Target's first San Francisco store will be located the dramatically new-looking Metreon, as shown in this artist's rendering.
Assuming all goes according to plan, the City Target store, taking up the Metreon's second floor, should be ready by early 2012. It will be complemented by a "visually inviting" 470-seat dining terrace overlooking Yerba Buena Gardens and a 10- to 14-foot-tall sculpture at the corner of Fourth and Howard streets.
Those are some of the features itemized by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, which gave its final nod to the project this week, a mere year after Target first talked to the building's landlord, Westfield Metreon, about moving in there.
The 85,000-square-foot store is considerably smaller than Target's average of 175,000 square feet, and will be one the first of the Minneapolis company's urban-centered stores.
This is exciting news for San Francisco, seeing the the Metreon has been in decline for years. The 85-million dollar Metreon opened back 1999 as an entertainment center, the first of a proposed chain of Sony urban centers aggregating dining, gaming, music, exhibitions, shopping, and movies. Sony intended the ambitious project to be not only a theme park and gallery for Sony products but a way to reinforce a hip image for the Sony brand. However, the venture failed, and in 2006 the Metreon was sold and refashioned as a food-oriented mall.
