Bayfront Park Site

As of this morning, the ball is rolling for the 5-acre Bayfront Park to be built across from the proposed Golden State Warriors Arena in Mission Bay, with bids from those interested in being named the lead landscape architect for the project due next month.

Bayfront Park will be bounded  a realigned Terry A. Francois Boulevard and the San Francisco Bay, between 16th Street and Pierpoint Lane, with bicycle and pedestrian pathways connecting segments of San Francisco’s growing Blue Greenway and Bay Trail from the north to the south.

Warriors Mission Bay Arena Rendering - Southwest Aerial

Intended to be predominantly defined by “an open flexible-use waterfront lawn area which can accommodate a variety of passive, active and major recreational uses,” other features which could be incorporated include performance areas, food kiosks, and plazas as well.

Another key design element of the park to be considered: access to a potential waterfront ferry service stop.

The formal design phase for Bayfront Park, which will include a series of public workshops, is slated to kick-off in May.  Construction is slated to commence in February 2017 and will take an estimated nine months.

14 thoughts on “Ball Is Rolling For 5-Acre Bayfront Park”
  1. Five acres is miniscule. Its a slap in the face of the city.

    That end of town needs a contiguous, wide multi-hundreds of acre waterfront green space (think Grant Park & adjoining lake frontage of Chicago) extending from the Giants stadium all the way to Candlestick.

    We are cramming 100’s of thousand of new residents into the city without any consideration of impacts ranging from displacement of hard core homeless into other neighborhoods, infrastructure requirements (to avoid more 16th and Folsom’s, where the drains are so old they run down to the bay instead of toward the water treatment facility, and back up annually with no plan from the Water dept. to do anything but use rented pumper trucks for weeks on end after each storm, to push the sewage back upstream — no lie) and real neighborhood amenities befitting a world class city with a $9 billion dollar operating budget and billions more inbound to do things like jam another huge arena into the already crowded Mission Bay. Where is the visionary leadership? Probably all on a fact-finding trip with sketchy international developer money like the New York Times just ran a front page expose on over the weekend. Oh, right. And where’s the news coverage?

    1. Yes the entire side needs to have a dedicated park along the water for all to enjoy. They do need to fix the water problem first. We should be able to ride bikes all along the bay. It is a great plan if they make this happen. People can walk and jog and ride bikes! The makings of a world class city.

    2. That 9 billion is already spoken for by the myriads of city services, public unions, homeless budget, etc. So in summary, you want more of all of the good things — bigger parks, working infrastructure, housing for all of society’s dropouts — but without doing the things that are going to pay for it — jam in more luxury housing, add a stadium.

    3. What on Earth are you talking about? Parks are not for regular people. They are for rich and well-connected Russian Hill residents who already have a park on every block and don’t want new residents to share them with.

      Editor, let’s have a link to the latest article on the reservoir debacle.

      [Editor’s Note: Francisco Reservoir Transfer Tentatively Approved.]

    4. If you got Grant Park on the Bay, would you allow skyscrapers on the rest of Mission Bay? You know, like Chicago.

      1. Grant Park in Chicago is larger than the entire Mission Bay project.

        If all of Mission Bay had been made into a public park, then it would have been fine to build skyscrapers southward from the existing 20th century pile in the Financial District north of Market. Of course that is what we are doing and have just about completed as far south as the peak of Rincon Hill. The rezoning of 4th St may open the way for another wave of them.

        So, we are getting our skyscrapers, but not our parks. And not an underground transit system to match the above ground growth. We are getting plenty of commercial developments, but few public ones. Maybe if we paint more sharrows, convert a few dozen parking spaces to ‘parklets’, rework the MUNI logo, and study tearing down elevated freeways we can balance the effects of doubling the population of SoMa/Potrero/Dogpatch/etc.

        FWIW, Lincoln Park in Chicago is a somewhat better comparison to the SF Mission Bay and Central Waterfront areas given both are a mile or so from the downtown core.

        1. Thant’s true. Grant Park is huge! I agree with the need for public infrastructure investment. Just don’t touch the Muni logo! It’s the only good thing about Muni…

    5. already crowded mission bay? It’s still mostly a vast wasteland last time I checked. Won’t you NIMBYS ever give up your relentless desire to stifle market forces for growth? You have now made San Francisco more expensive then New York by trying to stop the manhattinization of San Francisco. Kind of ironic don’t you think?

  2. WRT the recent NYT article “expose”, aka safety dosit boxes in the sky for the top 0.1%, it’s not all knee jerk bad news. Done right it will increase property values in the city, which is fine and dandy with this long term SF resident and property owner.

  3. Lots of nice parks proposed for Mission Bay – but the pace at which they are getting built is ridiculously slow.

    City needs to pick up the pace and get the parks built. It seems like they are always having more “input” meetings and not enough ribbon cuttings for actual openings.

  4. The City has collected millions $ in park construction fees.

    Maybe they have a few more Clarke Howatt’s they don’t want to talk about?

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