S.F. ‘blazing a trail’ with park renaissance
7 pandemic-era newcomers show city at its finest
Amid all the grim news clouding our lives right now (where to begin, right?) San Francisco at least can take solace in this: The city’s parks have never been more varied or vibrant.
Grand new spaces attract wide attention, while snug nooks have been refurbished to improve the lives of their neighbors. Some spaces expand our map of the city; others reinforce what we valued all along. Private donors play a role. So do the voters who, since 2008, have steered nearly $600 million to San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department.
And even as COVID’s scourge descended, work continued. Two dozen parks and playgrounds across the city have debuted or reopened since 2020. Another dozen are under construction or in advanced stages of planning.
“San Francisco, in its own unique way, has been blazing a trail” in terms of 21st century urban park systems, said Guillermo Rodriguez, the California state director of the Trust for Public Land. “It understands that parks aren’t only amenities, they are essential services.”
That aspect of the revival is emphasized by Phil Ginsburg, who since 2009 has led Rec and Park. “As the city grows, it largely is growing without backyards,” he points out. “That makes parks even more important.”
In 2017, San Francisco became the first city in the nation where every resident lives within a 10-minute walk of a park. According to the Trust, which compiles data every year on America’s 100 largest cities, San Francisco invests $420 annually per resident on its parks — four times the national average. More subjectively, National Geographic last month emphasized new parks and trails in naming San Francisco one of five cities worth visiting in 2023 “to inspire the whole family.”
But data and plaudits aren’t the best way to measure progress.
As these seven COVID-era newcomers demonstrate, the best way to appreciate San Francisco’s evolving public landscape is simple — go see for yourself.
Presidio Tunnel Tops
Date opened: July 2022
Size: 14 acres
The most obvious example of the recent wave is Presidio Tunnel Tops, which has earned attention everywhere from People Magazine and the Daily Beast to Smithsonian Magazine while attracting an average of 5,000 people daily in October.
There’s a supercharged air to the expansive space, no question. Sculptural benches milled from cypress trees line the walkway of an artificial bluff that hides six lanes of traffic. At the bottom is the most adventurous playground imaginable, with naturalistic climbing structures modeled on bird nests and the understory of a forest. The overall landscape supposedly contains 200,000 recently planted grasses, flowers, shrubs and trees — most of them propagated at the native plant nursery tucked within the 1,491acre national park.
The original vision of replacing the former viaduct running between the Main Post and Crissy Field with a “parkway” belonged to San Francisco landscape architect Michael Painter, who died in 2018. The Presidio Trust, which manages most of the former army base, embraced the idea as a way to add an educational component and central magnet to the park’s natural bounty.
If the result stands out as a triumph of the imagination, it also testifies to the wealth of many San Francisco families. Tunnel Tops was almost absurdly expensive — $118 million — but $98 million of that came from private donors and foundations who were courted by the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy.
This explains the too-visible donor wall facing the park’s campfire amphitheater. But donors weren’t calling the shots: The design team of James Corner Field Operations and EHDD tested out their ideas at meetings open to the general public. For a project this visible, that’s how things should work.
Francisco Park
Date opened: April 2022
Size: 4.5 acres
Philanthropy also fueled Francisco Park on Russian Hill, which opened three months earlier than the Tunnel Tops, and 2.2 miles to the east.
This one’s more problematic than Tunnel Tops: The city essentially agreed to turn a decommissioned reservoir into a public park if private donors from the well-heeled heights would fund its design, construction and upkeep. Another conceivable scenario, where the reservoir land along Bay Street would have been reserved for affordable housing while the remaining acreage was parkified, never had a chance.
Perhaps as a result, Francisco Park’s design isn’t particularly distinctive. The Bay Street portion holds an overscaled dog park. But the view from the upper plateau is matchless, a sprawling blend of city and nature that embodies the allure of where we live. The cable car even stops near the entrance on Hyde Street — beat that for local color.
Willie ‘Woo Woo’ Wong Playground
Date re-opened: February 2021
Size: 0.5 acres
If Francisco Park and Presidio Tunnel Tops were the sum total of the new wave, they could be downplayed as fresh examples of San Francisco’s sometimes Dickensian extremes — playgrounds for the rich, visiting rights for everyone else.
Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground in Chinatown brings the breadth of the revival into clearer focus.
The mid-block space along an alley off Sacramento Street isn’t new, it opened in the 1930s and was redone at least once before the remake that debuted in 2021. The views from the basketball courts or dragon-themed slide include laundry hanging from the neighboring buildings and the not-so-distant peaks of Financial District towers.
You get the picture: This is space for children in the city’s most densely populated neighborhood, rather than a tourist destination. For visitors who do stroll by, perhaps en route to Grant Avenue’s souvenir shops, it shows that this is a rooted, functioning community in a city where people value the spaces they share.
