Talk of the Point

So there it is, finally. The Trainmaster Building has been carried from the Burlington yard and plopped onto Cutting in to particular relation to the tracks, in the unhappy company of the Plunge and the wretched Todd Hotel (aka, “Gerlach Building”). It seems to promise the Plunge’s respectability while still a Todd-like ruin.

“Simple Architect” Tom Butt uses the kindest name I’ve heard for it. He calls it the “Santa Fe Reading Room.” Can’t you imagine off-duty trainmen seated not too far from the wood stove absorbed in Dostoyevsky and Joyce? “Excuse me, Horace,” says one to the other, “Might I read you a passage….?”

One of Tom’s antagonists, the “Not-A-Simple-Architect” Walter Connolly, owner of the Todd, has the most unkind name: “the shack.” But he might want to reconsider. What names might fly for the Todd should people get a look inside that little slum?

Andrew Butt, architect and occasional Talk correspondent, emails that the Point will finally a “gateway it deserves.” Another architect of respectable complexity, Jay Betts, calls it “bad design.” He says, “There used to be a sense of arrival into town, a gateway. That’s been removed.”

Bad design or gem, the Butt Gang seems to have won this time (after losing in August over NICE). The latest chapter seems to have been this month’s City Council meeting, where Connolly, Richard Lompa, Jay Betts, and perhaps others threw what they had at the Point Richmond Gateway LLC development and lost. The City Council declined to stop it.

With this, I hope this boring little fight ends and the developers live up to their promises. I hope too that Lompa and the others start going to neighborhood council meetings and other public forums. That’s where I heard–two years ago–about the arrangement reached between the city and the railroad about the crossing and nearby land. That’s where anyone could have heard it.

Jay Betts said the most honorable thing of all about this. I’ve heard him say with what I judge to be sincerity, “I keep apologizing for not being around” when this was in development. And for that little bit of humility we can honor him.

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