Number 2. Monday May 5th, 2025
Why is the very popular dickens fair celebrated at the cow palace instead of our city’s downtown where it’s really needed?
Every Holiday Season from Thanksgiving to Christmas for the last 20+ years, the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair draws tens of thousands of happy visitors and families from throughout the entire Bay Area to …the very most remote corner of San Francisco - the 84 year old San Francisco Cow Palace. Which provides no benefit to the City’s economy at all.
BECAUSE THERE IS NO PLACE FOR IT DOWNTOWN
Regional trade shows and local expositions of many kinds, holiday fairs, civic celebrations, and many more cannot use the Moscone Convention Center, because it is prioritized for national conventions that fill Downtown hotel rooms, even though these popular consumer events would draw hundreds of thousands of city and regional day visitors to Downtown every year too.
THE SOLUTION IS TO BUILD A NEW EXHIBITION YERBA BUENA EXPOSITION HALL
The aged and underused SFMTA Fifth and Mission Garage is an excellent site to cost-effectively build a new 150,000 sq ft Moscone Center Exposition Hall with only necessary parking above to meet the strong demand for local/regional events that Moscone Center can’t accommodate. A Downtown Infrastructure Finance District along with parking garage revenues could finance the Exposition Hall’s construction and needed public improvements to the adjacent Yerba Buena Gardens too.
The Obsolete Fifth/Mission Garage New Exposition Hall Site
THE REALITY CHECK ✔︎: THE KEY TO DOWNTOWN’S RECOVERY
It is not booze on its sidewalks. It’s proven major commercial attractions and popular consumer and civic events that will bring hundreds of thousands of local/regional visitors to Downtown every year and generate $Tens of $Millions in new Downtown economic activity. They just need A Place to Go.
-John Elberling, Editor
My Favorite Every Year – In Sacramento
What Is The SF Reality Check ?
The Future of Our City and its People is very much in doubt today. And almost every day the City’s elite and powerful, with their minions, media, and front groups, bombard us with Hype upon Hype to push their agenda and schemes to control that Future. For 50 years TODCO has been on the Central City communities’ side pushing back against this onslaught, especially challenging their urban development ideologies, from bulldozer redevelopment to trickle-down up-zoning scams. This bi-weekly Reality Check ✔︎will call out the funky economics, the empty assurances, the pseudo visions, the sucker bait at the heart of all this Hype. So many years, so many bad ideas … what fun! – John Elberling, Editor
