If you haven’t yet destroyed your TV or cancelled your subscription in reaction to the Sopranos finale, check out the new HBO documentary, Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush. Like many other entries in the HBO Sports documentary library, The Ghosts of Flatbush provides a nice balance of facts and anecdotes intercut with great footage and stills, tied together with narration by the consummate pro Liev Schreiber (who I saw play Henry V in Shakespeare in the Park a few years ago).

The first hour covers the pre-Jackie Robinson era and Robinson’s monumental rookie season. Comparisons are made between the Dem Bums and the hated Giants and patrician Yankees.

The second hour reflects upon the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first and only World Series championship in 1955. Only two years later would owner Walter O’Malley, frustrated with his failed efforts to build a replacement for Ebbets Field, pull up stakes and run away with the Giants to California.

O’Malley saw the phenomenal gate success of the Milwaukee (née Boston) Braves and sensed opportunity. Yet he repeatedly lobbied to build a stadium in Brooklyn at his preferred site. His efforts did little to convince legendary NY über-planner Robert Moses, who is considered one of the first chief architects of the white flight phenomenon. Moses felt that instead of Brooklyn, a stadium would be better situated in Queens, where it would be geographically centered in relation to the rest of the five boroughs and the suburbs.

O’Malley felt that Brooklyn was the only home (at least locally) for the team, so it didn’t matter if the stadium were 30 miles or 3000 miles away – the team would cease to be the Brooklyn Dodgers. He wanted a site at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic, which was near several subway lines and the terminal for the Long Island Railroad. And unlike Ebbets Field, which only had 700 parking spaces nearby, there would be potential for thousands of spaces for fans in the suburbs who would rather take a pleasant drive in from Long Island on one of Moses’ new parkways.

News of the move gradually changed from rumor to certainty, and sensing the inevitable, fans withdrew their support in disgust. While O’Malley is held up as the eternal villain, Moses is portrayed as almost equally culpable because of his disinterest in an eminent domain move (O’Malley and Dodger shareholders would have paid for the new ballpark’s construction). Moses eventually got his stadium in Queens after the Giants and Dodgers left. Modern Shea Stadium would be home to the expansion New York Mets, whose colors would include Dodger blue and the Giants’ orange.

Ironically, the site previously sought by O’Malley is near the home of the Atlantic Yards project, the multi-billion dollar mixed development that will contain a new arena for the Nets basketball franchise. Developer Forest City Ratner is trying to acquire the land via an expensive, highly controversial eminent domain effort. The Nets would be the first major sports team to call Brooklyn home since the Dodgers left 50 years ago. The Dodgers took up residence on a hillside near downtown LA called Chavez Ravine, which was cleared through – that’s right – eminent domain.

It’s not difficult to draw parallels between the current A’s and the mid-century Dodgers. Both were run by maverick general managers, both had a blue collar ethos. Both typically fell short in the postseason. But perhaps it is one quote that best – and most eerily – depicts the team’s fans, via author Michael Shapiro:

That fanbase was not all living together. There were spread out. They were not in one place where they could gather and share their despair.

Fans these days have the internet. Problem is, message boards and blogs don’t usually end up on the evening news.

Brooklyn Dodgers: The Ghosts of Flatbush will air several times over the next week or so and is also available via HBO On Demand.

A couple of housekeeping notes: Blogger recently added a poll feature, so I’m testing it out on the sidebar. For now the poll will replace the Scorecard, which will return when there’s a real proposal and media reaction.

I somehow find myself looking through some city’s municipal code once a month. So I wanted to see what Gus Morrison’s parking concerns were based on. Sure enough, there’s plenty to consider. Fremont’s Municipal Code, Title VIII, Chapter 2, Article 20, Section 8, has the details:

• Sec. 8-22003. Required parking spaces by type of use.
  (b) Business uses.
  (1) Entertainment and recreation:
  a. Theaters, auditoriums and sports arenas or stadia, including school auditoriums and stadia–For all fixed seating capacity, one for each four seats; theaters in shopping centers, one per three and one-half seats.
• Sec. 8-22005. Location of required parking and loading facilities.
  (a) The off-street parking facilities required for the uses mentioned in section 8-22003 and for other similar uses pursuant to section 22011, shall be on the same lot as the structure or use they are intended to serve. When practical difficulties, as determined by zoning administrator, prevent their establishment upon the same or immediately adjacent lot, they may be located within 400 feet of the premises to which the parking requirement pertains, provided such parking area meets all other requirements of this Code.
• Sec. 8-22014. Assessment districts for parking.
  (a) Exemptions. Whenever, pursuant to statute, public off-street parking facilities are established by means of a special assessment district, or by any other means which the city council may determine, all existing buildings and uses, and all buildings erected or uses established thereafter within the special assessment district, or other district which the city council may have determined, shall be exempt from the requirements of this article for privately supplied off-street parking facilities except as hereinafter provided.

