A current rendering of the 78 – 84 Rainey Street mixed-use building, reflecting its height increase from earlier renderings — although it still doesn’t look accurate to the building’s reported nine stories. More on that below. Image courtesy of Sixthriver Architects / Sackman Enterprises.
Remember Rainey Street’s most mysterious mixed-use project? Looks like we weren’t too far off predicting that we’d see progress on this development in the near future.
New documents filed with the city give a closer look at what to expect from the nine-story office and retail development that will soon occupy the food truck park at 78 – 84 Rainey Street, courtesy of developer Sackman Enterprises (also behind the 70 Rainey project just down the block) and designer Sixthriver Architects.
An eastern elevation of the 78-84 Rainey Street project. You’ve probably already figured it out, but this is the side of the building facing Rainey Street. Image courtesy of Sixthriver Architects / Sackman Enterprises.
Northern and southern elevations of the building, providing a view of its side profile and shape. Image courtesy of Sixthriver Architects / Sackman Enterprises.
A western elevation of the project shows its backside, facing the alley one block west of Rainey Street directly across from the Shore condos behind the Hotel Van Zandt. Image courtesy of Sixthriver Architects / Sackman Enterprises.
You’ll notice a few differences between these elevations and the fancy rendering at the top of this post. That rendering, despite being the most current view of the building according to Sackman who sent it our way in the first place, still doesn’t reflect our most current knowledge that the building will be nine stories tall. The eastern elevation above actually does show this, though — count the windows.
It’s obvious that this building went through a couple of iterations on height, since the very first rendering we saw of the project was even shorter:
An older rendering of the 78 – 84 Rainey Street mixed-use building, before its height was increased to nine stories. Image courtesy of Sackman Enterprises / Sixthriver Architects.
This smaller rendering came out back when the building was designed to include an underground music venue space, a detail I thought (and still think) is a fascinating idea for accommodating live music while respecting increased residential density downtown — not to mention the city’s potential new agent of change policy.
Old plans for the underground venue component of the development from a couple of years ago. These no longer reflect the current design of the building. Image courtesy of Viceroy Realty Advisors.
Last time we covered this project, I mentioned that we shouldn’t get our hopes up about this feature surviving into the final product, based on various bits of off-the-record knowledge — and the elimination of the underground venue component now seems to be confirmed by these new plans, with the only underground section being three levels of subterranean parking, adding up to 99 total spaces. Oh well, I’m just glad it’s taller now.
By the way, despite some of the project’s old promotional material calling it Rainey Street District, that name doesn’t show up anywhere in these latest plans, instead using the mouthful of an address 78 – 84 Rainey Street for a name — so that’s what we’re sticking with for the time being. We’ll probably figure out the development’s real name soon enough, with these new documents indicating the start of construction sometime in 2018.
An early drawing of the building before its height boost. I just included it because I think it’s adorable. Image courtesy of Viceroy Realty Advisors.
At the end of the day, I’m on board for this project. Its design, with the human-scaled bungalow stuff out front, shows way more effort to respect the original character of Rainey Street than a lot of the tall buildings in the general area — I’m not naming names, but you know what I mean.
It’s important to remember that Sackman could have taken this building much, much higher, but instead chose to go with a design that not only reflected the rhythm of the street, but added retail options (probably restaurants) alongside office space, which means the building actually meets the district’s needs rather than creating a whole set of new ones. To me, it represents the least annoying possible way to build offices on Rainey Street, and that’s…well, that’s something.
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