The tide is turning for river renaissance
Public, private projects lined up
By Deb Kollars -
dkollars@sacbee.com
Last Updated 1:47 pm PST Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Story appeared in MAIN NEWS section, Page A1
(Part 1 in an ongoing series of reports titled "Riverfront Rising")
For years and years, Sacramento's urban waterfront has been a ribbon of disappointment.
While cities across the nation have embraced the magic of water with spaces alive and appealing, we have settled for patches of weeds, old gray warehouses and empty slabs of concrete along the shores of the stately Sacramento River.
Look around the riverbend, however, and you will find a new waterfront rising: Riverside offices with views of the Capitol. The region's first condominium tower with balconies overlooking the water. A pair of new museums facing each other across the river. Shops and restaurants. Piers and marinas. Public promenades where people can gather.
All are being contemplated and designed, some with local muscle behind them, some with big national names.
Most are far from completion. Some may change or fade away. In every location, challenges remain, from securing levee safety to clearing industrial uses to waiting out a sagging housing market and tricky economy.
But for the first time in Sacramento's halting riverfront history, a series of projects with real plans, real backers and real timelines are lining up along the riverbanks in a collective sign of a renaissance.
To many, it is about time.
"I have been here 30 years," said Michael Glassman, a Sacramento landscape designer who is cohost of "Garden Police" on the Discovery Home Channel. "I have always been surprised at how little we've done with our waterfront."
A maturing market
The new focus along both sides of the river comes from converging forces, according to city planners and real estate experts. After years of suburban expansion, a maturing downtown market is drawing developers to the urban core. At the same time, the cities of Sacramento and West Sacramento are taking steps to connect people to the river.
Much of the action is in West Sacramento, the upstart city on the western bank of the Sacramento River.
"It's kind of popped all at once," said West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon. "In every part of the river we've got things happening."
Just north of the Tower Bridge in West Sacramento, for example, the capital region's first waterfront high-rise condominium is being planned by a San Diego firm with a long history of delivering residential towers.
South of the condo site, local developer Mark Friedman is trying to lure a giant state office project to his property with architectural designs that play up the beauty and nearness of the water.
And in a dramatic turn, an area known as Stone Lock has emerged as a waterfront hot spot. Scrubby and obscure for years, the 200-acre site lies at a fortuitous point where the Port of Sacramento barge canal meets the Sacramento River.
This summer, that property – with its four miles of waterfront potential – captured the fancy of the Cordish Co., a Baltimore firm with a knack for splashy multimillion dollar entertainment zones. Among the places Cordish has put its mark: the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Bayou Place in Houston and Fourth Street Live in Louisville, Ky.
Last week, the city of West Sacramento finalized an exclusive agreement with Cordish to begin planning and designing Stone Lock as its master developer. The document is scheduled to go before the City Council on Wednesday.
The goal is to create something the region has not seen: a modern neighborhood that celebrates the water. Among the possibilities are a central park and public plazas, restaurants and shopping and music venues, a marina on the barge canal, and a mix of housing and commercial spaces.
"If Cordish can do here what they've done in other places, this will be a major regional destination," said Traci Michel, West Sacramento's redevelopment program manager.
Underachieving spaces
If ever a waterfront could use a shot of life, it would be Sacramento's, on both sides of the river.
On a recent autumn evening in Old Sacramento, the sky was clear, the air warm, and the river a glistening palette of sunset colors.Yet at Rio City Cafe, an upscale restaurant with some of the best river views around, just half of the outdoor tables were filled. A lone couple walked on the floating dock below. Across the way, West Sacramento's landscaped promenade was empty. On the river, a single ski boat headed southward.
In nearby Waterfront Park, a plot of ground with a hopeful name and as much dirt as lawn, a group of Mexican folk dancers from Woodland performed for a small audience. The river was near, but largely hidden by buildings.
Melissa Verdugo, a historical interpreter who had helped organize the program, sighed as she surveyed the scarce crowd.
"We're trying," she said, ticking off a list of efforts by the Historic Old Sacramento Foundation. "But the scene here is pretty quiet. There's definitely a disconnect from the water."