Okay, so let’s interpret. For a 32,000-seat facility, Section 8-22003 dictates that 8,000 spaces would be required based on the 4:1 ratio. Section 8-22005 requires that if the parking isn’t in the same lot or adjacent (no on both counts), it needs to be within 400 feet. The Brandin Ct. lots and Christy Concrete plant are both at least 700 feet from the nearest gate.

It would appear that code almost mandates that the ballpark be built “in a sea of parking” so to speak, since the distance requirement could be highly restrictive. I haven’t checked ADA regulations, but those will certainly come into play as well. We know that the sea of parking is not feasible given the village concept and housing needs, so there has to be more to it than that. Given the ballpark’s schedule of events, parking will be needed 90+ days per year, or 1/4 of the year. Should that much parking be required for such a limited schedule? And how can it be beneficial to other users such as non-resident village patrons?

There’s even one more detail that shouldn’t be ignored. The concrete plant is shown as a 16.3-acre parcel, but only 10.3 acres may be usable due to the existence of a pond on that site. It’s possible that the pond may not be developed because it’s a habitat for migratory birds. These are wetlands, after all. Reduction of the site to 10.3 acres would reduce available land for parking, further pressing the need for a garage or the acquisition of additional nearby property, or both.

But as I wrote previously, the map shouldn’t be taken anything resembling a proposal or final plan. The devil truly is in the details.

As our green and gold heroes sputter into the break, there’s a lot of news to cover. Where to begin? Let’s start locally. From the Argus:

• Lew Wolff and former Fremont mayor Gus Morrison will meet today over coffee to discuss the ballpark village plans, and Morrison’s misgivings over them. I’m guessing Massimo’s?
• The Tri-Cities Landfill at the west end of Auto Mall Parkway closed to the public at the end of June. Fremont, Newark, and Union City garbage is going to the new Transfer Center a mile away, and soon the refuse will be trucked from there to the Altamont landfill. In the future Tri-Cities will be covered over with grass so that it looks less like a landfill and more like, um, a grass-covered former landfill.
• The City of Oakland is opening a four-month window to negotiate with the Wayans Brothers and Pacifica Capital Group on their proposed movie studio and entertainment center concept. There would be 100,000 s.f. of studio lot, 457,000 s.f. of retail, and a 331,250 s.f. for a “Creative Factory business park.” I know you’re going to ask, “Why would the City support this as opposed to keeping the A’s?” The 70-acre plan doesn’t include any housing, which would conflict with Port operations. Housing is the linchpin to the A’s Town concept.

From Chron:

• Authors Roger Noll and Dave Zirin contributed two articles titled, “Are stadiums worth the high price?” Noll gives an overview of stadium funding history over the last two decades and contrasts it with the A’s and 49ers’ situations, while Zirin covers the owners fleecing the public in far more broad terms.
• The paper’s 20 worst commutes has I-880 south at Fremont Blvd (South) as the second worst in the Bay Area, though it notes “Work under way to widen a highway that drops down to three lanes. Things should improve when work is finished in 2009.” They should’ve also qualified that the 880 South problem is only during the morning commute.

Finally, the Merc details how the ballpark in China Basin helped create the real estate boom. Frankly, the internets was always far more influential to me.

With the Warm Springs and San Jose BART extensions running into major funding-related delays, you may be surprised to know there’s an alternative virtually nipping at its heels. It’s not increased Amtrak service or Caltrain running into the East Bay. It’s the state’s high speed rail initiative. CAHSR is being pitched as an alternative to personal intra-state air and freeway travel, particularly trips between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Proponents claim that a trip from SF to LA would be around 2:30, the length of a well-pitched A’s game. Best of all, the 1-2 hour prep time needed to arrive at the airport and check in would be reduced to about 15 minutes. The cost? $40 billion, same as the value of all of the infrastructure bills passed last November. The first $10 billion is supposed to be covered by a bond measure that’s slated for referendum in 2008. That appears to be the biggest problem in getting HSR on the ballot, as Governor Schwarzenegger appears heavily reluctant to put his weight behind the proposal unless, as he puts it, there is venture capital or other private means to help out with funding. And it definitely won’t be built in a day, as construction could start in 2009 at the earliest with service actually beginning in 2020. That’s right, 2020.

