Las Urbanistas

Jim Herron Zamora, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, March 12, 2007

It all started when Mark Rauzon replanted a leftover Christmas tree in an overgrown park near his Oakland home.

The tree, a Monterey pine, died. But in the process of planting it beside Sausal Creek off Park Boulevard in early 1997, Rauzon met other people who wanted to reclaim the creek and clean up the neglected park. Together, they helped create a model for restoring urban creeks, tidal marshes and other wildland areas across the Bay Area.

Their group, Friends of Sausal Creek, spends nearly every weekend clearing brush, picking up trash and planting native trees and shrubs along the creek, which starts in the hills near Skyline Boulevard in Joaquin Miller Regional Park and dumps into San Francisco Bay near the foot of Fruitvale Avenue. Their volunteer efforts have been supplemented by city funds and other public grants and turned much of Sausal’s 6-mile creek bank into a greenbelt popular with hikers, picnickers and children.

The group celebrates its 10-year anniversary March 24 and plans a season of further restoration and maintenance. Their efforts have been followed by volunteer groups in Richmond, Martinez and Fremont that want to restore creeks in those communities.

“It really got bigger than I ever imagined,” Rauzon said Sunday as he led a tour of restored areas of Sausal Creek. “We completely transformed parts of this creek. It’s a wild place in the middle of a very urbanized area.”

On Saturday, more than 50 volunteers, including students from UC Berkeley and several high schools, had pulled patches of blackberry brush from a section in Dimond Park. Sunday, other volunteers pulled weeds and trash and planted native sagebrush along a small portion of the creek near East 27th Street and Fruitvale Avenue.

They removed a child’s bicycle, pieces of metal shelving and two empty bottles of Remy Martin brandy. They called in police when they found what appeared to be a handgun, but it turned out to be a BB gun.

“If you look around, you’ll see that Friends of Sausal Creek is really the model for urban creek groups,” said Oakland City Councilwoman Jean Quan, whose district includes much of the creek. “The work they have done is really amazing, especially when you consider that they are active pretty much every weekend. It’s remarkable to be able to sustain that kind of volunteer energy for 10 years.”

A similar group, the Friends of San Leandro Creek, sponsors only one big cleanup per year. But it has led successful education programs such as a contest for schoolchildren and a Watershed Awareness Festival, said Rick Richards, who co-founded the group in 1996.

“We really learn from each other,” Richards said. “I’m really impressed with their volunteer efforts.”

Ten years ago, the only people who frequented many parts of the creek were homeless, often drug users who discarded syringes, or prostitutes and their clients, who left behind used condoms.

“It was really a dumping ground, and some of that stuff was scary,” said Sheelah Weaver, a volunteer.

“Really, the creek is much less of a problem,” said Oakland police Officer Jimmy Judge, who helped fish out the BB gun Sunday.

Within sight of the discarded pellet pistol, several trout were spawning and Steller’s jays were nesting.

“This is really the urban front lines for nature,” Rauzon said. “We have wildlife that manages to survive in places where people dump trash and throw away guns.”

Judge said he chased a suspected car thief into Sausal Creek several years ago.

“I guess he thought I wouldn’t chase him down there (in an underground portion of the creek), but I caught him down there,” recalled Judge, laughing. “He slipped and fell and then I fell right on top of him. We were both soaked.”

Near Foothill Boulevard in the flatlands, the creek goes underground, without resurfacing before it empties into the estuary between Oakland and the island city of Alameda.

Toward its middle, between Dimond Park and Highway 13, is where volunteers have been the most active. With city help, they dug up concrete channels and redirected the creek’s course. They also planted new shrubs and willows and oak trees along the way.

The park, where more than 30 children were playing Sunday afternoon, showed the diversity of Oakland: Immigrants from Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Eritrea and Cambodia gathered for separate picnics.

Simona Necula visited the creek for the first time Sunday when she helped her daughter Deanna, 9, collect water samples for a school science project.

“It’s really a beautiful area,” said Necula, who immigrated from Romania. “It’s kind of hidden away back here. … We didn’t realize how nice it is.”

Like Necula, Makini Duewa, visiting the creek with her daughter, Ayorinde, 5, hadn’t known how much volunteer work went into fixing the creek. “This is one of the best places in Oakland for kids,” she said. “It’s safe. It’s clean. It’s perfect.”

