Welcome to Alameda, may I take your order?

So, I’ll confess, I was actually out-of-town for the past few days, and as much as I adore you all, I don’t do a lot of blogging while I’m away.   That’s why I had more “time neutral” posts up then something more timely and relevant, like the dueling editorial letters from City Officials — more on that next week.   While I was gone, I did get this email and wanted to throw it up before it got too late as reviewing the editorial letters and going through everything I missed while away including the City Council meeting is going to take a bit more time.

Anyway, folks who go through the Webster Tube side of Alameda will know that the new Stargell alignment is pretty much done, there’s still some landscaping to be done, and the College of Alameda has put in some really nice low walls that has given the College a nice presence at that entrance.  You all may have been wondering what the huge parcel to the right of Webster Street when you are coming out of the tube into Alameda was going to be.   Right now it’s just a weedy area and there are some leftover “No on Measure A” signs still planted among the weeds.   It’s sort of a weird patch of space and the access is fairly limited so I never had huge hopes for anything spectucular there — or really anything at all — and since I can’t recall anything coming through the Planning Board about that space lately, I just assumed that Catellus was going to wait and incorporate that into future plans for Alameda Landing.

Turns out, Catellus already does have plans and they have begun marketing them already.   For those who elect not to click through, here is the rough map:

Your eyes do not deceive you, it does indeed say “drive thru pad.”  And this is how they are marketing it:

Actually, if you click on the full marketing materials, it’s pretty clever in general.

Unfortunately, if the plan is to load the parking on the Webster Side of the property , it’s going to make the entrance to Alameda look seriously unattractive.   Hopefully the plan will be to plant some largish trees, maybe the City can negotiate with Catellus to construct the entrance archway that has been part of the Webster beautification plans forever.

There are some obvious problems with the site.   The first is: that curve is a doozy, cars coming off of Webster fly through that curve and that entrance slated to be off Stargell might be missed the first 100 times or so.   Second, the pedestrian access is pretty bad right now to that particular parcel, as in nonexistent bad.    If the idea is to get customers from the College of Alameda or people walking home from the Webster Street bus stops the City or Catellus will need to plop a new crosswalk in.

While I’m not in love with the idea of yet another drive-thru business planned for the West End, after all, I’m not sure which business would fill the space considering that the West End is fairly well represented in the fast food market.   Maybe an In-N-Out or perhaps the Starbucks will move in order to take advantage of the drive-thru window.   There are also plans for a Multi-Tenant pad as well, so essentially it will be a pocket strip mall.  Here’s what I would like to see though.  I would like to see a nice sized sidewalk on the Stargell side and access to the storefronts from both the Stargell and the parking side, as opposed to the currently heavily auto-centric look they are going for.    I imagine that the storefronts will probably end up including a cafe of some sort (Starbucks, Peets or maybe we’ll get an independent small business operator) and probably a nail shop because those pedicures don’t take care of themselves.