The new Bristol Condominiums on Yerba Buena Island in San Francisco.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle
People heading west on the Bay Bridge in recent months have seen an unprecedented sight: a multistory condominium building wrapped in scaffolding, just yards away from where the bridge’s eastern span touches down on Yerba Buena Island.
Now the scaffolding is coming down — but that only marks the beginning of a paradigm-shifting remake of a rocky outcrop that until 1931 was named Goat Island. Within a year, a hilltop park could be the Bay Area’s newest scenic destination, above craggy slopes that will begin to be inhabited by people willing and able to spend upward of $4 million on spacious modern homes with drop-dead views.
“You’re going to see the unveiling of an area that people hadn’t explored before,” said Tim Slattery, a partner at the architecture firm Hart Howerton. “It’s a complex jigsaw puzzle, but things are starting to come together.”
Slattery and his firm have been working since 2016 on the architecture and layout of buildings on the slopes of a small island that could only be reached by boats before the completion of the Bay Bridge in 1936. Not long after that it was joined by Treasure Island, a 403-acre plateau summoned from the bay to serve as the home of the Golden Gate International Exposition that opened in 1939.
The slogan: “San Francisco as it was meant to be lived.”
For early residents, that life won’t include the more urban scale and retail features envisioned on Treasure Island, where most of the construction still involves putting infrastructure in place. But for Meany, starting on the former Goat Island and working north makes perfect sense.
“One thing Yerba Buena Island does is allow us to create, quickly, a whole environment,” he explained. “The notion of an intimate community.”
Many of the basics already are in place, such as the three new water tanks that will serve both islands and have a 5.3 million cubic gallon capacity. The main roadways are complete. The causeway between the two islands has been rebuilt.
Just west of the Bristol, though not visible from the Bay Bridge, foundations are in for the first 31 ultra-lux townhouses and flats. Above them, the terrain is being shaped for the first half of a 6-acre hilltop park designed by noted Oakland landscape architect Walter Hood. Slightly downhill will be a boulder-studded dog park that Meany boasts will have a three-bridge view.
If current schedules hold, all this should be finished within 12 months. By then, the first new housing on Treasure Island also will have opened — a six-story complex for formerly homeless veterans — and the waterfront park should be under construction.
That project, which includes 775 housing units in the first phase alone, easily could stretch out for a decade or more. The remake of Yerba Buena Island is likely to be completed long before that, discreet though most of it might be.
“We’re trying to create an experience out there,” Slattery said. “It will be the one place in the bay where you can take in the entire region.”
Read the full article at SF Chronicle.