I?m sure you?ve noticed because I have had so many inquiries. The character of our City Center Campus is taking shape. By this time next year our new City offices, our new Fire Station and our new Police Station will all be completed. We will have a new waterfront and board walk on the main lagoon at Ryan Park and Parkside Towers (The Inktomi Building) will be occupied.
The designs of these three areas have been closely coordinated and integrated into our pedestrian campus design. Our City presence with an entrance park at Foster City Blvd. and Hillsdale is being complemented with the park in front of the Park Towers at Shell & Hillsdale. The pedestrian focus at both of these parks will be toward the central campus and our main lagoon.
The city buildings should be completed next fall leaving only the demolition of our existing City Hall and the construction of the new Council Chambers scheduled for completion in the summer of 2003.
The work on the boardwalk and waterfront at Ryan Park is just the first phase of the redesign of that portion of our City Center campus around the Recreation Center. The final design of this area will terminate two major walkways leading from the central campus at two waterfront gathering areas where the architectural theme will be ?Our Children at Play.? You know that theme of ?Our Children at Play? is the best representation of our quality of life that I can imagine. We can thank our city staff for this truly creative representation of Foster City.
The Inktomi Building, Parkside Towers, has proven to be an outstanding architectural complement to our City Center campus. We can thank the T. Jack Foster family, our Planning Commissioners and particularly Rick Marks and his staff for making sure, in fact insisting that Parkside Towers integrate into and complement the design of our total campus. By the way, although Inktomi has a long term lease on the Towers, the building is actually owned by Equity Office out of Chicago. They are one of the largest commercial real estate owners in the country.
So you see going down Hillsdale and over Shell we are making significant strides in shaping the periphery of our campus and at the same time we are working closely with our collaborators, the PJCC and the Episcopal Dioceses supporting their development of the inner campus.
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