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Resurrection architecture

Jon Jerde, who hopes to lead the first phase of the downtown railyard project, has an international reputation for projects that
By Bob Walter -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Sunday, December 8, 2002

VENICE BEACH -- Renowned "urban surgeon" Jon Jerde and his band of globe-trotting architects have a plan for the so-called Depot District, the first development phase of Sacramento's gritty downtown Union Pacific railyard.
Jerde is keeping most of that vision under wraps for now, but his body of work -- from Horton Plaza, the landmark complex that spurred revitalization of downtown San Diego, to the recent development of UP's railyard in Salt Lake City -- provides plenty of clues.

More pieces to the puzzle can be added after interviews with Jerde and key associates at his headquarters in Venice Beach, a labyrinth of light and airy offices above beach boardwalk shops offering tattoos, piercings and pipes.

The Depot District's 93 acres are the gateway to the 240-acre railyard, which is one of the largest expanses of undeveloped downtown land in any major U.S. city -- and long considered the key to a central city rebirth.

We know Jerde's Millennia Associates, negotiating with UP to buy a portion of the Depot District land, wants to turn it into "a place." Place-making, in the Jerde lingo, is what they do.

This place would draw people to the capital's inner city to live, work, eat, drink and play. It would pay homage to Sacramento's history and geography. And it would link the K Street Mall, Downtown Plaza and the rest of the existing downtown area with Old Sacramento, the river and the vast railyard itself.

The railyard is an imposing and only partly cleaned-up toxic morass of railroad tracks, rock, gravel, dirt, power poles and magnificent-if-decaying old shop buildings. But the idea of turning it into an eclectic magnet for tourists and locals comes naturally to Jerde.

"So many of our projects fix broken things," he said. "It's just like urban surgery, like adding a new organ. Here you have a part of a city that's dead, that has no life, and we plug this (place) in and the whole city goes alive, just like Horton Plaza did to San Diego."

According to Jerde's mantra, the buildings in any project are less important than "the places in between," where people walk, sit, gather, talk and create a community.

"We create places that are for people ... that create economic and social value for the places where they are created," said Richard W. Poulos, executive vice president of the Jerde Partnership.

Though Jerde usually works for a development company, Poulos said, "we actually work for the people because we are creating the places that those people fantasize about." In Sacramento's railyard, he said, the group would work directly for the people because Jerde would be the developer.

The reasons for the current secrecy about the Depot District plans are twofold:

* Millennia Associates, the development arm of the global Jerde Partnership, doesn't own the land yet. Millennia was selected by Union Pacific to exclusively negotiate for most of the Depot District land. Talks began early in November and are expected to last until early next year.

* Neither Millennia nor UP wants to irritate city officials, neighbors, preservationists or other downtown interests by having them learn about the plan in the newspaper. In fact, the railyard is such a moving target that the ultimate proposal will emerge only after months of negotiations and meetings with a variety of city, business and community groups.

So we don't exactly have a site plan, but we have a pretty good idea about the elements of the Depot District plan. It would include apartments, lofts, condominiums, stores, restaurants, entertainment venues, offices and, maybe, a hotel.

The parcel also would include a train, bus and light-rail transportation center and a massive extension of the nearby California State Railroad Museum. The existing museum would remain in Old Sacramento while two of the historic shop buildings at the railyard would become museums of rail technology where people could see renovation of locomotives and other rail equipment.

Eventually, the railyard might also include an arena for the Sacramento Kings, but that would come in a later development phase.

One detail about the Depot District that Jerde and Poulos are eager to share is that it won't be a shopping center. And Jerde knows shopping centers; he designed dozens of them, including Sunrise Mall in Citrus Heights and the mammoth Mall of America near Minneapolis.

Although he has moved on to design entire districts and other kinds of projects that befit an urban visionary, Jon Adams Jerde, 62, has been criticized for creating retail monuments that masquerade as urban gathering places.

"How we got into this in the first place is I really love crowds," said Jerde, a tousled and professorial type, as he hobbled around his headquarters recently in a leg cast. He shattered his right kneecap while in Japan.

"I grew up in west Texas where there wasn't more than four people within six acres of each other," he said. "The only ... communal place left in America was shopping centers. It used to be parks and town squares, but they all disappeared because of the burbs."

Though it's a "helluva challenge" to build community around a shopping center, Jerde said, that challenge led to the formation of his own urban planning and architectural firm, the Jerde Partnership, which has more than 100 members.

The result was Horton Plaza and a string of varied projects around the world, such as CityWalk at Universal City in Los Angeles, Japan's Canal City Hakata and The Palms casino resort in Las Vegas. The Palms was designed for the Maloof family, majority owners of the Sacramento Kings and Arco Arena.

Closer to home, Jerde was the design force behind Bay Street, an "urban village" sprouting on an old industrial site next to the IKEA furniture store in Emeryville, between Oakland and Berkeley. The theater-and-retail phase of Bay Street opened a few weeks ago. Next are apartments, town houses and a hotel.

"Our goal was to create a town center ... sort of a 'Main Street' for Emeryville, which never had a place like that," said Tim J. Thurik, project designer for Jerde, who was hired for Bay Street by developer Madison Marquette.

But the best parallel to Sacramento can be found at The Gateway in Utah, where UP's abandoned railyard has become a new urban district on the western edge of downtown Salt Lake City.

