Wednesday, May 04, 2016

The Concourse then and now

The Concourse now: no parking

The Concourse in 1944

It's hard to imagine now, but building a parking garage under the Concourse in Golden Gate Park was controversial ten years ago (see this and this).

As the 1944 picture shows, there used to be 200 parking spaces on the Concourse itself. The Concourse was no longer a parking lot after 1998's Proposition J authorized the construction of the 800-space underground garage---completely invisible from the Concourse itself---eliminating those 200 parking spaces from the surface.

Once the decision was made to locate the new de Young Museum and the Academy of Sciences on the Concourse, the garage made perfect sense, and it has been an inconspicuous success ever since.

Guess who opposed the garage? Yes, of course, the city's bike people, including Leah Shahum and the Bicycle Coalition.

Thanks to Curbed.







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2 Comments:

At 2:34 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

So why bring this issue up again? Just to bash cyclists?

 
At 4:24 PM, Blogger Rob Anderson said...

No, though I hate to waste an opportunity to do that. It was the 1944 picture in Curbed that showed what the Concourse looked like---with all those parked cars---before the underground parking lot was built that prompted the post.

 

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