I took a mental health day yesterday and my husband and I went shopping near Cupertino. We decided to do a drive-by of the construction site where Apple is building their new “spaceship” building.
Good lord, that thing’s going to be huge. We drove all the way around the construction site, and it’s a good six long blocks per side. They have the whole site surrounded by a three-story-high solid green construction wall, so you can’t see what’s going on in there. You can see, however, a mountain of gravel because it’s higher than the three-story wall, and you can see the top of a sort of industrial plant. My husband said they erected the plant on-site to either grind up the old buildings that used to be there (thus the gravel mountain), or maybe it’s a dedicated cement factory.
They’re also digging the hell out of Wolfe Road to install heavier duty utilities along that modest street. The shopping center right across the street, which is full of Chinese restaurants and a Ranch 99, is going to be mobbed once Apple moves in.
Google Earth shows the construction site from space, and the current image is dated February 2014. I’d link to it, but I haven’t yet learned how to link an image from that program.
My friend used to live not far from Homestead Rd and the Foothills Expressway, so I remember passing by the site. Of course then, it was just a grouping of unexceptional office buildings and parking lots. Little did we realize what it would become.
Google Maps already has Pruneridge Ave broken into two segments. Didn’t they just block that off this week?
ETA: Looking at Apples existing campus on the other side of the 280, I wonder whether Apple will be retaining it? (It would be a shame to lose that 1 Infinite Loop address.) If they do keep it, maybe they’s have so e kind of sky-gondola or evacuated maglev subway joining the two campuses…
It used to be a Hewlett Packard campus, didn’t it? Unless I’m remembering wrong.
When we drove down the eastern border of the construction site, the place where Pruneridge used to enter the site was completely dug up, and it was the only place you could catch a little glimpse of what was inside. Lots of piles of dirt and rubble, at this point.
I know that Apple right now is bursting at the seams, because in addition to its One Infinite Loop address, it leases lots of outlying office buildings in Cupertino. You can see the Apple logo posted all along Stevens Creek, in front of nondescript little temporary outposts. Even if the new place is as big as a city, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they retained the One Infinite Loop building.
