San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Dream of gym finally being realized
$60 million Sunnydale rec center’s design OKd
More than 30 years ago Drew Jenkins and his teammates from the Sunnydale basketball squad donned their jerseys and went down to City Hall to ask for something most San Francisco kids took for granted: a gym for their neighborhood.
Back then the closest gym was 2.7 miles away from the Visitacion Valley public housing development and turf violence was at a boiling point. Sunnydale teenagers were unwelcome in some rec centers — just showing up to play hoops could mean risking their lives. So they often ventured hours by Muni across the city in search of a safe gym in which to play, often ending up at the Boys and Girls Club in the Excelsior or gyms in the Portola or Bayview or Glen Park.
“We were the largest housing project in San Francisco and the one with the most kids in it,” said Jenkins. “But we had no gym or youth center to go to.”
It took a lot longer than expected. But on Thursday, Jenkins, now a longtime community leader, watched on his laptop as the virtual meeting of the Recreation and Park Commission approved a design for a new gym — the Herz Recreation Center — accepting a $10 million pledge of philanthropic support from donors.
While it may have taken decades, the recreation complex now planned for the neighborhood is also far more ambitious than some would have thought possible in the 1990s. The gym is just a component of a $60 million recreation “campus” for the neighborhood.
In addition to a 200seat gym with tournamentready scoreboard and sound system, the plan calls for a 25,000squarefoot “hub” with a Boys and Girls Club that can handle 120 kids, three times more than the current clubhouse. There will be rooms for dance, art, pingpong, a climbing wall, a new child care center, and a renovation of the toddler and schoolaged children’s play areas at Herz Playground next door to where the gym and clubhouse will be constructed.
“Every community in San Francisco deserves access to a stateoftheart recreation center and in Sunnydale and Visitacion Valley it’s absolutely essential,” said Recreation and Park Director Phil Ginsberg. “This has been a neighborhood that has long been underserved and scarred by violence.”
The new gym and community center is the centerpiece of the 1,600unit rebuild of the Sunnydale public housing, part of the HOPE SF project in which two developers, Mercy Housing and Related, are working with public agencies to replace 785 rundown public housing apartments. In addition to the replacement public housing, the plan calls for another 800 mixedincome apartments. One of the new housing complexes has been completed and the second will open in the fall.
Like public housing throughout the city, the Sunnydale projects were constructed as an isolated community. Decades of neglect have left some of the buildings in rough shape, with leaky pipes, poor insulation, and mold and sewer issues. The complex abuts McLaren Park, the city’s second biggest open space, yet it is disconnected from the open space. It is also next to, but not accessible to, the Coffman Pool, a public swimming facility separated by a fence.
Project architect Gregg Novicoff of Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects said the goal was to create a campus that integrates the neighborhood with McLaren Park. The buildings will be sunfilled and warm, constructed with mass timber beams, rather than steel and concrete. Before the pandemic a group of Sunnydale teenagers went to the architect’s offices to advise designers on what they wanted to see.
“From the first meeting the goal was to make this place a campus, a collection of buildings that would connect people to playground and the park, to create a welcoming gateway from that corner of Sunnydale,” Novicoff said.
The kids emphasized that they wanted multipurpose rooms that would be used by residents of all ages.
“There might be dance in one space, a birthday party in another, and water aerobics in the pool and maybe an adult book club or exercise class,” he said.
Proponents, led by Mercy Housing, have now raised $45 million for the project, including $11 million in park bond money, a $5 million land contribution and $10 million in tax credit financing. Executives from Related Companies and Kilroy Realty Corp. have each pledged $5 million. Another $15 million needs to be raised prior to the 2022 construction start.
Jontonette “Star” Clark, the assistant director at the Sunnydale Boys and Girls Club, said the pandemic has been particularly difficult for neighborhood teenagers — after a few years where violence was down, there were several shootings over last summer and fall.
“Some of our older boys have been roaming around without anything to do,” she said. “There have been so many promises made that never came to fruition. For once, it’s improvement that doesn’t feel like gentrification. It’s for the residents.”
Jenkins, now a residents service manager for Mercy Housing, laments that the two Sunnydale community leaders who organized that trip to City Hall all those years ago — his mother, Ruth Jackson, and Sharon Hewitt — didn’t live long enough to see the project taking shape. But they would be proud that the neighborhood didn’t give up.
“It’s been a long fight but we are closer than we have ever been to getting the gym,” he said.