King of the hill — prime time to enjoy Potrero open space
Over the next week or two, you will see the seasons change in San Francisco and around the Bay Area. The hills will turn from bright green to golden brown. By the second week of May, all the open hills, from Twin Peaks to San Bruno Mountain, will be a tawny brown. They will stay that way until the first big rains, usually in early November.
So just now is a good time to take a look at a reborn urban hilltop grassland on Potrero Hill. The area is not big — only 3½ acres. It is called Starr King Open Space, around 23rd and Carolina streets, just up the hill from S.F. General Hospital.
Starr King Open Space offers spectacular views of the city all the way north to Mount Tamalpais and all the way south to the distant hills of the Peninsula. The grassy space is a bit of the country in the middle of the city — and it comes with a small story.
A long time ago, before World War II, Potrero Hill was a neighborhood where the renowned — and now nearly extinct — San Francisco working class lived. Longshoremen, machinists, folks who worked in the canneries, streetcar conductors, laborers, carpenters, the people who did all the hard work in the city. The streets weren’t all paved, and the top of the hill was a place where residents would pasture goats or raise rabbits.
Kids loved it. There were trails through the grass, and they pretended the big rock formation at the dead end of 24th Street was a fort or a pirate’s cave. The grass grew high as a billy goat’s eye, a great place to run like the wind or fly kites.
Neighborhood’s demise
One day, bulldozers came and chewed up the top of the hill. Next thing anybody knew, a public housing project went up for workers in the wartime shipyards. It wasn’t much of a project, even by wartime standards: the buildings had flat roofs, sheetrock walls. Hundreds of people, all new to San Francisco, moved in. The neighborhood kids were crushed.
When the war was over, the projects were torn down, and the concrete slabs they were built on were left behind, like ancient ruins. The kids grew up and moved away; the neighborhood slipped.
There was a crime problem. Vacant lots were full of broken bottles and junk. A 1972 episode of the TV series “The Streets of San Francisco” was set on Potrero Hill, near 24th and De Haro. Two cops, played by Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, checked out the hill.
“Who would live in a dump like this?” Malden wondered. “This used to be a great neighborhood,” Douglas said.
But in the ’80s, Potrero Hill, even the forlorn south side, was “discovered.” A new townhouse development called Parkview Heights was built between 25th and 26th, De Haro and Wisconsin streets. A trade-off — called “a mitigation” in the planning business — required that the top of the hill, roughly from 23rd and Carolina south, become open space.
A nonprofit organization, Starr King Open Space, got the land. It was a citizens group, and over the years it had the usual problems nonprofits have: infighting and feuds. Now it seems fine.
‘Hilltop sanctuary’
The result is stunning: The top of the hill is what Starr King Vice President Webb Green calls “a grassy island in the city … an urban meadow.”
Paul Wells, a neighbor who is a radio producer and a sometime disc jockey, says it is “a serpentine grassland,” a reference to the native rock outcroppings. “I love to come up here and see the sunsets,” he said.
Wells and the other neighbors spent hours pulling weeds, chopping down tall fennel plants, restoring the hill. Now, Wells said, the open space is “our hilltop sanctuary.”
You can see it for yourself, before the green grass and wildflowers fade. Even a former neighborhood kid can come by and walk the same winding shortcut path that leads to the rock formation at the top of 24th Street and imagine he is 8 years old.
Sometimes, you can go home again.