This morning I volunteered with Dolores Park Works, a new group formed to help clean up Dolores Park. It’s a terrific group of neighborhood volunteers dedicated to making sure that Dolores Park remains a beautiful, vibrant, and safe public space. I helped pick up trash. Dolores Park is a neighborhood crossroads, geographically in the heart of San Francisco and used by a diverse group of people, from Mission hipsters to LGBT people from the Castro to gay and straight families with kids to people with dogs. It’s a prime example of what a great public space is — somewhere that everyone can use for all sorts of different purposes. But, with use comes wear and tear, and it’s important for neighborhoods to come together to keep their parks in prime condition. City workers from the Recreation and Park Department and the Department of Public Works work hard to keep our public spaces up to par, but in this era of tight public budgets, it’s critical for neighbors to work with and supplement the work performed by city staff. Congratulations to Gideon Kramer and company for getting Dolores Park Works off the ground.
Dolores Park Works isn’t the only example of people working to improve their neighborhood parks. For example, Friends of Duboce Park has done a tremendous job cleaning Duboce Park as well as working with the City to ensure that the recently reopened Harvey Milk Rec Center and other capital improvements are usable by the neighborhood. Similarly, Friends of the Noe Valley Rec Center has made sure that the Upper Noe Rec Center is a nerve center for the neighborhood.
And, neighborhood stewardship isn’t just about parks and rec centers. I’ve previously written about the City’s “Pavement to Parks” program that takes under-utilized and pedestrian-unfriendly street space and turns it into mini-plazas. As president of my neighborhood association, I worked with the Castro/Upper Market Community Benefit District (CBD) and Supervisor Bevan Dufty to create the 17th Street Plaza in the Castro. The CBD has done a tremendous job maintaining and creating programming (such as musical performances) in the plaza. The new plaza at Guerrero and San Jose is similarly a great new community space — a space that is maintained by the neighborhood for the neighborhood. The Guerrero Street area came together previously to green the Guerrero median.
In the end, each of us is responsible for doing our part to make sure that our public spaces, from parks to plazas to rec centers to every other kind of public space, is clean, vibrant, and safe. By doing so, we can play a big role in making our neighborhoods the interconnected and wonderful places they should be.
