Ground is broken for The Transbay Transit Center, let's hope they can come up with a better name for it.

In what was billed as the groundbreaking for the Transbay Transit Center last week; Mayor Newsom and several local notables turned over a few shovels full of ceremonial dirt to celebrate the start of what will become the temporary Transbay Terminal. Once the temporary terminal (Tempterm ?) is complete, demolition can begin on the old Terminal itself which has a neat quasi-deco style but clearly must go to make way for the glory that planners and developers have envisioned for the site.

Pundits and the media have been tossing around the phrase "The Grand Central of The West" to describe the new center and allude to how monumental this terminal, tower and elevated park will be not only in terms of steel and glass but to the future of Downtown San Francisco. It's sounds kind of funny to me because I grew up arriving in New York City from the Connecticut suburbs through Grand Central Terminal. A massive, dramatic city within a city, The Terminal is an ersatz Roman temple and one of the first developments in the country to employ the planning mode we refer to today as mixed-use back in 1913. Not only a train terminal, the complex boasts retail, commercial, residential and hotel space all of which is connected via underground walkways and tunnels. It is and was a triumph of modern engineering wrapped in marble, bronze and decorative Guastavino tiles. One of the reasons Grand Central is so iconic is that it's part of our collective American consciousness. The structures symbolic strength, scale and meaning are shorthand for the history, power and romance of New York itself. I like to think that this is understood by those that pass through it every day on their way to work and those that only know the building as Lex Luther's hideout in the movie Superman from 1978. Either way, it looks like San Francisco will finally have a center, a symbolic 'heart' where multiple modes of transportation will converge and people will gather. Not just to catch a train or bus, but to live, work and experience what it means to be Downtown in one of the greatest cities in the world.

Maybe there will be secret lair for Lex, too.