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S.F. Bay area city undergoes metamorphosis

By Rick DelVecchio

Once a haven for industry, Emeryville is undergoing an impressive urban transformation that includes $800 million in office, retail and housing development.

EMERYVILLE, Calif. — Rick Holliday spun his Audi through the industrial back streets on the east side of San Francisco Bay, stirring up dust in a district of warehouses and railroad tracks.

Holliday, a developer who takes on complex conversions of derelict industrial buildings, traced the zigzagging, bouncing escape route around jammed freeways to demonstrate the forces that are changing urban real estate in the San Francisco Bay area.

Those forces now converge on a postage stamp-sized city squeezed between Berkeley and Oakland at the eastern anchorage of the Bay Bridge. This is Emeryville, once a haven for heavy industry and card clubs and now undergoing what is arguably the region’s most impressive urban transformation.

In an area of just over a square mile, $800 million worth of office, retail and housing development, including a $110 million retail and entertainment center, is either recently completed, under construction or soon to begin.

The only comparably intense morphing in the urban Bay Area is occurring at the San Francisco end of the Bay Bridge, in the South of Market (Soma) district’s shift from warehouses to dot-coms and a recreational waterfront centered on a new ballpark for the Giants.

Holliday’s point about geography and congestion goes a long way toward explaining the attraction of Emeryville. In road minutes, the city of 7,300 is twice as close to the heart of San Francisco as many parts of San Francisco are to San Francisco itself.

But the push behind Emeryville’s transformation comes not only from location but also from politics. If San Francisco’s sense of place stems from its natural setting, Emeryville’s identity is a made thing. In its evolution from dump to destination, Emeryville has been sold like a brand.

The city’s new appearance, with two high-rise hotels, an office tower, a vast Ikea store, the restoration of trolley car-era San Pablo Avenue and various factory and various warehouse conversions, is due in large part to the local government’s role.

The city is dedicated to the speedy turnover of every parcel vacated by a dead industrial use. Using state redevelopment laws, it captures dollars that would normally be paid as property taxes and spends them to clear away blight and contamination.

The result is an inventory of rarities in a crowded urban region: extra-large chunks of well-placed, well-scrubbed land available for intensive reuse.

The office, housing and retail markets are each taking a share, as Emeryville absorbs office spillover from San Francisco, emerges as the retail and entertainment hub of the East Bay and becomes a major producer of housing as slow-growth forces hit the suburbs.

Emeryville is also known for its willingness to give developers creative freedom. The relationship between public and private organizations has produced an idiosyncratic mixture of forms and colors, of new and old and of home, work and public space. Condos, treasured for their bay views, top an office building and parking structure. A supermarket experiments with selling not to residents but to office workers. An apartment complex is twinned with a big-box shopping center.

Intent on creating a place instead of just a project, Holliday integrated parking and living space, created an atrium garden out of what had been a wrecking yard and gave up retail income to design the ground level as a semipublic arcade.

“What’s unique about Emeryville is they let individual companies come in and do what they do best without imposing a lot of urban design guidelines and planning rules on them,’’ Holliday said. “The collection of these 10 or 12 projects is making Emeryville a pretty interesting place. You couldn’t have drafted a blueprint to do this.”

Like San Francisco, Emeryville is becoming a center for technology jobs as Internet and telecommunications work spills out of Silicon Valley, 50 miles to the south.

Swelling with the Internet economy, the city’s worker census of 20,000 is triple the permanent population. The online search provider Ask Jeeves is among the newcomers to an employer roster that includes the biotech firm Chiron, a spin-off from research at the University of California at Berkeley.

Hundreds of computer animators will invade later this year when Pixar, the film animation studio that made “Toy Story,” opens its new headquarters.

As it draws jobs, Emeryville is also becoming a place to live for middle- to high-income Bay Area workers, many of them desperate to cut their drive time to work.

Condos, apartments and first-class office space go for a discount to San Francisco’s Soma, although the attractions — plenty of exposed brick-and-timber facades, a waterfront and a community of technology workers — are comparable.

“It’s almost San Francisco, but you’re not paying urban rents,’’ said Ron Gerber, project manager for the Emeryville Redevelopment Agency.

White-collar singles, significantly younger than the average Emeryville resident, flocked to Bridgecourt Apartments when the complex opened in 1998. Nearly 15% of the tenants in market-rate units relocated from San Francisco.

With job and residential growth comes retail and entertainment. Emeryville is the scene of some of the latest prototypes, including the globalization of retail, the supermarket as 300-cheese food boutique, sidewalk cafe and neighborhood center and the regional shopping complex as urban Main Street.

Retail Beatlemania struck Emeryville this spring when Sweden’s Ikea opened a hangar-sized warehouse store on a spot where the fires of the city’s last foundry burned as late as 10 years ago. Traffic stopped and the selling floors shuddered. City officials said the store has become one of the company’s biggest-selling sites in North America.

Large as it is, Ikea is due to be dwarfed in 2002 by its new neighbor, a $110 million shopping and entertainment complex by the Cincinnati firm Madison Marquette. In addition to 400,000 square feet of retail and entertainment, the company plans a 250,000-square-foot hotel and 350,000 square feet of residential.

Called Bay Street, Emeryville, the project will fill the site of a former pigment plant that long left empty buildings and bare ground with an orange stain. Competing with the Broadway Plaza mall in suburban Walnut Creek, it will emulate the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica and 4th Street in nearby Berkeley. On 4th Street, warehouses became a streetscape of cafes and boutiques, creating a place out of a retail concept.

Retail tenants will include Gap and Old Navy. AMC will operate a 16-screen cinema, the only state-of-the-art movie theater in the East Bay. A variety of restaurants, some independent and others chains, will offer fresh food and share a terrace overlooking the entertainment end of the complex.

No regional mall exists between Richmond and San Leandro on the east side of San Francisco Bay. Madison Marquette will fill the gap.

Bay Street is the name of the project, but it is also the name of an actual street at the project’s center. The street will become part of the city’s grid, although it will remain privately owned.

The street will cut between 75-foot-high retail and residential buildings that will feature varied elevations, facades and materials. The idea is to create the appearance that the center is an aggregation made by many hands over a long time, the way a real city street develops.

“We banned the words food court from the project,’’ said Eric Hohmann, Madison Marquette’s vice president for development. “This is not a mall. We’re creating an urban village.”

Across one of the buildings in the complex will be written, in letters more than 15-feet high, the words Bay Street, Emeryville — the name of the city, the name of the product, the center of the place.