In fact, the reborn playground wouldn’t exist if not for a $195 million bond in 2012 that helped fund the revival of 21 neighborhood parks and playgrounds, as well as improvements to Golden Gate and McLaren parks and the bay shoreline. That money now is mostly spent, but San Francisco voters in 2020 defied the pandemic by approving a “health and recovery bond” that included $239 million for parks.
Guy Place Mini Park
Date opened: May 2020
Size: 3,500 square feet
Willie Wong Playground is easy to miss. Guy Place Mini Park is almost impossible to find.
So, head south on First Street as it starts to ascend Rincon Hill, then turn right when you pass Local Kitchen’s parklet. Then an artistic gate not far on your right, just before the sidewalk bulb-out that includes a dog relieving station.
Your payoff for the hunt is a thoroughly startling small pleasure designed by the city’s landscape architects, with three open courts off a straight path to the back of what once was a steep parking lot. Each is marked by a 25-foot tall chute of meshed stainless steel interlaced with skybound grapevines. The granite paving and concrete benches are tough, undeniably so, but the effect is softened by the birch trees along the edges, and the abutilons underneath with their bulbous stained glass-like flowers.
This is still the city, as the materials attest; on one visit I saw a bedraggled man tumble out from behind the tall granite slab that’s a design feature in the back. But most visitors are neighborhood residents walking their dogs — hence the bulb-out that’s part of the project — pausing to enjoy a respite from the glassy young towers on all sides.
An odd place for a small park, one where much of the site had to be raised 12 feet so that it would be accessible? Perhaps. But you can’t build a successful urban neighborhood just by stacking units in the air. In the long run, it also needs to feel good on the ground.
Mission Creek Park promenade
Date opened: October 2022
Size: 1.2 acres
The October day after Mission Creek’s latest park opened, the linear strip between Third and Fourth streets already was being put to use.
Moms pushed strollers. A young jogger made a loop. Several older people commandeered a table to catch up with each other while sampling an urbane but tranquil setting where grasses fill three central bioswales, amid coast live oaks already looking settled in. Each bioswale is sliced by an angled “boardwalk” that extends to a perch above the creek.
The green space is one of several within the two-decadeold Mission Bay district, so it doesn’t need to be all things to all people (it also was funded and built by the district’s master developer). Instead, the linear terrain feels like some stylized remnant of the tidal marshes that existed here before 19th century San Francisco exploded in waves of reckless and propulsive growth.
This small landscape conceived by the firm CMG asks us to adjust to the slow procession of textures and forms inspired by the ecological value of stormwater retention. I’d love to visit during the next big rain, to see how the bioswales work.
Crane Cove Park
Date opened: September 2020 Size: 7 acres
Of all the parks that have opened since the start of the pandemic, Crane Cove Park has spurred the most delighted response.
It’s tucked behind Third Street in Dogpatch, a neighborhood that itself was long off the map, and it gives city residents their very own beguiling beach along the bay, where kids can play in the sand while their parents lounge on the grass. The setting? Next to an out-of-commission drydock.
Civic improvements like this don’t happen by chance: Crane Cove Park was in the works for more than a decade before opening in the summer of 2020, conceived as a public benefit in tandem with the (now-stalled) redevelopment of the former shipyards next door at Pier 70. Nearly $25 million came from park bonds, and another $12 from the Port of San Francisco’s, which tackled issues from sea level rise to environmental remediation along the way.
There’s still work to be done at Crane Cove Park before the space is complete, including full restoration of its two immense cranes and the addition of a playground and dog run. But even in this partial state, a truly compelling haven now exists along the bay — one that adds something entirely new to San Francisco’s constellation of attractions. Better yet, doing it without making a fuss.
Shoreview Park
Date reopened: June 2021
Size: 0.85 acres
“The park is more inviting now — friendlier,” says Kevin Barr, site administer for Northridge Cooperative Homes on Hunters Point Hill. “It’s been uplifting.”
Barr is describing the $3.3 million renovation of Shoreview Park, near the top of Bayview Hill, tucked against a cul-de-sac amid 1970s housing complexes like Northridge. Given that housing, the best views come from the 15-foot-tall rope bridge in the upgraded playground, a space accompanied by new picnic tables, a replanted lawn and durable outdoor exercise machines for nearby residents who may not be able to afford a private health club.
In other words, the design by landscape architects in San Francisco Public Works stuck to the basics. No flourishes here, just a space that’s more accessible and inviting than before.
If Shoreview Park has been vandalized in the past year, Barr hasn’t seen the evidence.
“When a place looks broken down, like the city doesn’t care, people don’t care either,” Barr suggests. “Once you do something to beautify it, people take pride. They make it their own.”