Ex-reservoir may get OK for park in Russian Hill
After more than a decade of planning, countless community meetings and tedious interagency squabbles, San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department is expected to approve on Thursday the transformation of the longabandoned Francisco Reservoir into a gleaming, 4.5-acre park on Russian Hill, of one of the city’s densest neighborhoods.
The reservoir, built in 1859 to accommodate the city’s surging population, has been an eyesore since it was decommissioned in 1940, following the construction of the Lombard Reservoir just a few blocks away.
If all goes according to plan, the new Francisco Park could be open as soon as next summer, providing the public with commanding views of the city’s northern shores, the bay and the Marin coast.
“I think it’s going to be a wonderful benefit for millions of people to be able to enjoy these views,” said Leslie Alspach, president of the Francisco Park Conservancy, a nonprofit coali-
tion of neighborhood groups that’s shepherded the project along in partnership with the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.
The conservancy, which worked with design firms and asked the public what amenities it wanted in the park, is also raising the estimated $25 million needed to build the park. Alspach said the conservancy hopes to keep construction costs below $20 million, with any leftover money going toward a maintenance endowment.
Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the recreation department, said the endowment is expected to cover the costs of at least one full-time gardener. Raising the money for the park privately, Ginsburg said, will help the city invest “in communities that deserve it most. All park systems around the country look for opportunities to leverage public funding with philanthropic support,” he said.
If the design plan is approved Thursday, the conservancy will kick its fundraising efforts into high gear. So far, it has raised $8.5 million, although only $4 million of that has been paid in cash so far. The remaining $4.5 million has been pledged by donors, Alspach said.
“Yes, it’s aggressive,” he said of the conservancy’s fundraising goals. Considering the group hopes to break ground this summer, “we’d love to be able to raise the money quickly, and for people across the city to help us. It’s a city park, not just a Russian Hill park,” he said.
The proposed park’s designs envision gently meandering paths connecting the reservoir’s three distinct elevation levels, which slope downward toward Bay Street. Each level of the park is intended to feature its own set of attractions.
The lower level of the park would be defined largely by a 9,300square-foot dog park and a broad entry plaza connected to a small, oblong lawn at the corner of Bay and Hyde streets.
Moving upward to the midsection would take visitors into the reservoir’s basin, which will be mostly covered over a multiuse lawn. In a nod to the reservoir’s historical significance, a portion of its historic brick basin will be left uncovered on the eastern side of the park’s middle level.
“That’s a key component of the design that meets the requirements of the (City) Planning Department, that we honor and respect and preserve the historical significance of the reservoir,” Alspach said. The center of the park would also feature a children’s playground, a community garden and a pair of picnic areas.
The plans for the park’s upper level call for an overlook of the bay, along with restrooms and a maintenance building.
Despite persistent calls from the public to turn the property into a park, getting to this point has required more than 10 years’ worth of negotiations between lawmakers and city departments, some of which offered competing visions of what to do with such a valuable tract of land.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission owned the reservoir for decades, and had considered selling the lot to developers at various points. In 2008, former supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, who represented District Two, where the reservoir is located, might have bought park advocates some time when she passed a resolution in 2008, urging the SFPUC to preserve the land as open space.
“The SFPUC had visions of selling it for high-rise housing,” said Mayor Mark Farrell, who spent what he described as “countless hours” negotiating with the utility to broker a deal to sell the land to the recreation department while he was District Two’s supervisor. In 2014, the logjam broke, with the SFPUC agreeing to sell the reservoir for $9.9 million over 12 years, a deal that the Board of Supervisors approved that same year.
“This project has been my baby since my first month in office,” as a supervisor, Farrell said. “It is unbelievably fulfilling to see this project come to fruition after years of incredibly intense hard work.”