Amica Gaino plays with her children — twin 2-year-old daughters Reign and Autumn, and her son, August Jones, 11 — at the new public park at Hunters View, Phase 3, in San Francisco. Gaino doesn’t live in the units but grew up in Bayview-Hunters Point. “We love this park,” said Gaino, who works at a daycare in the neighborhood.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
Amica Gaino plays with her children — twin 2-year-old daughters Reign and Autumn, and her son, August Jones, 11 — at the new public park at Hunters View, Phase 3, in San Francisco.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
The Beyene family leaves for Sunday morning shopping at 11 a.m., and the three kids — Surafiel, 10, Betty 7, and Rufta, 4 — are out the door long before their mom, Luwam, comes down with the toddler, Yoyo, 1.
They don’t mind the delay because in the courtyard of their San Francisco apartment building at Hunters View, Phase 3, is a public park so new that it does not yet have a name.
“We just call it the New Park,” said Betty, 7, who goes straight to the monkey bars and keeps swinging even when her mom is there waiting. Which is not a problem for her because the park has one of the great adult attractions of the city — a porch swing that goes out over a plateau, and seemingly out over San Francisco Bay, with downtown Oakland and Mount Diablo getting closer with each back and forth.
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“The view is very beautiful — not just for the kids but for the grownups,” said Luwam, noting that when the kids are in school, the 1-acre flat space is so peaceful that you can hear the seagulls caw way out over the water below. But that all ends at 3 p.m., and now that summer vacation is here, the quiet will end long before that. “You see tons of kids out here,” she said.
Large swings for all ages are featured at the new public park at Hunters View, Phase 3, in San Francisco.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
The park, which opened with a civic ceremony in May, is a privately owned public open space that serves all three phases of Hunters View — the hilltop apartment blocks that overlook the old Hunters Point Shipyard on the far southeastern edge of the city. The housing plan was launched in 2004 by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom as HOPE SF — Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere, a citywide initiative to improve public housing.
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Hunters View, with multiple apartment buildings, is envisioned as an entirely new neighborhood, with two multifamily buildings opening within the past year, at 853 and 857 Memory Lane, 118 units total. The compound is managed by the Jon Steward Company, and to qualify for residency, a household must earn at least 25% and no more than 55% of the median income for the area. Demand is high.
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“We’ve been on the waiting list forever,” said Luwam, who is from Eritrea. Every neighborhood needs a park, and the new one on Memory Lane is open to residents throughout Bayview-Hunters Point and anywhere else.
“I grew up here and don’t need to ask anyone permission,” is how one man put it after arriving with four little kids, two of them small enough to ride in a wagon. “There was always a park here,” he said, looking around. “Just a different style.”
The park budget was $3.37 million, paid for by a soft loan from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. The design was by Fletcher Studio, a Dogpatch firm that specializes in community open space, including the redesign of Esprit Park, which opened in 2025.
Hunters View, Phase 3, offers 118 family homes, a public park and sweeping views of the bay.
Brontë Wittpenn/S.F. Chronicle
According to head designer Lauren Ewald of Fletcher Studio, the style of the new park was dictated by its irregular footprint, three-fourths of an acre on a flaring rectangle pinned between the two apartment blocks on the long sides, and Memory Lane and the steep hillside on the short sides. Adding to the design challenge was the fact that a paved service road for emergency vehicles runs right through the middle of the park surface.
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That gray surface stripe is offset by buildings painted white and trimmed in yellow, and bold primary colors on the splay structures. Ewald, 35, is from Overland Park, Kan., and she didn’t mind playing up the cinematic brightness of the park she designed.
“You come around the corner, and the park is an explosion of colors. The playground, furniture, flowers, lights, the buildings— everything is rainbows,” she said. “It’s like you were swept up in the tornado from the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and landed in a Technicolor world, a blooming optimistic garden with a view to the bay.”
The buildings, by David Baker Architects, are situated to block the prevailing winds, and the picnic tables and eight barbecue stations, charcoal by request, are sited to catch the midday sun. The playground is in the sunniest spot, with three separate climbing structures and an embankment slide.
“The verticality of the buildings is proportional to the width of the park, so it feels like it is on a human scale, with just the right ratio,” Ewald said.
San Francisco’s new public park at Hunters View, Phase 3, features porch swings with sweeping views of the bay.
Sam Whiting/S.F. Chronicle
The motivation behind the porch swing was to give families something to attract multiple generations out there. Three and four generations are living here, and they are not going to swing on monkey bars or go down a slide in unison.
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“I love how kids from all around the neighborhood come here to play together,” said Hunters View resident Nena Aragon, who was out walking her pit bull, Hank. “I’m going to come out and try that swing next week when the weather is good.”
There are actually two swings, each 6 feet long on a frame meant to evoke the Gantry Crane at the old Hunters Point shipyard. They are made of steel and placed at an angle so the Oakland skyline is directly ahead. But the feeling of going high out over the water is an illusion. In reality, the range of motion is limited by design so it cannot swing backward far enough to build momentum.
Ahmad Ahmadi, an immigrant from war-torn Kabul, Afghanistan, found this out when he got a break from corralling his three kids, ages 13, 10 and 6, and came out to give that swing a ride. He could get it only so high, though he was not complaining.
“I enjoyed the swing with my wife,” he said. “It’s an excellent view of the ocean.”
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