Plans to raze the two-story, 56-space parking garage at 1320 Washington Street, between Leavenworth and Jones, are in works. And as envisioned by Urban Land Development, a six-story building would rise up to 65 feet in height upon the Nob Hill site.

As designed by Handel Architects, the project would yield twenty-two (22) condos – a mix of four (4) one-bedrooms, fourteen (14) twos, and four (4) threes – with stacked parking for twenty-two (22) cars and bikes and a 2,700-square-foot rooftop terrace for its residents.

We’ll keep you posted and plugged-in as the plans (and likely challenges) proceed.

19 thoughts on “Plans for an Upscale Nob Hill Infill Project”
  1. It would be nice if the old facade could at least be saved and incorporated into the new structure. I’m sick of cubist-modernism being the standard for all California construction nowadays.

    1. Perhaps Planning will push for that alternative to be presented as well. The building is old enough to trigger a study as a potential historic resource. The conversion at 1945 Hyde is a particularly nice example of how that can be tastefully accomplished.

    2. No. Tired trope. Keep the existing building if it’s useful. Adapt it, let it grow honesty if appropriate, or demo it and move on. Just don’t preserve a part of it irrelevantly and arbitrarily like so many other examples. It just cheapens history.

    3. I’m sick of people trying to glue 80-year-old parking garage facades to the bottom of 21st-century architecture because they think it’s an acceptable approach to preservation.

    4. Disagree with an attempt at retention in this instance. The facade doesn’t warrant it on it its its own architectural merits and there is no conjectural relationship with the rest of the block. Build as designed.

  2. would have been nice if they at least tried to have some type of bay windows to fit in with the buildings on either side.

      1. I like bay windows, but you don’t need them on every building on the whole block. I think the proposed building mixes well with the neighboring buildings.

        I like the facade of the existing building but I don’t think the entire building is worth preserving and the facade alone will not add anything to the streetscape with a modern building posturing up behind it.

  3. My first apartment in SF was at Washington and Leavenworth 20 years ago. It was a dream to one day get into this garage. Instead, my car first lived at Sutter and Stockton (hotel garage) and then at the Masonic, which by comparison seemed like next door. Although this project provides parking for the building, losing this particular garage is going to hurt the immediate neighborhood, many of those buildings which don’t have any parking at all. Not a reason to not build it, but I wouldn’t have thought much about it had I not lived in this neighborhood once upon a time (and in the pre-Lyft/Uber era).

    1. That is interesting the parking ownership complained that there was not enough people parking cars in this garage and went out of business even though the landlord lowered the rent to keep them in business. I think this development is great for the neighborhood. Who wants to look at an ugly parking garage???

  4. Lack of parking does force people to walk, bike, scooter, muni more, so it’ll lead less traffic. At a grand scale, imagine traffic impact if garage capacity was cut in half around FiDi. It would probably make a noticeable dent in Bay Bridge traffic.

    1. So all those Uber and Lyft drivers that are flooding the streets would just magically disappear because of lack of garages?

      1. Ultimately, the shift will be to self-driving electric powered cars. They can follow each other much more closely than human-driven cars and their speed can by synchronized. This would allow streets to be narrowed while still maintaining the same capacity. Also, since they do not need to park (because they just drive on to their next pickup), there is no need for parking garages or parking lots. You just need a small area for them to briefly stop to let someone out of the car, and then they swiftly take off again.

        Uber and Lyft are not the “magical solution.” Effective self-driving cars will be. Also, a current solution for shorter distances is walking–it doesn’t involve Uber or Lyft and it certainly eliminates traffic from the streets. In many countries in the world, and even in certain U.S. cities, people walk much more than they do in the typical American city. Not only is it a great way to stay fit, even later into life, but it helps to reduce traffic.

        Also, if you read the proposal, there will be exactly one parking spot per unit in this new development, so it is not as if there will be no parking.

      2. uber and l;yft have made SF’s traffic so much worse and the city govt is just allowing it to continue. why dont we provide a cap to number of uber and lyft cars allowed in the city the same way we are doing with the scooters. We dont need 200K lyft/uber cars on the street everyday. We went from a taxi shortage to an uber/lyft glut, and it is seriously causing severe traffic and pollutions. It makes no sense that we allow unregulated thousands of additional cars in the city. I actually think getting rid of garages might make traffic worse and people will need more uber/lyfts

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