Thursday, November 16, 2017

Up, up, and away

They're taking down the construction cranes at 181 Fremont, one block from my office; soon it will be the new Facebook offices in the city.

Across the bay, and closer to home, Oakland isn't missing out on the construction boom.

There are buildings being built: Emerging Oakland high-rise to cover beloved mural

The only problem with this location is that it’s also right next to Jimmy’s Deli and the Academy of Chinese Culture on 17th Street, the site of a massive mural by anonymous New England street artist Believe In People (BiP).

BiP painted the piece, titled Vintage, depicting an elderly woman rocking out to thrash metal, on the side of the building overlooking the parking lot in 2016.

And there are other buildings proposed to be built: Planning commission approves Oakland's tallest residential building

Oakland's planning commission voted Wednesday night to recommend the approval of the city's tallest housing development ever, a soaring 40-floor tower by developer Carmel Partners, that would replace the Merchant's Parking Garage at 1314 Franklin Street diagonally across form the historic Tribune Tower downtown.

Meanwhile, I unfortunately managed to miss the blockbuster 60 Minutes episode on the Millenium Tower, which sits precariously in between my office and 181 Fremont.

For now.

half a world away, in a suburb of Amsterdam, San Francisco's sinking tower came across the radar of Petar Marinkovic, an engineer who works with the European Space Agency to track earthquakes. Using signals from a satellite 500 miles above the earth, Marinkovic measures ground movements around fault lines. In 2016, he happened to be studying the Bay Area, when something caught his eye.

Later, 60 Minutes gets to the heart of the matter:

Everybody is afraid to tell the truth. Because if we get to the bottom of this, they are worried that it is going to, in some ways, slow down the building boom that is happening in San Francisco.

Everyone's in a hurry.

The time is now, and the White Rabbit is in a hurry; there's no time to waste.

After all, there are fortunes to be made.

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