Park fixes: Balboa Park gets a long-awaited upgrade.
Balboa Park, dedicated in 1910, was a destination spot on San Francisco’s southern side for generations of children.
Thanks to a wave of efforts, including a recently completed $3.5 million renovation, it is once again.
Over the years, the park had fallen into disrepair. Playground equipment wore out and rusted. A photo taken a few years back showed the swing sets broken, their chains looped over the top bar, a seat dangling high in the air. A massive tree limb lay on the ground nearby.
While it still remained a destination for teams playing on its baseball diamonds or soccer field, the general areas of the park were no longer a draw.
“To put it in polite terms, it was kind of dumpy,” said Kim Lee, who on Saturday made the trek from Daly City with her husband, Danny, and 2-year-
old son, Marcus, as San Francisco officials cut the ribbon on the reborn Balboa Park. “Now, we have play dates here all the time — a bunch of us do.”
Public, private dollars
Marcus worked his way up a climbing wall and scampered through a bright orange jungle gym tunnel with his 2-year-old buddy Eric Wong, who lives in the nearby Mission Terrace neighborhood.
“Now I bring him here all the time,” Lee said.
The Lees and Wongs were among scores of families that flocked to the grand opening of a project financed by public dollars and private donations. The renovated park includes $3.5 million in new playgrounds, refinished tennis courts, a picnic area, a nearly complete skate park and other improvements. Another roughly $1 million from 2008 bond money was used to completely refurbish the bathrooms, while a separate nonprofit built the tot portion of the playground a few years ago, Recreation and Park Department Director Phil Ginsburg said.
Ginsburg and three San Francisco supervisors at the event — John Avalos, Scott Wiener and Sean Elsbernd — all held up the Balboa Park renovation as a rationale to support a $195 million parks bond measure on the November ballot, which includes money to renovate the indoor pool there.
“I grew up playing soccer and baseball here,” said fiscally conservative Elsbernd as his 3-year-old son, Michael, navigated a weblike climbing structure. “There’s no question about (supporting the bond). … This is about the whole city.”
Families’ ‘greatest resource’
Officials also alternately hailed Balboa’s transformation as the embodiment of community effort or a victory for the Recreation and Park Department’s sometimes controversial strategy of attracting private funds to improve parks. It was even celebrated as both.
“If anyone you know doubts the importance of investment in our parks and the importance of partnership … this project puts that debate to rest,” Ginsburg told the crowd.
Avalos, whose district includes Balboa Park, hailed public parks as “the greatest resource for families to stay in this city.”
“I know that this park came together because of the advocacy of residents,” Avalos said. “A lot of the work was done by families.”
About $2.6 million for the renovation came from the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that conserves outdoor space, from urban parks and gardens to wilderness. Balboa is the second of three park renovations for which the trust is providing a total of $16.4 million. The first, Hayes Valley Playground, was completed in 2011 and saw a fivefold increase in users, a trust official said. The third is Boeddeker Park in the Tenderloin.