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San Francisco Chronicle
20 hours ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘The city is ready': S.F. prepares for massive crowds during string of Golden Gate Park concerts
San Francisco police and other city agencies will be out in full force in and around Golden Gate Park for an unprecedented string of concerts over the next three weekends, officials said Thursday. The large-scale events — Dead & Company's shows on Aug 1 -3, the Outside Lands festival on Aug. 8 -10 and the Zach Bryan and Kings of Leon concert on Aug. 15 — are expected to draw more than 450,000 attendees combined in what marks the first time Golden Gate Park hosts concerts three weekends in a row, officials said. 'The San Francisco Police Department will have a full deployment of officers' in and around Golden Gate Park before, during and after the concerts, Interim Police Chief Paul Yep said. 'The San Francisco Police Department and our city partners have been planning for these events for months, and we've been training for any scenario that may occur,' Yep said. 'The city is ready.' He added that Golden Gate Park 'is going to be the safest place in San Francisco.' Sheriff's deputies, park rangers, parking control officers and other city personnel will also be out in full force, along with security guards. 'Our teams are equipped and trained to handle a variety of situations, and we are fully prepared for any emergencies that may arise during these weekends,' Mayor Daniel Lurie said. With crowds expected to fan out into other parts of the city after the shows, Yep said additional officers and city ambassadors will flood neighborhoods near the park, including Haight Street and downtown corridors. While the shows were expected to inconvenience some residents in the area with issues such as heavy traffic and loud noise, the city is prepared to handle complaints, including through a hotline that runs every year for Outside Lands, said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the Recreation and Park Department. The hotline is 415-965-8001. Ginsberg and Allen Scott, president of concerts and festivals at Another Planet Entertainment, the organizer of the shows for all three weekends, underscored the economic impacts of the shows. The three weekends are expected to pour $150 million into the city's economy, plus $7 million for the Recreation and Park Department, Scott said. Another Planet also donates $25,000 to the Sunset and Richmond neighborhoods, 'as a little bit of a thank you for putting up with a little bit of inconvenience,' Ginsberg said. Lurie said attendees, including out-of-town visitors, stay at hotels, eat at restaurants and visit other small businesses. 'That economic impact stretches across the city,' he said, 'and all San Franciscans feel the benefit.' 'When visitors feel safe and they enjoy their trip, they go home and they tell everybody what we all know: That San Francisco is not only a world-class city, but we are a city on the rise,' Lurie said.
San Francisco Chronicle
10-07-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Controversial S.F. fountain not part of Embarcadero Plaza renovation plans, officials say
The fight for Vaillancourt Fountain heated up Tuesday night at a community meeting where a San Francisco city official said publicly for the first time that the controversial concrete sculpture is not part of the renovation plan for Embarcadero Plaza. 'We did look into keeping the fountain on-site,' Recreation and Park Department Project Manager Eoanna Harrison Goodwin told a decidedly pro-fountain audience, 'but once we got the cost estimate, it is beyond our project budget.' The revelation, while not the final word on the 710-ton sculpture, was perhaps the most discouraging sign yet for its ardent supporters that its days on Embarcadero Plaza may be numbered. The blocky Brutalist fountain, a lightning rod for public opinion since its debut a half-century ago, has deteriorated and broken down in recent years. In June, the park department fenced it off after declaring it a public hazard based on a report that concluded a full renovation would cost roughly $17 million. A new independent estimate now pegs the cost at $29 million, Goodwin said Tuesday — a dramatic jump that earned a collective groan from the crowd. That number did not include the cost of plans, permits and annual upkeep of at least $100,000. That means fixing the fountain would cost nearly as much as the entire Embarcadero Plaza makeover project, budgeted at $32.5 million, Goodwin said. The plan is to combine Embarcadero Plaza and the adjacent Sue Bierman Park to form a single 5-acre multiuse park, twice the size of Union Square. The complicated project is a public-private partnership between the Recreation and Park Department, which manages the land; BXP, which owns the four Embarcadero office towers; the Downtown SF Partnership; and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Though the park department maintains the fountain and is indicating it no longer wants it, it does not own the sculpture and has no authority over its possible removal. It is part of the Civic Art Collection, and its fate will eventually be determined by the San Francisco Arts Commission and possibly the Board of Supervisors. Tuesday's community forum at Codi, a meeting popup at Embarcadero Three, came just one month after the fountain's creator, 95-year-old artist Armand Vaillancourt, made a rare visit from his Montreal home to lobby the park department and the arts commission to preserve his namesake work. The fountain has been shut off for a year since its pumps broke, but Vaillancourt told the Chronicle that with some cleaning and repairs it would last another 50 years or more. Vaillancourt was not among the 200 people who RSVP'd for Tuesday's meeting, but his daughter, San Francisco resident Oceania Vaillancourt, attended and made an emotional plea for her father's creation. 