View photo gallery (9 photos)

The Jack London Market building is now fully occupied after Navis LLC agreed to take space on the top two floors.  Great to see the it finally fully occupied. We've been in the area now for close to 5 years and the dream of this beautiful building as the anchor of a revitalized Jack London Square was starting to fade away. Hopefully with the increased foot traffic, many of the local restaurants and businesses can thrive.

The developers originally planned to open a public market in the building’s interior similar to the ones in San Francisco’s Ferry Building and Seattle’s Pike Place Market, but are now leaning toward attracting food manufacturing tenants to fill the space.

The news of the Jack London Market seems to be the secondary story in this piece (though Haven is quite good and deserves much kudos). Sad to see that the dream of having a Ferry Building style market place in Jack London is going away. However, looking at the abandoned first floor of the building for the past 3 years has been a bit of a downer so I'd be glad to see anybody occupy that spot. If they plan to bring folks like Miette in with their baking operations and small store front, it could actually work out to be something similar to the original idea.

It was a pretty ambitious plan to begin with. Without the necessary foot traffic, it would have been pretty difficult for any market style business to thrive. Had they been able to rent out all of the office space above the market, it could have worked. Hopefully once/if that space is taken, they can revisit the idea of a market style section.

One of the more interesting experiments Thompson plans on trying is SMS-based room service for the 248 residential units inside the Grand building.

The Grand is a new-ish apartment complex in the Uptown area of Oakland and having a cafe room service thing might be interesting. I hope the owner can still make money given all the bells and whistles he's bringing to his business. The ultimate question will be whether the coffee tastes good or not. I'll definitely give them a shot when they open next year.