Beer, dogs, kids, and fancy sandwiches taking the place of car tires on Park Street

Friday evening, I joined my kids and spouse at the auto-shop-turned-beer-and-food venue at the corner of Park Street and San Jose Ave.

The place isn't even listed as open on Yelp or Google — and yet both its outdoor patio and indoor areas were already hopping.

Many arriving by bike

The bike racks were almost full when I arrived. Thanks to input provided to the Planning Board by Bike Walk Alameda and neighbors, the bike racks were recessed sufficiently from the sidewalk so that even my cargo bike didn't intrude on the flow of pedestrian traffic (the pedestrian access route in PROWAG parlance).

When I left, the bike racks were overflowing. There was a mix of adult and kid-aged bikes. As I left, I didn't see any signs of this dire prediction by one public commenter at a Planning Board meeting in 2023:

[The commenter] thought this business would bring drunk cyclist to an already busy street. He also felt this was too loud and busy for the local residents. He did believe that change was good but was concerned for impaired cyclists.

If I could choose, I'd much rather encounter a drunk person riding on a bike than driving behind the wheel of an automobile.

From old into new

Park Station, a beer/cider taproom, fills the place of former auto garages.

Southie, an order-at-the-counter "American (New)" concept (to categorize it using Yelp-like terminology), fills the place of the former auto shop's office.

Seeing how large the crowd was on one of the venue's first night's of service, I had a certain amount of trepidation and figured there was a non-zero chance we'd be still be waiting for our food and drinks hours later. (When I was a tad younger I would do things like stand beside a food truck for three hours to try kimchee tacos when those started becoming a thing in LA. But now I'm on my kids' more expedient food-into-tummies schedule and have also adopted it for myself.)

We were pleasantly surprised: Even with screwdrivers and hand tools and partially installed fixtures and boxes visible behind the counters, the food and beverage crews knew how to feed a crowd. (Speaking of messy restaurant construction, I am currently in season 2 of The Bear. No spoilers, please.)

Southie temporarily closed dinner service at their Oakland location, so their existing team would be available to staff this new Alameda location. And the owners of the Park Station taphouse have almost a decade of experience running a similar venue in Sacramento. There's still work to do to finish and refine this new spot, but it's already operating surprisingly effectively.

Live music to come

A small stage is still under construction. Park Station's use permit will allow a certain number of concerts with amplified music with constrained hours.

In about 6 months, the Planning Board will review the use permit, to make sure the venue is staying within bounds and to hear any feedback from neighbors.

For what it's worth, this is the nature of living alongside each other in a city. (If you want an at times entertaining and at other times disturbing read, here are 58 pages of public comments regarding the use permit for the back patio at the Clubhouse bar across the street.)

Transforming from cars to people

This is now a place for eating and drinking and occasionally listening to live music, in part, because of previous use-permit violations.

In 2017, both the Planning Board and the City Council revoked a previous permit that had enabled auto repair at this site, despite that portion of Park Street no longer being zoned for that type of automotive or industrial land uses. Big O Tires had been leaving many cars in public on-street parking spots, in violation of the conditional use-permit.

Big O has since moved to a new site with sufficient off-street parking, so they aren't leaving their customers' work-in-progress cars (or their junkers) in the public right-of-way anymore:

While I'm normally all for intermixing of land-uses, this is a better arrangement: food/drink/music venue near other retail and small business and residents on the southern end of Park Street, with auto shops clustered in more self-contained warehouses off the northern end of Park Street.

We'll see how this progression continues. Ideally the northern end of Park Street itself will fill in with even more retail, office, and residential uses over time.

Shipping container architecture

Speaking of developments on the northern end of Park Street, indulge me for a moment with an aside about shipping containers...

The other month I was waiting at Big Discount Tire Pros (as Big O is now called), while getting our EV's wheels rotated, and I passed the time reading a newspaper clipping on the wall:

The waiting room and offices inside their warehouse are built out of shipping containers — inspired, it turns out, by abandoned plans for the small mixed-use complex where I now work at the north end of Park Street.

My office’s developer had Planning Board approval for a design of reused shipping containers, but Councilmember Tony Daysog effectively vetoed the design. The owner had to pay to redesign the project with conventional materials and eat more delays.

So while the “gateway” to Park Street was “protected” from innovative architecture, it apparently planted a seed of an idea, which in turn sprouted a few blocks away, inside the warehouse the tire company moved into on Oak Street, after making space for the taproom and restaurant further down Park Street.

If you’d like to see how containers can be reused in architecture, go get your tires rotated at Big Discount Tire Pros (even if they’ll probably also try to sell you a wheel alignment you likely don’t need.)

Raise a toast to change

To thrive, cities need to change.

A small automobile repair shop may have made sense at the corner of Park and San Jose in the 1920s, when it was originally built. Today, it makes more sense in a different and larger location.

Today, there's demand for more places to eat and drink, particularly places that allow for dogs outdoors or for kids to run around.

All that stays the same

And yet with all this changes, one thing remains constant: Auto parking is always a problem, in one form or another..

Before it was all of Big O's cars ("complaints about off-site parking and other issues go back to at least January 1989, when the board held a public hearing about it" according to that East Bay Times article I linked to earlier).

This Friday it was two parked cars fully blocking the bike lane on Park Street:

While the red car in the background is violating a visible red curb, the fault for the white car's parking in the bike lane actually lies with Park Station and the City of Alameda. When the taproom's contractors rebuilt that segment of sidewalk in July, they didn't paint the new curb red. (Previously it was a curb cut.) Now it may look like a legal parking spot, even though it's squarely in the bike lane.

I reported this missing red paint on SeeClickFix on August 16. Turns out someone else also reported the problem on August 14: although they tagged it as a parking enforcement problem, their photo clearly shows it's a problem with curb paint. And a third person reported overall parking problems as well on August 14:

So even as we embrace urban change, some things stay the same — and we can all continue to complain about people parking their cars where they shouldn't.