E-mail Jim Zamora at jzamora@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/12/BAGLUOJLD61.DTL

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

La Palma officials say a proposed system that would get passengers from O.C. to the Antelope Valley in an hour will produce excessive noise in residential areas.

LA PALMA – Imagine commuting from Irvine to the Antelope Valley in an hour.

The ride would be as smooth and quiet as an airliner and hover inches above a magnetic track at 90 mph, sailing along on tracks that go over freeways.

The magnetic-levitation train, or maglev, is in use in Shanghai, China, and deploys vehicles resembling traditional train cars.

The maglev concept has caught the interest of several Los Angeles County cities and one Orange County city. The municipalities’ leaders have formed a group in hopes of creating a 108-mile route.

“Transportation is a growing problem in the region,” said Albert Perdon, executive director of the Orangeline Development Authority, the organization pushing to build stations for the line as early as 2013.

But La Palma is on the other side.

Here, City Council members have resolved to vote against mass transit proposals along the now-dormant Pacific Electric rail line that runs just inside the city’s borders. They fear such development would produce excessive noise in residential neighborhoods.

Last week, the council unanimously adopted a resolution against the proposal. But members Christine Barnes and Henry Charoen pointed out that increased transportation needs should be taken into consideration.

“People think their town is a little island, but we all need to be connected and find solutions,” said Barnes, who serves on the Southern California Association of Governments board that oversees regional transportation issues in six Southern California counties.

Mayor Mark Waldman and Councilman Ralph Rodriguez live near the proposed route; the old railroad tracks have been pulled out in at least some spots.

Both agreed that the negative consequences – increased noise and the construction of an intrusive rail line through residential neighborhoods – outweigh having a regional maglev line run through La Palma.

“I do not believe it will benefit the city,” Waldman said.

The Orange County Transportation Authority owns the old Pacific Electric route inside the county but so far has no active plans for the property.

Other county cities have taken interest in maglev lines.

Two years ago, Anaheim officials secured some federal funding to someday build a different maglev line running to Las Vegas, with a stop at the Ontario International Airport.

Another proposed maglev line would connect Ontario to Los Angeles.

So far, Los Alamitos is the lone Orange County city that is a member of the group promoting the Irvine-to-Palmdale line that would go through La Palma.

Los Alamitos Councilman Troy Edgar serves as the authority’s vice chairman. He will talk later this month to potential investors in New York. He is hoping for more cities to embrace the project.

“Our biggest reason for being a part of this is … to provide leadership, to be part of the solution,” Edgar said.

Maglev’s biggest foe so far isn’t La Palma— it is a relatively empty wallet.

The authority has raised $1.5 million of the projected $19 billion needed. Its leadership intends to get mostly private and some public funding.

Construction has begun on the 30-story Fifth on Park, shown in a rendering at left, which will be one of the tallest buildings in Harlem.

GENTRIFICATION in Harlem has taken many forms, as the neighborhood has revived and celebrated its past, and last week it reached a new milestone: its first Upper East Side-style high-rise condominium tower, to rise 30 stories above the low-rise brownstones for which the nearby Mount Morris Park Historic District is known.

353 Central Park West

The site is now a large hole in the ground. But the glass-and-brick tower will soon rise 310 feet on the edge of central Harlem, with 147 condos, 47 rental apartments, a 55-foot lap pool and a four-story church sanctuary with seating for more than 1,800 worshipers — and a very tall reminder that Harlem is becoming more like the rest of Manhattan .

The building, at Fifth Avenue and East 120th Street, facing the 20-acre Marcus Garvey Park, is to be known as Fifth on Park.

It has been greeted with some consternation and surprise by local preservationists, because it was built “as of right” with no required public review. But the developers say it will be a beacon to bring back the black middle class to the cultural heart of black New York.

Joseph Holland, a former state housing commissioner who is developing the site with a partner, Lew Futterman, said he wanted to make a statement with the design of the building, about the resurgence of Harlem and its welcome to middle-class black New Yorkers, after its decades of decline. “I believe it is important for middle-class blacks to take a stake in the community,” he said.

At a reception last week at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where details of the project were unveiled, Mr. Holland said, he pressed black professionals to consider Harlem and offered his guests a 5 percent rebate if they bought before the formal marketing campaign begins in April.

The building will tower over most of central Harlem, including the 19-story Harlem State Office Building on West 125th Street, and will be by far the tallest unsubsidized building in the area. It will be rivaled in height by only a handful of city housing projects and state-subsidized projects in Harlem and East Harlem.

