PM Linkage: Muni Equipment vs. FiDi Building; The Warriors Really Should Set Up Shop In SF; More Bike Racks Needed In the Mission; More!

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Ask Curbed SF: What's Happening With the Grant Building On Market?

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Wednesday, February 29, 2012, by Alex Bevk

The Grant Building at 7th & Market [Photo Credit: SF Planning]

A curious reader asks:

What is going on with the Grant Building on the corner of 7th St & Market? I recall that a small-time Australian group had plans to convert the building into a hostel with ground floor eating and a nightclub/rooftop bar. I think the group went to Planning Commission for some approvals... maybe a conditional use permit? I'm pretty sure Planning Commission approved this, too. However, this was more than a year ago, and I haven't heard any news about this project. Do you guys know anything?

We did some digging, and it looks like the project is slowly trudging along. Our reader had it correct - the application to convert the building from office use to a 42,000 sqft, 94-room hostel/hotel with a restaurant and nightclub was approved by the Planning Commission back in October 2010. Designed by Bay Area starchitect Newton Tharp in 1905, the building is also on the California and National Registers. However, the proposed project didn't make any major changes to the exterior of the building, so it sailed through the Historic Preservation Commission.

There wasn't much activity for a while, but then in September 2011 the project went back before the HPC when the architects added two new sets of egress stairs on the exterior. Once again, it was approved no problem. But that's the latest activity, and unfortunately no building permits have been filed as of yet. Who knows when construction will actually start. The 1095 Market website is woefully unhelpful. We'll let you know if we hear of any developments.
· Grant Building Hotel Project Is Actually More a Hostel Project [Curbed SF]
· Grant Building Slated for Hotel With Club, Resto, and Rooftop Bar [Curbed SF]
· 1095 Market Street Holding LLC [1095 Market]

1095 Market Street, San Francisco, CA

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Little Free Libraries: The latest movement in small building...

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Comment of the Day: "Helloooooo Warriors! Building the arena on...

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"Helloooooo Warriors! Building the arena on the Giants parking lot in Mission Bay is the smartest development decision the city has been a part of since working with the Giants on ATT Park in the first place. Bring it on." - killbotkondo [The San Francisco Warriors]

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Ask Curbed SF: What's Up With the Belli Building in Jackson Square?

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Tuesday, February 7, 2012, by Alex Bevk A curious reader asks:

I was walking down Hotaling place in Jackson Square and noticed renewed construction on the Belli Building. Do you know what will come of it? Will it be more condos?

Looks like work has indeed resumed on the project at 722-728 Montgomery Street, better known as the Belli and Genella Buildings. Originally built in 1851, the buildings are both city historic landmarks and previously operated as a cigar warehouse, theatre, and public bath house (not all at the same time, of course). Famed/infamous SF attorney Melvin Belli bought and restored the properties in 1958, but they fell into major disrepair after he died in 1996. A project was approved back in August 2007 for a 12 residential and 5 commercial condo conversion out of the old office space, but due to some...financial issues with Belli's widow, the property was sold and the project stalled. It wasn't until December 2010 that building permits were finally filed to complete the work. According to the permits, the upper two floors will be converted into the residential units, with commercial space below.
· Previous "Ask Curbed SF" [Curbed SF Archives]
· Historic Landmark Listing for Belli Building [SF Planning]
· Belli’s Barbary Coast (And At One Time) Belle Of A Building [SocketSite]
· Historic Landmark Listing for Genella Building [SF Planning]

722 Montgomery Street, San Francisco CA

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Ask Curbed SF: What Is This, And Why Is There No Building Permit?

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, February 6, 2012, by Philip Ferrato

Got a question about what's going up (or coming down) in your neighborhood? Inquiries welcome at the Ask Curbed SF Inbox. It helps if you send a picture, like one reader did, above.

A concerned reader asks:

Does anyone know what is going up between Ferguson Bath & Kitchen Gallery and the Royan Hotel? I walk by most everyday and have yet to see a building permit posted.

What's going up is 411 Valencia Street, a 16-unit condominium project over retail and a garage. As for the building permit, we can't answer why it's not posted, but it was issued in June, 2011 after years of back and forth- starting with an initial approval in 2006. Questions about inclusionary housing show up in the permit history. There was some review by the Historic Preservation Commission in 2008- the owners are replacing a one-story garage (Bennett's Auto Repair) in the Eastern Neighborhoods plan- plus a neighboring Clear Channel billboard intruded onto the site's airspace. We're going to assume four units per floor, one parking space per unit, no inclusionary housing. But it will have bay windows.
· Previous "Ask Curbed SF" [Curbed SF Archives] 411 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA

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Building Big: While the market for McMansions continues...