That disconnect has been recognized for years. The Sacramento community sits at the confluence of two major rivers. One, the American, features a continuous natural parkway, enabling hundreds of thousands of people a year to enjoy its beauty, wildlife and seasonal moods.
The other, the Sacramento, runs past the heart of the downtown core. Yet, apart from the few blocks occupied by the Old Sacramento historic district and brief promenades, scant options exist in the downtown area for people to gather and enjoy the Sacramento River.
Even where there are opportunities, few venture near.
Miller Park, for example, is one of the prettiest and best-maintained parks in the region. It stretches for a half mile along the Sacramento River south of downtown, where Broadway ends. This time of year, the park is luminous as the cottonwoods turn yellow against the changing skies.
The dream for Miller Park is to stand as a shining exclamation point at the southernmost end of the urban waterfront. But for now, it requires a leap of faith just to get there – past a rail line, oil tanks and warehouses.
Longtime challenges
Such barriers have long undermined dreams of developing Sacramento's waterfront.
The railyard area north of downtown, for example, is burdened by a toxic past. A railroad spur in the "Triangle" area of West Sacramento and a water treatment reservoir in the "Docks" area of Sacramento have blocked progress for years in these two prime waterfront regions.
Concerns about levee safety and flooding also have slowed efforts to add amenities next to the water. The levees themselves form a physical barrier, rising higher than the land and blocking views and access.
Most intractable of all is the monolithic Interstate 5 running parallel to the river, cutting off Sacramento's downtown from the water. Sacramento City Manager Ray Kerridge called it "a terrible, terrible thing to do to a city."
Numerous cities have overcome similar obstacles to transform their once-industrial waterfronts. They offer restaurants, shops and aquariums. Crowds on the piers and plazas. Boating life. Commercial life. Night life.
In the 1970s, Portland moved a freeway to open waterfront space on the Willamette River, and has been adding parks, skyscrapers and restaurants ever since.
More recently, Chicago transformed a blighted railyard near Lake Michigan into the spectacular Millennium Park, where architecture, gardens and entertainment attract millions every year.
Pittsburgh, meanwhile, has turned grim stretches where steel mills once reigned into 30 miles of continuous river access, complete with public waterfalls and fountains that beckon children to jump in and play.
In Pittsburgh, waterfront revitalization was a huge job, according to Tom Murphy, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute and a former Pittsburgh mayor. It involved cleaning up not just the land but the water.
"When I was growing up in Pittsburgh, our mothers always told us two things: Get home before the street lights come on and never go near the rivers because they were so dirty," Murphy recalled. "Now they are a place of magic for people."
Murphy visited Sacramento earlier this year to speak at a conference on levees. He was stunned by the beauty of the mountain-fed Sacramento River, and by the lack of development at its edges.
"I was overwhelmed by the amount of riverfront and the greenness and softness of the landscape," he said. "You have great potential for your waterfront. You just haven't put it together yet."
Charting a new course
In California, major coastal cities such as San Francisco and San Diego have had natural advantages in developing waterfront communities and tourist attractions. It was bound to take inland cities such as Sacramento longer, said Greg Paquin, president of the Gregory Group, a Folsom real estate consulting firm.
"We're getting to that point now," he said. "We're maturing in a number of ways."
A sign of that maturing came four years ago, when the cities of Sacramento and West Sacramento overcame a competitive pattern to create the joint waterfront master plan, "Celebrating Our River."
Now, both cities are working on a critical feature of that plan – creating longer and more lively river promenades with bikeways, walking paths, lookouts and public plazas. They are using the same Portland landscape architecture firm, Walker Macy, and the cities' planners are helping each other navigate flood control issues.
In addition, the two cities finally have launched the widening of the Tower Bridge to make it easier for people to walk or bicycle back and forth – something West Sacramento's Mayor Cabaldon and Joe Serna Jr., the late mayor of Sacramento, agreed to years ago.
"Ten years and $13 million later, it's finally getting done," Cabaldon said.
At the same time, private developers are being driven not only by the demographic shift toward downtown living but also by the two cities' clearer vision for developing the waterfront, said Mike McKeever, executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, which monitors the pulse of regional growth.
"We're all sensing it," Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo said. "There is a momentum under way that we haven't seen before."