'My dad asked me to help him,' said Vaillancourt during the Q&A session after the city's presentation, noting she lives two blocks away and goes by the fountain every day. 'I just can't imagine the fountain not being there,' she said through tears. 'I just hope we can gather the community and hopefully change the decision of removing the fountain.' Also in attendance were members of the Northern California chapter of Docomomo US, a modernist architecture preservation group that has been staging actions to save the fountain. The sculpture, which currently sits in the middle of the multiuse area, was not on any of the diagrams presented Tuesday by HOK, the design firm hired for the project. The diagrams showed a location for a 'permanent art piece,' though apparently not the one that is already there, Petra Marar of Docomomo noted. 'The fountain is not on any of the options,' said Marar. 'It feels like it is all or nothing, keeping it or removing it, and it feels like they are removing it.' Andrew Sullivan, a landscape architect who worked with the famed Embarcadero Plaza designer Lawrence Halprin, said, 'The process that the city went through to determine that the fountain needs to be removed is disingenuous. They predetermined that the demolition of the fountain is a given without any actual design. They just created excuses to get rid of it without any meaningful discussion.' The design of the park has also yet to be determined. The future unification of Embarcadero Plaza and Sue Bierman Park will be continued at a third meeting to be scheduled this fall. The park will then enter the design phase.
San Francisco Chronicle
17-06-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Makeover of S.F. Chinatown park delayed as construction bids come in $10M too high
The long awaited makeover of the historic park at the heart of San Francisco's Chinatown has been set back six months due to construction bids coming in more than $10 million over budget, with anticipated tariffs on construction materials a major factor, officials said. The bidding process for Portsmouth Square, the city's oldest park, will now start over with a call to be sent out in September, when construction was intended to begin. Bids will be due in late October, with groundbreaking anticipated for March. 'The cost overage is due to global tariffs, ongoing supply chain challenges and widespread construction inflation,' said Tamara Aparton, spokesperson for the Recreation and Park Department, which owns and operates the square. Aparton said the renovation job is budgeted by the city engineer at a ceiling of $43 million, and the lowest of the three bids bid came in at $54.7 million. Rec and Park will try to bring the cost down by using cheaper construction materials and fencing, and cutting back on amenities that are not crucial to the experience in a heavily used 1.3-acre park known as 'Chinatown's living room.' The fundamental features of the design, which include a new children's playground and neighborhood clubhouse, a rotating art wall and gathering spaces under a trellis, will not change. The park will not have to be redesigned, which would have potentially delayed the project for years, on top of a decade of delays already incurred. By staying close to schedule, access to city and state bond funds will not be threatened. 'The good news is that it is still on track,' Aparton said. 'Construction is still expected to begin in March 2026, right after the Lunar New Year and just 5½ months later than originally planned.' Still to be determined is who will cover the $4 million to $5 million cost of removal for the pedestrian bridge that spans Kearny Street and connects the square to the Hilton Financial District hotel and the attached Chinese Culture Center. The demolition of the span, known as 'the bridge to nowhere,' is a major aspect to the park design, but funding for the removal has been in dispute for years. 'While the city works through the bid process for the project, we are separately continuing to negotiate the outstanding issues related to the allocation of demolition costs between the city and the Hilton,' said Jen Kwart, spokesperson for the city attorney of San Francisco. 'The bid process will continue to proceed independent of the negotiations regarding cost allocation.' Counting the cost of studies, permits, outreach, project management, infrastructure improvements, and other ancillary expenses, the overall project has been valued at $71 million. Construction is expected to take 26 months and be completed in the summer of 2028. Portsmouth Square is a vital community outdoor space used daily by Chinatown residents, many of whom live in small single-room occupancy apartments. Neighborhood activists were informed of the restart of the bidding process at a community meeting last week. 'They seem to be pretty certain that it will only delay the project by five months,' said Annie Cheung, president and CEO of Self-Help for the Elderly, which runs classes, workshops and training programs out of the Portsmouth Square Clubhouse. She's been involved in planning for the new park for at least 12 years, and is hopeful that this is the last of many false starts. 'The community has been waiting for a long time for the new park,' she said. 'Most of our Chinatown residents live in SROs, and Portsmouth Square is our only major park and open space. No more delay.'
