Where have all the tables gone?

Starbucks at 3rd & Santa Clara
Says good-bye to street life.

I've been meaning to write about this for several weeks, maybe waiting for some downtown denizen to comment, but I have not heard a peep. While Mountain View and San Fransisco add street furniture to their business districts, downtown San Jose's tables and chairs have been missing faster than my mother's enchiladas at a family party.

Last year I wrote about Peet's coffee getting rid of their modest street inventory of exactly one table and two chairs with some lame excuse (Cafe Culture is for Canadiens, not Californians). Then a month ago I notice that the overly hyped up Safeway market, located in the 88 building, with its soft focus pictures of bikes with a basketsful of flowers, got rid of their street furniture as well. At the same time the store installed very inconvenient entrance turnstiles as well (see photo). Is this a sign of the times or a part of a corporate policy to start nice and "purty", and then slowly change the look and feel after the newness and grand opening publicity wears off.

There used to be tables right there.
Right behind the cyclist.

Well now the 3rd St. and Santa Clara St. location of Starbucks, one block from city hall has pitched they tables and chairs in to the trash bin. Gone are the tables that fit rather well on the west side of the building, where (you can see in the picture) the sidewalk is wide and now sits on the quiet bike lanes just installed just last month.

What makes this even worse is that the interior of this Starbucks is so small, there almost isn't a time of day when you can find a vacant chair. Bad business on your part Starbucks on 3rd St. and Santa Clara, and just as bad as the San Pedro Square Starbucks. With no restroom available to customers, employees at the San Pedro Square store instruct you to use the "porta potty" around the corner.

 In a recent Metro article titled "Dreams of Instant City" by Michael Malone, the Metro introduced the article with the following comment on downtown business;

While trendy, small, owner-operated restaurants sprout up in Willow Glen, the downtown restaurant mix leans toward seafood and steak chains and Italian restaurants for executives on expense accounts. (emphasis is my own).

Welcome to Safeway. Now try and
squeeze you and your bags through
turnstile.

To this I would add any chains. Whether its Starbucks, McDonald's, Jack-in-the-Box, or Walgreen's. Large chains do not encourage community with street furniture or actual windows when the focus is solely on the bottom line.

To show you what a real effort at invigorating street life looks like I have included a street view of Rues de Forges in the town of Trois Rivieres in the Canadian Province of Quebec. Trois Rivieres is a town of only 130,000 along the banks of the St. Lawrence river, but after you view the photo from different angles you get the feeling that its a city of over 1 million. Don't forget this is a city that has a daily average of 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the month of January and gets only a couple of months of really good weather. On midweek summer days and evenings that I have visited the street life is dense and lively; leaving me completely dumbfounded as to why we can't do that here.

Sometime you'd think we lived in Alaska instead of one of the most wonderful climates on the planet. Any comments? See any other instances of disappearing street furniture? How can we create a vibrant street life?


 I will be commenting on the article "Dreams of Instant City" in a future post.


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