Just two days after its announced partial closure, the Ferry Building is fully open for business once more. On Thursday, in accordance with a statewide public health officer order that restricted indoor activities at malls and other businesses in cities on the state’s watchlist, the Ferry Building closed indoor shops and restaurants that had no direct access to doors that led outside.
Today, Hudson Pacific Properties, which owns the building, announced that the Ferry Building is now being classified as a transport terminal rather than a shopping mall excluding it from the statewide order.
Over the weekend, Christine Farren, the executive director of CUESA which runs the longstanding farmer’s market at the building, heard that this closure order was coming down and was in talks with the building’s manager to host businesses that were forced to close as pop-ups at the organization’s outdoor markets.
As a tenant of the building’s outdoor spaces well practiced in social distancing and sanitization measures, CUESA’s markets have remained open during the pandemic because of its physical positioning and its essential service of providing fresh and prepared foods.
“CUESA has a longstanding relationship with almost all of the tenants that are inside of the Ferry Building because we’ve acted as a small business incubator for many of them,” Farren explained. “At one count, nearly 40% of the businesses inside had started in our farmer’s market so these are very personal relationships to us.”
For now, CUESA and the rest of the businesses at the market can resume business as usual.
