Update on Park Street


Slow and Steady Progress


Brian Higgins
Artwork by Thomas Hacker Architects

In May 2000, a six-month study commissioned by what is now the Alameda’s Department of Development outlined the criteria for the revitalization of the Park Street Business District. Priority No. 1 was the renovation of the Alameda Theatre.
    But 41⁄2 years later, the city has not acquired the theater, situated on Central Avenue between Park and Oak. It last showed a movie, by the way, in 1979.
    That hasn’t stopped the announced spring commencement of a $25 million (and counting) plan that will overhaul the theater, attach a six-screen multiplex and add a five-story parking garage.
    The project is one of three significant financial endeavors slated to begin construction within the business district in 2005. Cost overruns and recalculations have added 20 percent to the budget that was originally $20 million (for a theater built in 1932 for $150,000 to $500,000, depending on the source). Additionally, negotiations between the city and theater owner John Cocores “have been ongoing for over a year,” says Robb Ratto, executive director of the Park Street Business Association. The two sides, Ratto says, aren’t even close.
    Nonetheless, city officials are sticking with a mid-2007 completion date for the project that calls for razing the Video Maniacs store at Central and Oak. PSBA wants to step up the pace on the overhaul of the historic Art Deco building—designed as a triplex by Timothy Pflueger, the architect of the Paramount Theatre and Castro Theatre.
“We would certainly hope that it will be open by Thanksgiving of 2006,” Ratto says, “and we’d be disappointed if it isn’t.”

    With Webster Street and the South Shore Center currently undergoing significant upgrades in an attempt to capture a bigger piece of the retail pie, Park Street, the city’s longtime tax-revenue leader, has planned its own infrastructure upgrade. “The Park Street Streetscape and Town Center Project” is a mouthful, but it’s essentially the East Side’s version of the Webster Street Renaissance Project. Funding is virtually identical: a $921,000 grant
from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission ($40,000 more than Webster Street); $500,000 in matching funds from the city; and another $1 million floated from city bonds.
    “We made the MTC a great offer,” says Sue Russell, who wrote both the Park and Webster grant applications for the city’s Department of Development Services. “Instead of matching 11 percent (per MTC guidelines), we offered them a half-million on both projects.”
    Development Services director Leslie Little insists that “the design is distinctly different on both projects.” Michael Smiley, the lead designer on the Webster and Park streetscapes, agrees in part. “We want the two streets to be distinguished. Therefore, we have different trees, different lights and different elements of the street furnishings themselves. But there are similarities in that it’s a major planting and street-lighting project. The philosophy, when you have a limited budget, is that you want to get in your big structural items that really affect how the street looks and feels.”
    Like Webster Street, the upgrades on Park will be undertaken in phases. But city leaders recently concluded that $2.4 million doesn’t go as far as it used to; upgrades to Santa Clara Avenue, in the block between Park and Oak, were scratched from Phase I of the project. The reconfigured Phase I now will include only Park Street from Central to Webb. The project is scheduled to start in April, after the Webster streetscape is complete, and run through November.
    The district’s most expensive new enterprise, the Alameda Free Library project, got off to an auspicious start.
    At a January 2004 fund-raiser at the condemned LinOaks Motel, site of the new 45,000-square foot library, guests took full advantage of an invitation to spray-paint their odes on the walls of the doomed structure. But when asbestos was uncovered in the final check before demolition, the razing of the LinOaks was delayed—for several months, as it turned out—and the city was left with a graffiti-covered eyesore. Volunteers scrambled to re-paint a building that was destined for the wrecking ball.
    The LinOaks was finally torn down, fresh paint and all, in May. Today, it’s a muddy field enclosed by a chain-link fence across the street from the city’s police headquarters. An artist’s rendition of the two-story Alameda Free Library tacked to that fence offers a preview of the fulfillment of Measure O, the $10.6 million bond issue that Alameda voters overwhelmingly approved (with $15 million in matching state funds) in 2000.
    “The start of the library construction is really going to be weather-dependent,” says the city’s project engineer, Bob Haun. “It looks like we’ll start somewhere in March and we’re looking at a completion in the summer of 2006.”
    Haun estimates that the new library will cost $27 million by the time the dust settles. But he figures that sum will to be divisible by a century. “We are designing this structure,” Haun says, “to serve the community for 100 years.”

HISTORY


PARK STREET traces its origin to the 1850s as the principal route to the East Bay mainland.
 
HISTORIAN WOODY MINOR reports that the city’s first hotel, Cohen’s Alameda Park Hotel, opened at Park Street and Webb Avenue in 1865.