Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

I got this interesting release which I'll show below as it's chocked full of information. It's on an event to take place this Saturday at 11 in the morning at the old Key System building at 11th Street and Broadway in downtown Oakland. Here's the info: The Oakland Heritage Alliance along with SKS Investments are unveiling a new mural by artist Rocky Rische-Baird at the site of the historic Key System building in downtown Oakland to commemorate the innovative mass transit system that once served communities throughout the Bay Area. The 20-by-80-foot mural will be installed at the base of the former Key System building at 1100 Broadway. As part of the redevelopment of the 1100 Broadway site, SKS Investments will restore and preserve the facade of the neo-classical structure which will be integrated into a new 20-story tower that will provide 310,000-square-feet of Class A office space and 10,000-square-feet of ground-floor retail. Upon the start of construction at the s...

Maria Ayerdi Will Cause Development Dollars To Flow From Oakland When the currently proposed new Transbay Terminal comes to reality, you can thank the direction of one person for its completion and subsequent drawing or more development dollars away from Oakland: Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan. Who? Kaplan is the Executive Director of The Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) , the organization responsible for the development and financing of this massive project, which was featured in this video I created last year: The authority's work will result in the tallest building ever constructed in San Francisco, over 1,000 feet tall and a retail and mixed use complex of over 2 million square feet of space. Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan's resume is perfect for the role. She was Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan is the Executive Director of the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and a former TJPA Board Member. A member of the State Bar of California, Kaplan has served as the Mayor of San Francisco’s .. ...

One good thing about being around here for awhile with an active memory is history. I remember when Dreyer's Ice Cream proposed its giant facility for Rockridge, and many, including for a time me, were against it. One reason for this was that the original plan called for a visible College Avenue presence that was just too out of scale with the neighborhood. I say that's true for the Safeway proposal before us. This is one of those stories that needs a video and one will be up soon, but for the present, what's neat about Rockridge is that there's not one long wall of building walls hugging the street. It's a parade of structures of varied heights, allowing Sun to reach the street and giving a small-town-in-Oakland feel. But Safeway's current proposal will destroy that feeling in my view. It calls for a building that does what's not cool: hugs the street and looms over it. It would drastically alter Rockridge and make it seem more like a retail downtow...