Willow Glen Resident
News
B of A building is choice for BART station
By Stephen Baxter
If BART trains someday pull into downtown San Jose, city leaders say the station should give passengers a sense of arrival.
Forging that path, the city council on Oct. 16 selected the Bank of America building on First and Santa Clara streets as its preferred site for a Bay Area Rapid Transit station. The privately owned building has 30-foot vaulted ceilings in its main lobby, and its Spanish-style tower shoots 13 stories in the air.
The Valley Transportation Authority estimates It would cost about $50 million to make the building earthquake-safe. Nevertheless, the city council chose it instead of the Western Dental building on Second and Santa Clara streets. The Western Dental project would have cost roughly $22 million, but it would have been far less grand, council members said.
"One has a presence, and the other one's just kind of there," Councilwoman Nora Campos said.
San Jose Redevelopment Agency officials said they began talks with Bank of America building owner Stephen Lin in early October. Redevelopment officials plan to return to the council to discuss an offer.
Vivid nightclub, which occupies the ground floor of the building, would have to be relocated to accommodate construction.
Hans Larsen, the city's deputy director of transportation, said part of the building's appeal is that it needs a seismic retrofit anyway, and transforming it would align with the city's goals of historic preservation and downtown revitalization. The structure has deep roots in the city. It opened in the late 1920s as the Bank of Italy building, a bank founded by San Jose native A.P. Giannini, who grew up near it. It was renamed the Bank of America building in 1930 and is now a city landmark.
The VTA is developing a $4.7 billion plan to extend BART from Warm Springs to Milpitas, San Jose and Santa Clara. Construction on the 16-mile extension could start in 2009 and finish in 2015, with passenger service beginning in 2016.
BART planners say a downtown San Jose station would be one of the system's most frequently used portals.