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On the Market: The Ultimate Live-Work Building With All the Bells and Whistles

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Thursday, January 12, 2012, by Rob Bear

It's no wonder CNBC picked one of the bathrooms in this Dallas, Tex. mixed-use building as one of their top 10 "extreme bathrooms." The deep soaking tub, surrounded by a wooden deck, is complemented by showers that drain through a layer of pebbles. Pretty extravagant, but that's sort of the idea of this office/apartment near downtown Dallas. Totaling 17,577 square feet, this is one heck of a set-up for the work-at-home type, with a massive street-level, air-conditioned garage—currently stocked with expensive toys by Porsche and Ferrari. The second story is devoted to the office, while the third and fourth are residential units, one with a moody grey color scheme and the other done up in brilliant white. The price for parking, office, and home all in one? $5.5M.
· 3203 Mckinney Ave [Realtor.com]
· Extreme Bathrooms [CNBC]

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Globe Trotting: The (New) Tallest Building in the World: All the Must-Know Stats

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Tuesday, August 2, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

Click to expand!

The clever cats over at Gizmodo have broken out their trusty TI-82s and simplified, for the masses, how to best comprehend the astounding stats of the tallest buildings in the world. (Infographics: we like them!) If that skinny one on the far left doesn't look familiar, it's because it hasn't actually been built yet; the Kingdom Tower, soon to rise in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, will be the tallest building in the world once complete, beating out Dubai's Burj Khalifa. Earlier reports estimated its height as one mile, but the official word is 3,280 feet, or one kilometer. That's more than 560 feet taller than the Burj.

Other Kingdom Tower vitals:
· Builder: Kingdom Holding, the Saudi firm owned by billionaire businessman Prince Alwaleed
· A total cost of $1.2B to build
· A Four Seasons Hotel, Four Seasons residences, office space, condos, etc.
· 59 elevators (traveling 22.3 miles an hour up to the observation deck)
· 12 escalators
· A 98-foot-diameter penthouse at floor 157
· Total space: 500,000 square meters (about 5.7M square feet)

· Prince Alwaleed signs deal to build world’s tallest tower [Arabian Business via Gawker]
· Mile-High Tower Twice the Height of Burj Khalifa to be Built [Curbed National]
· The First Image of the World's New Tallest Building [Gizmodo]

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Is Lady Gaga Building a Manse in the Vineyard?: More Gaga rumormongering, here goes: The...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Wednesday, May 11, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

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Building DIY Plumbing Pipe Shelves in My Dining Room

We've seen more than a few posts featuring DIY plumbing pipe shelves around here and I have been trying to think of a way to incorporate it into my own home for the past year or so. I recently switched around my rooms and ended up with a blank wall surrounding a radiator and that seemed like as good of place as any to finally take on the project myself!

The first post about plumbing pipe shelving that really got my attention was way back in 2009 – Morgan's DIY Plumbing Pipe Shelving. I will be forever indebted to Morgan and her blog, Brick House, for her insightful, detailed post about how she put together her shelves. Without her post I don’t know if I would have ever figured out the details of how to DIY this unit on my own. Even with her post as a guide, my project still required numerous trips to the hardware store, including one last minute trip when my measurements turned out to be a little off. Although, granted, the repeated trips weren’t entirely my fault. One trip to Home Depot was quickly aborted when I learned that the machine that cuts the metal pipes was out of order.

When I had finally collected all the components I needed for the shelves, I set out prepping the area where they were to be installed. (Rather than list the components for the shelves here, I'll refer you back to Morgan's comprehensive how-to post.) Thank God we had the foresight to paint the radiator before we assembled the shelves. For anyone who has never painted a radiator let me just report that it is a pain in the neck to get into all the nooks and crannies! Also, high heat paint is stinky so open all the windows! We stained and drilled the holes for the pipes in the 1” x 12” pine planks that we would be using for the shelves and washed the greasy residue off all the pipes while the radiator paint dried overnight.

With the radiator painted and all the components prepped, it was finally time to start building the shelves. As Morgan at Brick House reported, measuring and planning were the lion’s share of the work for this project, putting it together was the easy part. Still, it’s definitely a two person job and I’m grateful my husband was home to assist.

Basically erecting the shelves was like working with Legos or Lincoln Logs. We screwed together the base, laid a shelf on top of it, screwed together the next level of pipes, laid the next shelf, and so on until we reached the top. Once we had the entire unit pieced together, we straightened it out and then screwed the flanges to the floor at the base and to the wall at the top.

