I was going to write about the Planning Board meeting tonight tomorrow night! (thanks JKW) (Historic Preservation Ordinance, Food Trucks, and more!) But I decided that I wanted to write about something else. Quick tip on the Food Truck agenda item, apparently the Off the Grid set-up on Saturday at South Shore is super popular and brings lots of people to the shopping center resulting in more retail sales for existing tenants. The City is also looking at adding more flexibility to bring food trucks to Alameda Point as well.
Anyway, I wanted to post some graphics I made about the Beltline property, because immediately after a commenter mentioned that most people probably don’t know the size and scale of the property given the fence and all, I thought it would be interesting to see how the Beltline compares with other Alameda Parks.
So here is an overhead view of the property, these are all from Google maps, click to enlarge, I’m guessing that I should add that all the dirt parts in the middle makes up the Beltline.
The two plots highlighted in red are Jackson Park and Franklin Park, two parks I think most people are familiar with. In hindsight I should have chosen Krusi, but didn’t want to go back and add a third. So you can see how large they are in relation to the Beltline.
So then I cropped out just the park portion of Jackson Park, rotated it and placed it on the Beltline parcel, so you could see how many Jackson Parks you could fit on the Beltline. I got three in, I probably could have stuck another one in in split portions, but got lazy:
Then I cropped and rotated out Franklin Park and gave it the same treatment and as you can see you can easily fit five Franklin Parks in the Beltline, I’m sure I could have squished another on the western side as well, but elected not to.
So while not an exact idea like you would get from visiting and walking the site, it can give a sort of frame of reference of the size of the property as compared to existing parks.
In other news, new/old City Council member Tony Daysog is now on Twitter. Yay! But, he’s blocked some people from following him on Twitter. But on Friday I found that I could not follow him on Twitter:
Apparently some other folks could not as well, but some people made it through the Tony Daysog filter. On Friday, I created a Tony Daysog Twitter Mirror in the right hand side bar, just under my own Twitter feed. On Friday afternoon, I think Tony Daysog realized that something was wrong with his Twitter account, I am now able to follow Tony Daysog, so I deleted the mirror. Fun with technology!
FYI, this week’s planning board meeting will be held tomorrow night, as there is a special council meeting taking place tonight before the Mayor and City Manager head to DC for the Mayor’s Conference.
Comment by JKW — January 14, 2013 @ 6:15 am
Thanks, I made the change above!
Comment by Lauren Do — January 14, 2013 @ 7:03 am
Wondering if there is still any momentum as far as “Rails to Trails” plans.
http://www.railstotrails.org/resources/documents/whatwedo/TrailDART/Report_CrossAlameda.pdf
Also has any determination been made as to contaminated soil at the former Locomotive Service Facility. There actually used to be a “Shop” there at one time and these areas are generally pretty contaminated where they have been abandoned,
Comment by frank — January 14, 2013 @ 10:46 am
Frank, this ‘rails to trails’ looks great. What happened to the idea?
–the dates on the link are pretty old..
Comment by Catherine — January 14, 2013 @ 8:42 pm
The project continues to move forward. Pieces are in the transportation priorities that were before the council last night. I haven’t watched it yet, so I don’t know what happened. I assume that it was approved. It’s all about finding the funds at this point.
Comment by jkw — January 15, 2013 @ 9:22 am