake for a company like Herrick. They simply should have known better; they’re not Joe-with-a-welder-and-a-ladder. Like, literally the same guy that cut the hole should have ground it.
Then again, the detailers, EOR, GC, special inspectors, and maybe even the damn erectors should have noticed the mistake — it's fucking obvious when a hole hasn’t been ground.
So, multiple people fucked up in a huge way, but also these specific holes had a geometry that was not expected of “normal” weld access holes (odd design, from what I’ve seen of the drawings) and so people looking for weld access hole problems would not have paid careful attention to these holes because obviously they weren’t weld access holes (which, while defensible, is another fuckup of a different sort because they effectively were weld access holes despite the geometry). Full-penetration welding is a tricky bastard, and sequencing can make a surprisingly large difference in your outcomes.
...so, as usual, sort of a perfect storm of missed opportunities and fuckups. An aggro QA/QC person should have caught this, but only if they were also senior enough for the shop guys to give a single flying fuck what that QA/QC person said.
...which is a different problem.
posted by aramaic at 10:31 PM on December 11, 2019 [17 favorites]
Full-penetration welding
I don't have any idea what this is, but I am into it.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:55 AM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]
I don't have any idea what this is, but I am into it.
posted by Literaryhero at 2:55 AM on December 12, 2019 [4 favorites]
ButteryMales, your sister should get out while the getting's good. It won't last forever.
posted by kokaku at 7:42 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by kokaku at 7:42 AM on December 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
I feel like the journalist used the perfect language and tone to describe a beautiful but crumbling corporate park full of fantastical non-native plants and organized activities. We have one of these slippery corporate parks in Minneapolis, the Commons, a weird football stadium owner / Park Board / “non-profit” operator collaboration. The Park Board is actually a bunch of elected officials who are separate from city of Minneapolis elected officials, so the weirdness that was stadium development/city planning/park and rec was extra weird here, with ongoing litigation and drama. It’s a nice space (certainly better than the parking lots and ugly buildings that were there before), but it is weirdly sterile and visited mostly by Wells Fargo corporate people lunching from food trucks and occasional visiting families from the nearby homeless shelter.
Maybe these parks will be better when the trees grow, but they feel blank. And who knows who will be operating them 20 years from now. At least the one in Minneapolis won’t crumble through the ceiling of a transit center...
posted by Maarika at 12:09 PM on December 12, 2019
Maybe these parks will be better when the trees grow, but they feel blank. And who knows who will be operating them 20 years from now. At least the one in Minneapolis won’t crumble through the ceiling of a transit center...
posted by Maarika at 12:09 PM on December 12, 2019
At least the one in Minneapolis won’t crumble through the ceiling of a transit center
Well this one is only aspirationally a transit center, as the Caltrain terminal and BART connections remain unfunded. It's simply a corporate-branded statement-architecture bus terminal at this point. If completed (narrator: sigh), it will take at least another decade (by current estimates) and will already be insufficient for its intended usage.
In the meanwhile, whether the rooftop continues to function as a park will depend on corporate patronage.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:40 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
Well this one is only aspirationally a transit center, as the Caltrain terminal and BART connections remain unfunded. It's simply a corporate-branded statement-architecture bus terminal at this point. If completed (narrator: sigh), it will take at least another decade (by current estimates) and will already be insufficient for its intended usage.
In the meanwhile, whether the rooftop continues to function as a park will depend on corporate patronage.
posted by sjswitzer at 1:40 PM on December 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
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This is everything that San Francisco insists (despite all evidence) that it is not. It's a monument to everything corporate and private and an FU to anything civic.
posted by sjswitzer at 5:40 PM on December 11, 2019 [9 favorites]