The eastern edge
On the Sacramento side, an ambitious project called Township 9 is being heralded as a catalyst for Sacramento River waterfront development.
The 65-acre project, approved by the City Council in August, sits next to the American River near its confluence with the Sacramento. Plans call for transforming the industrial area into a neighborhood with housing, shopping and offices. Land nearest the river is envisioned as a parkway.
Construction is set to begin in a year, and people should be living there within two years, said Steve Goodwin, president of Capitol Station 65, the owner and developer of Township 9.
Nearby, Thomas Enterprises, the owner-developer of the former Union Pacific railyard north of downtown, is hoping for City Council approval in December of a large urban neighborhood. Eventually, it is to include a waterfront stretch featuring park space, a possible marina and hotel, and other commercial or office uses.
To the south, a wedge of promising waterfront property known as the Docks finally has a heartbeat, after more than 30 years of planning and waiting. KSWM Docks Partners, the team from San Francisco that is developing Treasure Island, has an exclusive negotiating agreement with the city of Sacramento to buy and develop the Docks site.
Many challenges remain for the Docks, with the first construction at least three years away because of the tough housing market. But according to KSWM's principals, the team is committed.
"We feel absolutely convinced we made the right decision putting our toe in the water," said Todd Saunders, a partner with Wilson Meany Sullivan, a real estate development firm that is part of the KSWM team.
West Sacramento
Across the river, signs of progress already are visible near the pyramid-shaped ziggurat building in the northern end of West Sacramento's waterfront. There, a high-rise office tower is going up, the future home of the State Teachers' Retirement System.
In between the office tower and the ziggurat, plans call for something many waterside cities take for granted: high-rise condos.
The housing slump is expected to delay by at least two years the construction of the condo tower by Fairfield Residential LLC of San Diego. But designs are proceeding, with the project slated to go before the West Sacramento City Council sometime this winter.
Though waterfront condos and offices are common sights, what the city and the Cordish Co. have in mind for the Stone Lock area is far from typical.
Three years ago, a modern entertainment district was the last thing anyone was thinking about, said Val Toppenberg, West Sacramento's director of redevelopment. The city had bought a chunk of property from the Port of Sacramento to help bail it out of a deficit. Soon after, the city acquired more property nearby from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Last summer, city leaders tallied the acreage they had amassed – 200 acres in all.
"I thought, my goodness, there is a huge opportunity here," Toppenberg said. He and his staff studied waterfront developments across the country and invited some of the nation's top firms, including the Cordish Co., to bid for a chance to become master developer.
"We thought, 'Who cares if we're this little city on the wrong side of the river,' " Toppenberg said. "We didn't want a subdivision. We wanted a really cool project."
If the City Council approves terms of the Cordish agreement on Wednesday, the firm will have a year and a half to plan the project, complete environmental reviews and gain entitlements. Given the size and scale of the effort, Michel said, it will take at least a decade to complete.
The Triangle area, home to Raley Field, may go vertical even sooner, now that the railroad spur that has long hampered growth is coming out. Moving the tracks – and a cement plant that relies on them – involved years of negotiations and a $16.5 million package of investments by the city and private developers.
On a recent afternoon, Davis developer Lynne Yackzan stood on a barren waterfront parcel in the Triangle that her family has owned and dreamed of developing for years.
"It's this gem, this little Emerald City about to happen," she said. "The rails are coming out. We can finally move forward."
The rail spur's imminent departure helped push Triangle developer Mark Friedman into action over the past two months.
Friedman hopes to win a state contract to build a complex for the California Resources Agency, now located in downtown Sacramento. To help make his case, he brought in some big guns, including Hines, one of the world's largest skyscraper developers, and Pickard Chilton, a noted architectural firm.
Competition to gain the 1.4 million square feet of office space is stiff, however. Sacramento city leaders are fighting hard to keep the agency within city limits.
"We want that million-four square feet in the city of Sacramento," Kerridge said, "and we're going to get it."
Friedman, however, is offering an amenity other proposals can't match: views and access to one of the very treasures the Resources Agency oversees – the Sacramento River.
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I'm sure Sacramento will have more nice projects in the future, though.
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