For one thing, The Gateway was the first project for Millennia, Jerde's development group. The company hopes Sacramento's Depot District will be the second, although a half-dozen opportunities are being studied from California to Florida and Europe, Poulos said.

In Sacramento, Millennia has assembled a development team that includes veteran capital developer David Taylor, the local office of the Morrison & Foerster law firm, national developer Thomas Enterprises and contractor Hensel Phelps.

In Salt Lake City, Millennia teamed with the Boyer Co., considered the biggest developer in Utah, for the $375 million project on 30 acres.

The Gateway -- about four blocks from downtown Salt Lake City -- is expected to be, yes, the gateway to development of another 650 acres to the west of downtown.

"Not that many years ago, nobody would have thought to develop there," said Jake Boyer, a partner in the Salt Lake City firm and project manager for The Gateway. "The Delta Center (home of the NBA's Utah Jazz) across the street was the first to take the plunge.

"We believed it was important to create something that was unique ... beyond anything that we had in this city. We bought into the Jerde theory, place-making and all that, and their people are masters at planning large chunks of space and giving them an intimate feel."

Today, the old railyard is a mix of 350 apartment units and about 650,000 square feet of retail and entertainment venues that are 88 percent leased. Construction is about to start on a children's museum, planetarium and IMAX theater, along with 150 condominiums that are 40 percent pre-sold, Boyer said.

Former Salt Lake City Mayor DeeDee Corradini calls The Gateway her "pride and joy."

"We wanted to open up the future of downtown Salt Lake City," Corradini said, "Our vision of the ideal eventually became a residential, retail, cultural and transportation center. Jerde's people worked with us through the process, lots of public meetings. ... It turned out to be essentially our vision, and it's not finished yet."

The first phases, however, were finished in time for the 2002 Winter Olympics, which showed off The Gateway to visitors and a worldwide TV audience. In fact, The Gateway was developed in about four years -- pretty much record time for such an undertaking because of the Olympics.

"This normally would have been a very slow project," said Brian Hatch, Corradini's point man on The Gateway and deputy mayor until both left office in January.

"But with the Olympics coming, everything was fast-tracked," Hatch said. "The whole community went into a sprint, everybody worked weekends ... things just happened faster. I think everybody there still is worn out."

The Gateway has not been greeted with universal acclaim. Local architects have been critical of some of the bold features and colors and have compared some of the work to stage sets.

"It's a fake little ... I don't even know what to call it," said Robert L. Bliss, a retired architect and former dean of the architecture school at the University of Utah.

"Architecturally it's Disneyland," Bliss said, echoing criticism of some other Jerde projects. "It pretends to be historic, and it certainly is not."

Poulos, not surprisingly, disagreed. He said the project was "not thematic at all ... the scale and composition of The Gateway buildings fit nicely into the fabric of the city."

As the buildings age, trees will fill in and vines will grow over some of the structures, he said, and the project will fit in even better.

Other concerns in Salt Lake City focus on the project luring retail business from the established downtown mall. In fact, Nordstrom reportedly wants to pull out of its downtown store and open at The Gateway.

"This project was supposed to complement downtown. But lo and behold, Salt Lake City cannot support two retail centers like that in this recession," said one industry source, who asked not to be identified.

Poulos and Boyer officials said that they worked hard to avoid duplicating or raiding downtown stores. They said Nordstrom plans to move out of the downtown mall whether or not it lands a site at The Gateway.

In Salt Lake City, the entryway to The Gateway is Union Pacific's historic depot. The long-abandoned depot now houses a Virgin Megastore and is designed for more restaurants and more entertainment-oriented retail.

Sacramento's still active depot (just try to park there when trains are arriving) also is envisioned as the gateway to a new district.

But instead of a commercial outpost, the depot at Fifth and I streets will be part of the intermodal transportation center that everyone -- from UP to Jerde and city officials -- envisions as a focal point of the railyard project.

"Sacramento's depot will not be anything like the depot in Salt Lake City," Poulos said.

He also said the plan for Sacramento will feature a higher proportion of residential units -- probably including some loft-style condominiums -- than The Gateway.

Sacramento also would have a smaller retail and entertainment component than was built in Utah "to make sure we differentiate ourselves from Downtown Plaza and K Street," Poulos said.

Bruce Jolley, Jerde's vice president for planning, said the goal in Sacramento is to work on "linkage."

"We want to stitch together and draw people to the multiple attractions of downtown Sacramento, from Old Town and the river to the railyard, Downtown Plaza, K Street and maybe an arena," Jolley said.

That message is welcomed by Mayor Heather Fargo and Anthony J. Manos, executive vice president of Westfield America, which owns Downtown Plaza.

Manos said he is eager to work with Millennia if a deal is struck for the railyard. "We're very excited to see the railyard get redeveloped and to see another element of downtown urban housing," he said.

Fargo said her primary goal for the first phase of the railyard is a smooth connection with the rest of downtown.

"It's important for this project not to be seen as some separate neighborhood," she said. "I was comfortable right off with the Jerde people because they seem to understand that this is piece of something bigger.

"Once we have millions of people coming into the (railyard) intermodal by train or bus or light rail, we need to make it comfortable and safe and attractive for them to move from there to the rest of downtown."