Festival promotes green space in Mission
With Muni maintenance buildings on two sides and a fenced-in parking lot on the third, the stubby asphalt triangle by the 1900 block of Harrison Street in San Francisco’s Mission District isn’t an obvious spot for a neighborhood park.
But the 50 or so people who lingered in the potholed clearing near 16th Street on Saturday saw something else: a place where community can grow, both literally and figuratively.
“This can be a learning space — a green, medicinal, herbal space,” suggested Dheyanira Calahorrano of Latina Mission Moms, one of the organizers of the event to promote a Treat Avenue green space. “We have kids and working families who don’t have backyards, we don’t have the outdoor spaces we need.”
The half-day Treat Avenue Greenspace Event was named for the diagonal passage that fills most of the space, once reserved for freight trains and now mostly used for parking by Muni employees who didn’t take a bus to work. Calahorrano and other residents are making the case that it instead should be transformed into land serving residents of the Mission’s northeast corner.
Another sponsor on the scene was Jorge Romero-Lozano of Greening Projects, which helped organize the festival using a grant from Into the Streets, a nonprofit founded during the pandemic to spur small-scale rejuvenation efforts in the city.
Romero-Lozano’s organization has a similar aim, and currently is at work on community spaces in the Bayview and Bernal Heights. After being approached by Calahorrano last year, he researched city records to find snippets of underused public land that might be available with the right push from neighbors. This stretch of Treat seemed to be the best option, and supporters began approaching city agencies and local politicians.
“So far, nobody definitely has said ‘no,’ ” Romero-Lozano said. “It wouldn’t take much to turn it into a green space.”
To soften the stark terrain of bumpy asphalt, the space was dotted with a dozen colorful metal tables with chairs and four corrugated containers holding plants from the horticulture program at the City College of San Francisco. A pair of fabric canopies, one for a children’s play area, offered protection from showers one moment, sunny skies the next.
The event felt relaxed despite being a minute’s walk from 16th Street, tucked away amid blocks that feel removed from the busy traffic that define other parts of
the Mission.
Just beyond the fenced-off parking lot stand the main facilities of the San Francisco SPCA, which was offering senior dogs for adoption outside on Alabama Street. Another neighbor is the statuesque brick manufacturing plant of Dandelion Chocolate, which includes a gaunt but chic cafe serving 16 different chocolate drinks; it backs onto the edge of the area where the festival was held, but doesn’t include an opening onto Harrison Street.
“It’s a gray area,” said Doug MacNeil, who has owned a twostory building at 16th and Harrison for 25 years. “This area is always in transition.”
MacNeil stopped by the festival out of curiosity, and described how Dandelion’s building held a printing plant when he arrived on the scene with his now-defunct bookbinding firm. The handsome brick self-storage facility across 16th Street held a clothing company and then a dot-com startup. The other corner on his intersection was empty, filled with rubble from a demolished cement plant. Now there are residential lofts.
Given this perpetual flux, MacNeil wasn’t sure that a community space on the festival site would work: “If this block was residential, you could make a park,” he shrugged. “But not that many people are here.”
Advocates expect to confront skepticism. That’s why one table at the festival was reserved for the landscape firm Terrain Studio, on hand to talk with attendees about what they’d like to see instead of asphalt, and what enticements might help the triangle, if reclaimed, to flourish long-term.
Those conversations, and the responses to surveys that festivalgoers filled out, will be used to draw up a conceptual plan that will be presented at a follow-up gathering on May 18.
“If people feel a connection and a place becomes an attraction, they take care of it,” said Terrain co-founder Scott Slaney, who has worked with Greening Projects elsewhere. “This is a pretty large space. It’s important to activate it, or else it becomes a vacuum, like it is now.”
After completion of a plan that residents embrace, the sponsors will take their proposal to several city agencies with an eye to getting the block closed off from parking. They’ll also pursue funding grants that would bolster their credibility.
Given all the struggles facing San Francisco and its neighborhoods, the quest to bring Treat’s leftover triangle to life could fall short. For Romero-Lozano, though, the low-key festival had an upbeat feel.
“People told us they want a nice ground cover, with plenty of tables and lots of plantings,” he said. “Definitely, this feels like a good start.”