Attention Curban Planners the city over: Judgment day has arrived. Before the long-awaited reveal, we'd like to offer sincere thanks to those who entered the Curbed SF SWL 337 Planning Challenge. While entries ranged from the serious to the stoned, they formed a collective vision that gave us the warm and snugglies (no, really). You crazy San Franciscans, with your creativity and your AutoCAD. . . Anyway, without further ado:
We present the Runner Up award to Jackson West, longtime San Francisco blogger whose tongue-in-cheek (yet Kafka-esque) plan for SWL 337 leads us all straight to hell in a (American Apparel-made) handbag. But hey, at least we get to take in a dog fight and have ourselves a Pinkberry on the way down. See y'all there. Jackson— meet us in the parking lot, and we'll hand over that $100 check. Because that's what you just won: 75 bucks, which you mustn't spend in one place. The preamble:
My plan for the pier is to create a theme park called "The City That Once Knew How." Marrying the nostalgia of Colonial Williamsburg with the broad-shouldered idealism of the Works Progress Administration, it will be an ode to the industrious blue-collar workforce who's blood and sweat produced the great war machine that won in the Pacific Theater and sufficiently enriched the Bechtels so that their descendents could go on to run the magnificent military-industrial complex we know and love today— not to mention the capital to move all of those manufacturing jobs to free market zones in China and leave the offspring of these unionized workforces to jobs in the service sector feeding, cleaning and entertaining the center-right, pro-business Democrats who love the irony of a cold Pabst Blue Ribbon but not the ten hour days and six days a week of backbreaking labor that once provided a living wage and called for an inexpensive, hydrating macrobrew.See Jackson's full manifesto and (legible) rendering after the jump.
· Curbed SWL 337 Planning Challenge: Pre-Reveal [Curbed SF]
· Curbed SF SWL 337 Planning Challenge: Giants Up the Ante [Curbed SF]
· Curban Planning: Enter the Curbed SF "SWL 337" Planning Challenge [Curbed SF]
Manufacturing: We'll let Dov Charney build a model production floor for manufacture of American Apparel products, and to offset the high cost of the land lease, he'll be allowed to pay sub-minimum wage prison rates to laborers bussed daily from nearby San Quentin. He saves on labor and shipping costs, while you can be proud to buy the produce at the gift shop because it's Made in America.
Entertainment: The Third Street Gym, the Golden Gloves Tournament and the East Bay Rats could all use a brand-spanking-new amphitheater to host smokers, bare-knuckle brawls, post-punk-psychobilly-pop shows and otherwise get out their aggression in violent battles and angry music with racial and ethnic overtones (no gambling allowed).
Public space: Parks, as we all know, are for pussies who walk or, worse, ride bikes. Parking lots are for the working man, as Donald Fisher well knows. So as much of the existing parking lot will be left for chauvinistic Giants fans who refuse to take public transportation and prefer to tailgate, get stabby, and drive home drunk. Pet lovers will be thrown a bone, though -- the dog enclosure won't just be off leash, but will offer an exclusive venue for de-criminalized, well-regulated competitive dog fighting (no gambling allowed).
Offices: The Maritime Hall on Rincon Hill is in far too valuable a neighborhood to be left to unions -- so why not move it brick-by-brick to this new park? Its new lease can be subsidized by turning the beautiful old hiring hall portion into an exclusive club bar and grill. Members will pay for the privelege of receiving a "union card" for entrance, and will be served meals in real, vintage tin lunch pails.
Residences: Why live in a sturdy building meant to last when you can surround yourself with the very technology that rendered actual manufacturing jobs in America obsolete? A retrofitted shipping container offers 300 square feet of living space, which at $350,000 per unit would be an affordable first home for recent college grads from the flyover states recruited by SOMA startups. You can stack 'em half a dozen high and nobody could possibly say that they're out of scale or character with the neighborhood's architecture!
Of course, elected officials and municipal employees would just bungle the whole operation, and if any profit is generated, it should go to private enterprise and not public coffers to line the pockets of the corrupt. I figure a single-bid contract be offered to Lennar, a model of corporate efficiency and fair dealing in San Francisco for decades.
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