Features

Members of two city panels will gather Wednesday to discuss the fate of downtown Berkeley’s historic buildings. 

A joint meeting of the Downtown Area Plan Advisory Committee (DAPAC) and the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) will consume the first part of the meeting, after which the LPC will leave and DAPAC alone will consider options for the future of Center Street. 

A joint subcommittee of the two bodies has been meeting since August to develop recommendations for the new Downtown Area Plan mandated in the settlement of the city’s lawsuit challenging UC Berkeley’s plans for downtown expansion. 

The university’s Long Range Development Plan 2020 proposes the addition of 800,000 square feet of university uses in the city center, and the city filed suit on the ground that the university’s Environmental Impact Report failed to provide adequate documentation of and mitigations for the resulting impacts on the city. 

The new plan covers a larger area than the existing downtown plan, and includes many buildings which have either been declared official city landmarks or are considered potentially eligible for landmark status.  

Wednesday night’s meeting begins at 7 p.m. in the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. at Martin Luther King Jr. Way, with the joint meeting scheduled to begin 15 minutes later. 

Following the joint meeting, DAPAC’s own Center Street Subcommittee will ask its parent body to approve their recommendations for development of the block of the thoroughfare between Oxford Street and Shattuck Avenue. 

That block draws the heaviest pedestrian traffic in the city, drawing both on the university at the eastern end and the BART station and related mass transit access at the western end. 

It will also house two major university-endorsed projects, the projected 19-story hotel, condo and conference center complex at the Shattuck end and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive building at the Oxford Street end. 

The subcommittee is urging DAPAC to call for closing Center to traffic “in a way that does not degrade transit service quality” while maximizing open space for pedestrians and the disabled and adding amenities including foliage, benches and public art. 

Hotel architects have designed the auto entrance to the complex on Shattuck in anticipating a street closing. 

While the subcommittee decided against calling for a full-scale “daylighting” of the now buried Strawberry Creek along this block of Center, some members have called for using some of the flow to provide a “water feature” for the pedestrianized streetscape.