“The scale of such a thing is absolutely appalling,” said Michael Henry Adams, an architectural historian and co-author of “Harlem: Lost and Found” (Monacelli, 2001). “The irony is that what makes Harlem attractive to so many people is that unlike most other parts of the city you can look up and see the sky.” To reach 30 stories, the developers bought development rights to a full square block of land owned by the church next door, the Bethel Gospel Assembly Church. That gave the developers the right to build a far taller building than would otherwise have been allowed.

In 1983, the church, in what must be considered in retrospect a brilliant real estate move, bought the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues and extending down to 119th Street, including a fairly modern surplus school building, for only $300,000, and conducted services in the school auditorium.

The church had once housed the James Fenimore Cooper Junior High School, and the building is still adorned with a large relief sculpture of Cooper and has the Board of Education seal and the city and state seals carved into the green marble entrance. The building was opened in 1936 at a cost of $12 million (about 40 times what the church paid for it) but was closed in the 1970s.

Over the last few years, the church, at the urging of its pastor, Carlton T. Brown, decided to raise money for a new sanctuary and for the church’s missions abroad, by selling what had been the school’s playground to the developers along with all of the air rights to the entire lot, in exchange for $12 million, according to city records, and space for the auditorium and 47 rental units, which would provide income for the church.

Vincent Williams, a church trustee who heads the building committee, said that the church was exploring the option of offering a mix of market rate and affordable rental units but that a final decision had not been reached.

THE zoning in the area was created to encourage medium-density construction, similar to that used in a number of recent condo developments, including the Lenox, a 12-story building put up by Mr. Holland and Mr. Futterman on Lenox Avenue and 129th Street.

But the code allows higher density for churches and doctors’ offices, and makes an exception to encourage tall towers on large plots with open space. The developers were also able to use the open space around the church in their calculations of open space.

The developers said they planned to offer apartments for about two-thirds the going rate in the rest of Manhattan, with many of the same amenities, including valet services, communal roof terraces and high ceilings. Prices range from $346,000 for smaller studios to $2.67 million for three-bedroom duplexes with terraces. (The developers list the top story at 28, but their construction documents show 30 stories, including some space for mechanical systems atop the building.)

There is some evidence, brokers say, that new condominium construction raises market values in older condominiums, even where the neighbors rally to try to stop a project.

But in the new project’s surrounding neighborhood, feelings are frayed. Valerie Jo Bradley, a longtime resident who is active in the Marcus Garvey Park Alliance, said she was worried that the building would block the southern exposure of the park and cast long shadows over basketball courts and a playground. “There is nothing that tall on Fifth Avenue,” she said.

Buying the Next-Best Thing

ONE interesting quirk of the residential real estate construction boom may be the fact that architects, who often portray themselves as creative but underpaid artists, have begun competing with bankers, lawyers, hedge-fund executives and real estate developers for apartments on Fifth Avenue and Central Park West.

City records show that last month, Ismael Leyva, the Mexican-born architect who designed the residential interiors at the Time Warner Center, and worked on more than a dozen other major residential projects over the last few years, paid $5.6 million for a full-floor condominium on the 15th floor of 353 Central Park West at West 95th Street. The unit has sweeping park views from its floor-to-ceiling windows.

Mr. Leyva said he didn’t consider buying at the Time Warner Center, because “I couldn’t afford it then and I can’t afford it now.”

But mimicking his sleek modern interiors at Time Warner, Mr. Leyva is planning to update his new apartment to make it less traditional. The apartment has three bedrooms, a living room, dining room and library, a private entrance to the elevator, and four bathrooms, according to the floor plan. It totals 2,733 square feet.

Walls are being removed, and the kitchen is being opened up to create a more loftlike feel, he said. “It is a good 12-year-old building,” he said. “I wanted to do some changes to fit my taste.”

Mr. Leyva bought the apartment from its first owner, Nadine Gill, the records show. Ms. Gill bought it for $1.8 million in 1997, when at the age of 64 she decided to downsize from a 3,500-square-foot, nine-room apartment in the Eldorado, a prewar building at 90th Street and Central Park West.

Buying in a postwar condominium has its advantages, too. While many high-end prewar co-ops require all-cash deals, Mr. Leyva, the architect, was able to buy with a $3.6 million mortgage, according to city records.