San Francisco Chronicle
24-05-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
People love the new Great Highway park. Do they love it enough to spare Supervisor Joel Engardio?
What controversy? Being able to take a snooze in a beachfront hammock on a sunny afternoon has made all the turmoil over closing the Upper Great Highway to create Sunset Dunes, San Francisco's newest park, worth it. At least it did for Fred Reynolds, who lives nearby, when I spoke to him on a recent Saturday. 'I thought it worked very well during COVID,' Reynolds said of the pandemic closure of the roadway. 'So, it seems like a natural progression. I think it's turning out to be a great asset for the city.' Now the question is if Reynolds' neighbors feel similarly enough about the park and its new amenities to extinguish their political furor. While San Francisco voted to pass Prop K in November, closing the Great Highway to cars, Sunset residents overwhelmingly opposed the measure — and responded to its passage by revolting against their supervisor, Joel Engardio, who championed the roadway's closure. The campaign to recall Engardio said it had enough petition signatures from District 4 residents by Thursday's deadline to submit to the San Francisco Elections Department for a ballot measure. If the signatures are certified, the department must hold a recall election 105 to 120 days afterward. There's also a lawsuit seeking to reopen the Great Highway and the possibility of a ballot measure to reverse Prop K. The recall campaign also opened another front in the city's moderate-progressive political war. Meanwhile, Sunset Dunes park, the source of all this acrimony, opened officially to great fanfare on April 12. Politics aside, it's still doing well. Sunset Dunes is still largely a four-lane road. There's new murals, paintings on the asphalt, sculptures and some added amenities, such as hammocks and tree trunks repurposed into seating. That's enough for Sunset Dunes to become the third most-visited park in the city during the week, averaging 3,400 visitors a day, and fourth overall on weekends, averaging 7,800 visitors a day, according to the Recreation and Park Department. 'I've been coming out on the weekends pretty much, but I want to start coming out at night every day just for exercise, too,' Sunset resident Osmond Li said after trying out a piano set up for visitors. So far, 62% of the visitors to Sunset Dunes are from San Francisco, and 35% of them are from the adjacent Sunset, Parkside and West Portal neighborhoods, according to the Recreation and Park Department's sensors that can track cell phone registrations. A 'honeymoon' surge to a new park is normal, but 'weekday consistency suggests lasting success. Our numbers there have been higher than expected,' said Tamara Barak Aparton, a spokesperson for the Recreation and Park Department. Is all that foot traffic translating into more sales for area businesses? It's probably too early for anything conclusive, but I checked with a couple of businesses I talked to just after the November election. Andytown Coffee Roasters co-owner Lauren Crabbe said her count of foot traffic at her Outer Sunset shops is up 20% over last year, compared to 5% at her Richmond District location. 'There's obviously something going on there beyond just the weather if we're seeing one neighborhood performing better than the other,' Crabbe said. At Aqua Surf Shop in the Sunset, store manager Dagan Ministero, who opposed Prop K, said he hasn't had an influx of customers since the park opened. 'I don't know if it's just the nation overall, but business is kind of down these days,' Ministero said. 'I haven't seen an increase.' Traffic congestion was one of the chief concerns for Ministero and many opposed to closing the Great Highway. Traffic is at or below pre-pandemic levels on the lower Great Highway adjacent to the park and nearby 46th Avenue, according to monitors set up by the group Friends of Sunset Dunes. However, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency is collecting more comprehensive data on the area's traffic conditions that it expects to release this summer, according to Parisa Safarzadeh, a spokesperson for the agency. 'We do anticipate that with every road change there is an adjustment period,' Safarzadeh said, noting that new traffic patterns and potential problems become clearer after drivers settle into routines. To help traffic flow, there are new stoplights at Lincoln Way and 41st Avenue, and at Sloat and Skyline boulevards. Sunset Boulevard, the closest major north-south route, has been repaved. Speed bumps were added to some streets near the Great Highway to discourage cut-through traffic. Safarzadeh said traffic data will be evaluated to determine if further changes are needed. 'It's too early to even understand what that would look like.' Drivers accustomed to using the closed 2-mile stretch of the Upper Great Highway from Lincoln Way to Sloat Boulevard will bear the brunt of these changes. Anecdotal evidence suggests commutes could be longer and not everybody is happy. Ministero said he's witnessed several fender benders in the area that he attributed to an uptick in traffic and that better infrastructure changes should have been in place before the closure. 'I feel like it was kind of putting the cart before the horse,' Ministero said. Despite his opposition to the Great Highway's closure, Ministero, who lives in the Richmond, said he loves the new public space and surfs the area almost daily, despite the 'problematic' traffic. Sunset voters who felt betrayed by Engardio now appear to have a chance at retribution by recalling him. Or can the new park win them over before Election Day? Either way, the park will remain. We can throw Engardio out and relitigate this at the polls and the courts. But to what end? Engardio has a vested interest in making sure Sunset Dunes is a success, so ousting him could jeopardize that. No doubt, commuters will be inconvenienced. I live in the Sunset, and I'll be one of them, too, when I drive. We should make sure the city upholds its responsibility to make traffic improvements. Because in the end, Sunset Dunes could become a great city asset, and that's what we should all want. Harry Mok is an assistant editor, editorial board member and columnist for the Opinion section.