The project has gone through numerous levels of planning over the past decade, and pretty soon it’ll be time to find out if it’ll happen. Environmental impact reports have largely been completed, leaving a few major issues other than the funding to sort out. Chief among those is the route the line will take between the Central Valley and the Bay Area. One has the line running through Pacheco Pass, whereas the other runs near I-580 through Altamont Pass. Naturally, both have their local advocates. The Pacheco Pass option has new CAHSR board member Rod Diridon (former county supe and transit magnate) and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group behind it. Altamont Pass has Stuart Cohen and the Transportation and Land Use Coalition on its side. Either option would have large unavoidable expenses: Pacheco would require extensive tunneling and is not environmentally friendly, Altamont requires a bay crossing (either near the Dumbarton Bridge or via a new Transbay Tube). As it stands, the South/East Bay layout looks like this (station locations labeled in blue, Cisco Field is the red “X”):

The light green line represents the East Bay section that runs down to San Jose. The nice thing about the East Bay section is that even though it runs on a separate line from BART, it’s set up to link directly to BART. All three Oakland stations, Union City, and Warm Springs would have multimodal operations. There would also be a fast, direct link between Pleasanton/Livermore/Tracy and the South Bay and Livermore-to-SF would finally be real instead of those residents waiting for a BART extension to materialize. However, the service wouldn’t run nearly as frequently as BART, so HSR shouldn’t be considered a complete replacement for BART. There’s potential for other regional rail services to run on the HSR tracks. For instance, ACE Rail could be transformed into such a service and it could serve more stations along the line, while express trains bypass the ACE stations. Another option is a modified version of the Caltrain Metro East concept.

BART and HSR have other differences as well. BART utilizes a wide gauge, electric third rail system similar to the Washington Metro and Atlanta MARTA, and its top speed is 80 mph. HSR would use overhead electric wires on regular gauge rails, similar to high speed trains used in Europe. The closest US-based relative to HSR would be Amtrak’s Boston-to-DC Acela Express service, which uses similar trains but shares tracks with freight trains. Top speed for HSR is projected to be 225 mph, though that speed would only be approached in the Central Valley (Bay Area speeds would be less than 120 mph due to noise concerns and the higher number of stations in close proximity to one another). Both BART and HSR would run on dedicated guideways, free from congestion and the potential for accidents with passenger cars.

The real issue among supporters of HSR is the lack of consensus among them. At some point the Bay Area-Central Valley route will be established, which will resolve a good deal of the infighting. Beyond that, there’s a philosophical issue: How should HSR be positioned? While the original vision was for a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative to 737’s in the air and SUV’s on I-5, others have latched onto the concept of HSR acting as a good commuter train option. Consider a commuter train that makes the trip from Tracy to San Francisco in less than an hour. Or a San Jose to Warm Springs trip in 8-12 minutes (!). It sounds too good to be true, but if you want proof check out the performance of the same technology in Europe – or better yet try it yourself if you ever go there – and you’ll see it’s possible.

The commuter-versus-intercity debate is interesting because it actually pits certain environmental factions against each other. On one hand, the commuter option isn’t getting emphasized because having a fast commuter train – especially one far faster than driving – could lead to increased sprawl as even more workers flee for the exurbs for more affordable and now more accessible housing. That has the land use folks worried. On the other hand, posing HSR as mostly a long distance replacement means you might not win over commuters who could potentially be off the freeways if the plan wasn’t realized.

The great thing about the possibility of HSR is that it could significantly benefit the A’s after they head down to Fremont, and they’d have little to do with HSR’s development. Fresno-based fans could get to the ballpark in just over an hour. A few minutes less if they’re coming from Sacramento. I could conceivably leave work at 3 on Friday and head down to Anaheim to catch the first of a three game A’s-Angels set, since the Anaheim HSR station would be very close to Angel Stadium. That is, if the Angels are staying in Anaheim after 2015.

Whatever your feelings are on high speed rail, the people in power need to get off their asses to get this on the ballot in 2008. It’s already been delayed twice, and delaying it further in hopes of getting a certain type of political climate will only raise the costs of the project and waste large amounts of preparatory work that have already been completed. The governor can’t pussyfoot around. And the private industry groups like SVLG and its member should get their wallets ready if they’re really behind the plan. Then we can know for certain if high speed rail is for real, or as the kids say, pipe.

Notes: HSR supporters have been pressing the media in recent weeks. Former State Senator Quentin Kopp wrote an opinion piece for Friday’s Chronicle. Kopp is CAHSR’s board chair. If you’re looking for a point of comparison, the San Jose/Warm Springs BART extensions will cost an estimated $5.5 billion to go 21 miles. For more information on CAHSR, check out SF Cityscape’s HSR forum.

Earlier this week former Fremont mayor Gus Morrison submitted a letter to Fremont’s City Council (posted in the Tri City Voice) urging caution in their dealing with the A’s. Morrison wrote, “I have long thought this project was one where the cart seemed to be getting far ahead of the horse.” He went on to suggest that “a Fatal Flaw Analysis ought to be performed to find out if there are things in this project which could kill it.” Among those, parking and ingress/egress were considered paramount.

