Tom Lochner provides a great write-up of last week’s workshop…

Hercules gets a look at designs for waterfront transit center
By Tom Lochner

A revised set of design proposals for an intermodal transit center on the Hercules waterfront was met with more favor at a community meeting last week than an earlier design that detractors had derided as the “Safeway Station.”

Architect Richard Thompson & Associates unveiled four alternatives featuring a tower, a plaza, a stairway and a cafe building at a meeting in the Hercules Community-Swim Center.

Alternative 1, with a curved roof, incorporated some of the glass-and-steel features of the so-called Safeway design — so dubbed by some waterfront residents because the curved roof, an apparent attempt to emulate European train sheds, struck them as reminiscent of 1970s Safeway supermarket buildings of which there are a few examples in San Francisco.

Alternatives 2, 3 and 4 have a more traditional look of a brick loft building.

Mike Bowermaster, a Promenade resident who has written frequently about the station’s design on the Web site Waterfront Watch at www.waterfrontwatch.org, rated Alternative 1 as only a slight improvement on the Safeway Station, in which some people see elements of the “Brutalist” architecture of Le Corbusier and more recent Modernists such as I.M. Pei. But while he likes those architects, “It’s plainly obvious that brutalist and 1970s grocery store architecture won’t work here,” Bowermaster commented on Waterfront Watch.

Bowermaster rated Alternative 2 as mostly “goofy and forgettable,” but praised Alternatives 3 and 4.

A Power Point presentation that depicts the four alternative designs from different angles is available under “City Updates” on the home page of the city’s Web site at www.ci.hercules.ca.us.

After the unveiling of the designs, the meeting participants, who at one point numbered close to 100, divided into groups and later filled out a questionnaire.

“Groups liked the openness of alternative 1, but they also liked the traditional feel of alternative 4,” Hercules spokeswoman Michelle Harrington, the coordinator of the event, wrote on the city Web site.

The intermodal transit center will accommodate WestCat buses and include an Amtrak Capitol Corridor train station and a terminal for Hercules-San Francisco ferries. Officials and participants appeared to agree that the center should be a “signature” building with high visibility and with a function that goes beyond simply being a conduit for commuters. They also agree it should be accommodating to bicycles and pedestrians.

Harrington said the participants’ comments will be incorporated into a revised design to be presented at another community workshop in four or five weeks.