Esmeralda Slide Park in San Francisco is shown in 2023. The Bernal Heights space is part of the city’s Street Parks Program, maintained by neighborhood volunteers.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
Esmeralda Slide Park in San Francisco is shown in 2023. Residents oversee the Bernal Heights site, one of dozens of community-maintained street parks.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
The signature double slide at Esmeralda Slide Park in San Francisco is shown in 2023.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
Raul Romero has been a tireless volunteer clearing away junk and helping build the freeway-side greenway in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood.
Jana Asenbrennerova/Special to The Chronicle
Esmeralda Slide Park in San Francisco welcomes visitors with a big sign marking its signature attraction, a gleaming steel double slide that swooshes kids on a 40-foot ride past rows of immaculately terraced planters. Anyone taking the steep, tree-lined stairs through this leafy slice of Bernal Heights might assume it is a city park under jurisdiction of the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.
Esmeralda is an outlier — planned, planted, named and maintained by its neighbors, with oversight from San Francisco Public Works, which owns the property as a public right of way. There are 137 of these open spaces, called street parks, each with a volunteer steward in charge.
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The city could always use more of both — street parks and stewards — so it will promote the concept this weekend by hosting its first-ever Street Park Summit at its Public Works Street Tree Nursery, between the I-80 overpasses on Fifth Street.
The half-day summit Saturday morning will include advice from city landscapers, gardeners and arborists, as well as grant-writing experts to assist with funding outreach. The seminar will end with a field trip in city shuttle vans to see five showcase sites in the Street Parks Program, a partnership between Public Works and residents who don’t mind getting their hands dirty for no pay.
STREET PARK SUMMIT
When: 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday, April 18
Where: 415 Fifth St., San Francisco
What: Networking with San Francisco street parks stewards and Public Works staff; informational sessions on community challenge grants, permits and gardening techniques; and a shuttle tour of several street parks.
“These are odd little pieces of land that would otherwise be dormant and neglected,” explained Ramses Alvarez, community engagement manager for Public Works. These odd lots can be next to staircases on hillsides or median strips, or in areas originally mapped out for paved streets that turned out to be too steep or narrow, known as “unaccepted” or “paper” streets.
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“We’re looking for people to become a steward of a space that maybe they look at out their bedroom window,” Alvarez said. “They might say, ‘That space requires a little more love, and I want to give it to them.’”
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That’s what happened to Joan Carson and her husband, Wayne Harriman. After they moved onto Prospect Street in Bernal Heights in 2001, they decided to adopt Esmeralda Stairway, which ran down the hillside adjacent to their house, and was overgrown in weeds and generally neglected.
“Way back when I took this on, 15 years ago, I was able to get compost bags from Public Works, and got training in how to clean up the graffiti and the paint to do it with,” Carson said. That was about the extent of city assistance available.
“There weren’t very many street parks or people you could talk to, to share resources,” she said.
Carson organized the first community workday, and 42 neighbors signed up. She called herself the lead volunteer, a title that evolved into steward — and she became the first of 137 of them.
She also renamed the staircase the Esmeralda Slide Park, after her group refurbished the kids slide that runs parallel to the staircase. She made the wooden letters for the sign.
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“Esmeralda is what it’s all about. Somebody from the community stepped in and thought the place needed more nurturing,” said Carson. “Wayne and I spent four years working the area before the city stepped in and got involved with doing infrastructure repairs.”
An arbor bearing wooden “Esmeralda Slide Park” lettering, made by steward Joan Carson, is shown in San Francisco in 2023.
Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle
By the time Public Works became involved, Esmeralda Slide Park had already won a Seven Hills Award from the nonprofit San Francisco Beautiful, in 2015.
“San Francisco Beautiful is a huge supporter of neighbors working to improve the small-scale civic infrastructure,” said Robert Ogilvie, CEO of the 80-year-old organization. “The Street Parks Program is one of the most important and visible things that San Francisco Public Works does. It is an example of government at its best.”
The Street Parks Program, which launched in 2004 with one staff person, has added two more in the past two years. For big cleanup events, it sends out landscapers and gardeners to assist the volunteers, lend tools and supply gardening gloves. Most importantly, it supplies bags to pick up the green waste and sends out a truck to haul them away.
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All of this assistance comes later. Launching a street park is up to the neighbors.
“If I moved in now, when the Street Parks Program is beyond its infancy, and tried to figure out how to make this a better place, they would connect me with other park stewards and give the guidance to find the resources I need,” Carson said.
Raul Romero, volunteer at Portola Greenway, poses for a portrait during the Bloom Shaboom Community Block Party in the Portola District, the historic greenhouse part of the city, on May 15, 2022.
Jana Asenbrennerova/Special to The Chronicle
Street parks, also called pocket parks, are funded by donations and grants — unlike a sister program, Green Benefit Districts, which require approval by a vote of property owners and are paid for through property tax assessments. They include the recently-opened Minnesota Grove on Minnesota Street in Dogpatch and the Glen Park Greenway, along the former banks of Islais Creek.
Street parks vary in size. Some, like Esmeralda Slide, are small. Others can stretch out for blocks along easements, such as Burrows Pocket Park, which runs alongside San Bruno Avenue in the Portola District off Highway 101.
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Saturday’s four-hour Street Parks Summit is free, no reservation required. It starts at 9 a.m.; toward the end, the vans will load up to visit Pennsylvania Garden, Virginia Garden, Glen Park Greenway, Quesada Medians and Upper Esmeralda Street Park, where stewards will be on hand in their orange Public Works-issue vests. It is not a position to be taken lightly: Prospective stewards must fill out a two-page application and agree to a three-year commitment.
Esmeralda Slide Park, which lies below Esmeralda Avenue between Winfield Street and Prospect Avenue, is not included in Saturday’s tour. That’s because Carson and Harriman are in Santa Fe, and you couldn’t tour San Francisco’s flagship street park without them.
“Esmeralda Slide Park is the poster child for the fortitude Joan and Wayne have put forth,” Alvarez said. “They show dedication year in and year out.”