Morrison is absolutely right. It took a while for the Council to get the report and it’s taking longer for them to get the plan, which appears to be getting out to different stakeholders on a piecemeal basis. I don’t know what goes on in the twice-a-month sessions, but I hope that it’s not the same kind of situation.

To the Council’s credit, they’ve expressed their interest in being part of the planning process. Paraphrasing council member Anu Natarajan, she cautioned the A’s that she didn’t want to receive an already packaged plan without going through proper planning steps.

While Morrison’s concerns are well placed, he may be jumping the gun a bit. The key indicator of this is the reported number of condos and townhomes in the project, which seems to vary with each newly released piece of information. It shows that the plan is still undergoing major gestation. What isn’t clear is how much the city is helping to scope it out. If anything, the only part with real detail is the core village area. Everything else lacks detail. It is that “everything else” that will be heavily debated over the next few months.

If the plan were submitted today based on the graphic released for FUSD, it probably wouldn’t pass. Vice-Mayor Bob Wieckowski, who Morrison endorsed previously, clearly said that placing the school on the public parcel outside the neighborhood was a non-starter. And there’s no way the plan would work with only Auto Mall Parkway as the single major freeway access point, especially if the Fremont Boulevard/Cushing Parkway interchange can be utilized. Thankfully, there are ways to address these concerns. They’ll require compromise from both the A’s and Fremont. As I noted in my review of the economic impact report, there are creative ways to make everything work.

Of course, the cart-horse analogy should be studied further. It would appear that in this case, the A’s are both cart and horse. I suppose that makes the City of Fremont the reins.

If you haven’t had a chance to download the ballpark village plan at the Merc’s website, you really should. It’s a good snapshot of what the developer’s vision is now, prior to an inevitable series of changes – hopefully all for the good.

While studying the plan further over the weekend, I noticed that some graphical elements would quickly flash on the screen and then disappear as I scrolled through the drawing. I had seen this with my own mock-ups, which got me thinking there was more to this document than met the eye. I proceeded to open the file in a graphics program. Lo and behold – there was more under the surface!

I thought it was odd that the condos (yellow-gold) would be arranged in large, monolithic buildings. Upon further inspection, there was a good deal of extra space set aside for parking. Since there are 560 residential units in the core village area, there would have to be at least that many spaces for residents, plus a set number of visitor spots. The rest of the parking could be split between the retail part of the village and the ballpark. I’m assuming there’d be one level of garage parking, but it’s possible there could be two levels. The layout of the residential-only buildings allows for large plazas above the parking, which will be needed as all of the elements are set rather tightly with limited amounts of open space at street level.

When looking at the plan it’s easy to ignore the legend at the right. The legend’s explanations pull everything together – sort of. The numbers deserve to be explained further – and once that’s done it starts to really take shape.

• Building B1 – Ballpark
• B2 – Left field building, mixed use, 11 residences
• B3 – Right field building, mixed use, 13 residences
• V1 – Residential, 89 units
• V2 – Commercial, 140,000 s.f.
• V3 – Residential, 87 units
• V4 – Mixed use, 44 units, 48,000 s.f.
• V5 – Residential, 57 units
• V6 – Mixed use, 24 units, 56,000 s.f.
• V7 – Mixed use, 28 units, 71,000 s.f.
• V8 – Commercial, 30,000 s.f.
• V9 – Mixed use, 100 units, 77,000 s.f.
• V10 – Mixed use, 23 units, 34,000 s.f.
• V11 – Mixed use, 52 units, 29,000 s.f.
• V12 – Commercial, 3,000 s.f.
• V13 – Mixed use, 54 units, 30,000 s.f.

V11, V12, and V13 are not labeled in the drawing, but I’m certain that V11 and V13 are the J-shaped buildings attached to B2 and B3, while V12 is effectively a glorified kiosk in the middle of the park. BTW, it looks like B2 and B3 will have residences overlooking the field.

V9 has to be the busiest piece outside of the ballpark because it contains the hotel, a relatively large amount of parking, and 100 housing units to boot. V2 and V7 are potential homes for larger retailers.

The core village is over 20% smaller than Santana Row in terms of acreage and retail/commercial space. There are fewer than half the residences as well. While the buildings will vary in height and cladding, they probably won’t be as tall as their Santana Row counterparts.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the ballpark’s footprint. The artist placed a bitmap over the top of the footprint, but I removed it and what’s left is a most unusual outfield design. There’s no indication that the Polo Grounds-like outfield will carry over to the final project. Nonetheless it is a change of pace from the all too commonplace bandbox design we’ve seen elsewhere. This is one element I’d take with a grain of salt.