San Francisco Chronicle
04-05-2025
- Climate
- San Francisco Chronicle
Tiny, beloved S.F. playground hit by 2023 landslide reopens after $1.2 million rebuild
A tiny playground tucked against a sheer rock cliff in the middle of San Francisco took an outsize hit on New Year's Day 2023 from a landslide triggered by an extreme winter storm — a disaster that turned out to be one of the city's most expensive that year. Nobody was hurt, but the avalanche of dirt, trees and boulders forced the closure of Peixotto Playground. Hidden at the end of a narrow driveway one block above Castro Street, the little play area with a clubhouse in Corona Heights Park is a treasured neighborhood spot — a 'jewel inside a rough box,' according to a column by the Chronicle's Carl Nolte. More than two years later, at a cost of $1.2 million to stabilize the hillside, the playground reopened this week with new sand, swings and a slide, and benches cut from the trunks of trees that fell. 'The landslide was top three in our most costly events of 2023,' said Eric Andersen, the city Recreation and Park Department's director of operations, ranking the slide with the flood at Stern Grove and the giant eucalyptus falling on the historic Trocadero Clubhouse during a very stormy winter of 2022-23. 'It required a fairly significant refurbishing of one of our older playgrounds.' Located at the base of Corona Heights Park, Peixotto (pronounced Pish-otto) Playground opened in 1951 on the site of a former rock quarry that later became a brick manufacturing plant. The park is accessed either by hiking down a paved path from the Randall Museum and past the tennis court, or by hiking up steep 15th Street from Castro, and making a left on Beaver Street. The playground entrance is marked by a sign on the fence next to an apartment building, but you have to hike up the driveway to see its main attraction: a 50-foot wall of shining red chert stone exposed by the quarrying operation. The landslide was loosened by an atmospheric river that brought days of hard rain, culminating on Jan. 1, 2023. The slide was 80 feet long and 20 feet wide and took out 36 feet of chain-link fence before coming to rest on the edge of the playground. The children's play area itself was not damaged, nor was the clubhouse, home to the Rocky Mountain Participation Nursery School since the 1970s. 'It's a nice blend of a natural resource area with a playground and a clubhouse in the middle,' said Andersen. After the slide, geologists determined the hillside to be unsafe and both the playground and the clubhouse were closed pending full repairs. FEMA declared it an emergency, which merited funding for the work. During the cleanup, city crews discovered an irrigation leak that was affecting water service in the clubhouse. Crews then took the opportunity to spruce up and repaint the clubhouse and renovate the play area. Logs that had come down in the storm were repurposed as seating areas, and a new lawn and sprinkler system were installed. The Rocky Mountain Participation Nursery School returned in February and its industrious students set about rebuilding its community garden. Work crews were still on site, which allowed for a class project in drawing individualized thank-you cards for the workers. The slope stabilization project was finally completed on April 22. 'Peixotto Playground is a beloved neighborhood gem, and we're thrilled to have it fully restored and reopened,' said Recreation and Park Department General Manager Phil Ginsburg. 'Thanks to the incredible teamwork across our maintenance, structural and gardening crews — and a lot of creativity with natural materials — we were able to not just repair the damage, but make Peixotto even better than before.'
