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Comment by beamatronic | Hacker News Reader

It's a neat building. It sits in the design center of San Francicso, and was originally built as a mall. Here is some of the history.

http://www.syserco.com/projects/zynga

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The same building used to be the headquarters of Sega of America back during their heyday. (the level design of Sonic Adventure 2 was heavily influenced by San Francisco / Bay Area)

Sega, CNet, Macromedia...

I'm starting to see a pattern

some buildings are bad luck

I'll take Macromedia's luck any day of the week.

"Things I used in high school"

Not CNet, ZDNet (Ziff-Davis) and TechTV (Which started life as ZDTV). Worked there can attest ;-)

A lot of the Adobe Stuff including the Macromedia divisions when they were alive are still immediately next door or across the street. I think their use of 650 Townsend was mostly for overflow office space.

Linuxcare: I worked in that building in 1999.

Yeah, it was funny to see the huge open space in the middle (reportedly originally designed for holding fashion shows but never used that way).

This also used to be the Macromedia headquarters (before we moved across the street to the Baker Hamilton building). Here are some pictures of it on the inside, from around 2000 - 2001.

The merry-go-round was given to us by Apple:

http://radio-weblogs.com/0106797/picts/MacromediaFlashOffice...

These are pretty cool, thanks!

Not really familiar with SF, except as a yearly visitor. The area around the building seemed pretty sketchy. Lots of overpasses and car repair shops. I definitely had my spidey sense up walking to their offices.

It's called the Design District for a reason: large furniture stores don't usually make for beautiful architecture. It felt pretty safe to me on several visits, and definitely up-and-coming a few years ago.

If you ignore the homeless problem (which is actually in busy areas like Tenderloin), there are no real "sketchy" areas in SF. You have to cross the bay for that.

It's somewhat disingenuous to claim that SF has no "sketchy" areas if you're explicitly ignoring them.

If you ignore the crime problem in crime-heavy areas, you might say that those areas have no crime problem. It doesn't mean that you're right.

Maybe my parameters are skewed. IMHO sketchy areas in London, Paris, Milan are more threatening than anything I've seen in SF peninsula, despite the obvious difference in guns per capita.

Can't speak to Milan but I've never felt unsafe in Paris, and only once felt unsafe in London (and that was at 3AM and I was dressed... interestingly), whereas in the space of a week in SF I had two scary encounters with ranting homeless guys.

They actually pushed many of the homeless away from Market St. to just west of the Zynga building on Division street under the Central Freeway. It is indeed pretty sketchy - tents lined up in rows, broken car windows, needles and feces on the sidewalk, people working on obviously-stolen bikes, etc.

EDIT: Looks like the city is going to try to clean it up: http://sfist.com/2016/02/23/division_street_tent_city_to_be_...

Hehe, "design center" of san francisco, aka just basically a bunch of overpriced furniture stores or other 'life-style' chains such as Bang and Olufsen :P

Many of the big names in design have offices there such as Studio Becker which do high end kitchens and cabinets for remodels and new buildings. Design companies ended up clustered there in part because the zoning locked out so many others, so there is an ongoing political battle over whether design services are worth having within the city boundaries.

I live nearby and I wouldn't call it neat. It looks like a parking garage, because it mostly is one.

> and was originally built as a mall

It is a mall.

LOL!

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