I’m absolutely giddy with the way the shelves turned out. They have a stunning visual impact and, because we went almost to the ceiling with them, make the walls, and thereby the room, seem taller. While I had never thought much about the radiator before, it looks amazing painted black. And surrounded by the black pipes and dark stained shelves, it recedes into the shelving.

Images: Jason Loper

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Unique Architecture: Building with breeze? Yes, this guy...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Wednesday, May 4, 2011, by Cole Perkins

Building with breeze? Yes, this guy created the stunning Bahia House with breeze: "Combining the principles of contemporary design, traditional Bahian siting, and vernacular materials, Kogan produced a fantastically efficient house that seems to breathe with its environment." Cool, huh? [Architectural Record]

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Building Blocks: Lego Versions of Some of the World's Most Famous Architecture

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Scandal-Ridden Apartment Building in Mumbai to be Demolished: Powerhouse politicians who have scandalously taken...

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, January 17, 2011, by Sarah

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Building a Content Rich Website - Part 1 by Byron Stuart

This article series will focus on the importance of building a "content rich" website and why this is the best way to benefit your visitors and make you more money online.

There is a lot of talk these days about the "Google Slap" and how it has changed the internet marketing landscape and how people should build their websites from now on. It has been true that many people have had great success in the past with the so called no-work websites, building a network of them using automated tools. These sites work on the principal of creating vast areas of "virtual real estate" in the hope of attracting traffic and then generating revenue from people clicking through Adsense ads and the like. The idea being that if you have thousands of pages each generating a few cents here and there that it adds up to good money.

The potential problem for the people that have adopted these methods is that the "Google Slap" is all about focusing on the real visitor experience of someone visiting your website. Google is actually getting human reviewers to have a look around sites (presumably they have to be high ranking sites or why would they bother) and rate them on the basis of whether the visitor is actually getting the information they were searching for. If your site is not deemed to be delivering satisfactory content then your site ranking will be downgraded and you could even possibly have your site delisted.

Apart from the human reviewers Google also has the ability to automatically monitor the time that someone spends on a site after clicking through from a Google search. If statistically speaking your site shows up as having a large percentage of visitors that spend a very brief time at your site then it will raise warning bells and a site ranking downgrade and even a possible delisting could be just around the corner.

Now there is no point in getting angry or upset about this if you have used these methods in the past. The internet world has moved on and it really is in your best interests to go with the flow and learn how to keep the almighty search engines happy. Although it is worthwhile pointing out that some internet marketers have chosen to continue to try and beat the system and are still having some success at doing so. But the point is that sooner or later the vast number of PhDs and other talented people that Google employ will catch up with them as well so unless you get some kind of perverse thrill from always being on the run there is probably a better methodology to follow.

Now what exactly are these better methodologies? Firstly by ensuring quality content and being committed to creating quality content then there is no chance of you falling foul of a human reviewer or worse still failing to attract a loyal following for your site(s). Patience and perseverance are the keys to building any business and now more than ever these age old values are coming to the fore for internet marketing. Building web sites by hand takes time, spending 2-3 months building a really useful and content-rich website is well worth the effort.

It's not all bad because at the end of the day without quality content, your site is nothing and the Google Slap will ultimately result in a better experience for the majority of web users.

In further articles I'll discuss:
* why lots of quality content is the key to lots of traffic.
* how to go about sourcing content for your sites.
* the importance of adding dynamic content to your site, both for the human reader and for the search engine robots
* the different ways of monetizing your site (not just Adsense)
* the vast array of internet marketing software tools available
* the kinds of software that can assist you to build better sites faster
* the kinds of software that help you short term, medium term and long term
* developing an overall strategy for your new "career online"
* how to work smarter and more efficiently

I'll even discuss how to set goals that are congruent with your deepest desires!

Till next time I wish you every success.

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That's Rather Lovely: No-Fuss Modern Digs in Historic Building as Crisp as Owner

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Friday, January 7, 2011, by Sarah Photos: Jeffrey Hirsch/NYSD

This week's New York Social Dairy House column explores the airy, bright apartment of architectural designer Jennifer Post. "For all her white paint and expensive white Italian sofas, she says she could never live in a modern building," write the interviewers of the space in NYC's famed Apthorp building. The notoriously blunt Post, who counts Simon Cowell among her clients, offered a series of inspiringly quick-hitting thoughts such as "architecture has to be the hero." No prattling on for this one, thank the lord! Her home is likewise swift, spare, and elegant—do have a look above.
· Jennifer Post [NYSD House]

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