The Dolores Park Playground is scheduled to close for renovations this September with a reopening expected in April 2011. After the playground reopens, the rest of Dolores Park will close for for another one to two years.
The clubhouse, field, basketball court and six tennis courts will be repaired and/or renovated; the roads and pathways, including the pedestrian bridge connecting the park to Church Street at 19th Street, will be restored; and the irrigation, lighting and general landscape will be upgraded and improved.
Because much of the work will be underground, it would be difficult and most likely unsafe to leave sections of the park open during construction, [Nicolas King, a legislative aide for Supervisor Bevan Dufty] said. But it is still uncertain how much park around the playground will remain open.
First reported by the Uptown Almanac as best we can tell.
∙ Friends of Dolores Park Playground [friendsofdolorespark.org]
∙ Mission Dolores Park Renovation Project [sfgov.org]
∙ Dolores Park Will Close [Mission Loc@l]
∙ $11.7M Dolores Park Renovation Process to Kick-off This Spring [uptownalmanac.com]
I really hope they do something about the irrigation, the park is a huge mud pit most all of the times I’ve been there. Never can find a dry place to sit even on a sunny day.
I can’t believe an entire park is closing for a whole year, feel sorry for the neighbors.
Oh no ! Will this upset the equilibrium of which Dolores Park are You ?
I dont get why it takes a year for design and seven months for planning.
Having been through this process on another park, I actually think the design and planning schedules here are relatively aggressive, especially if there’s community involvement (as I hope there is) in the process. There is a lot of design and (landscape) architectural work needed before it can even go out for bids, with the necessity of back-and-forth discussions between design iterations. It’s a bit like constructing a large building, except that the “building” is a park.
Dave – exactly – I read this morning where they haven’t even started the community input phase on the Dolores Park design. That could go smoothly or rough and bumpy, impacting the overall schedule.
oh the horror! where will the greasy hipsters on bikes go now? hopefully not to the panhandle, we’ve got enough problems of our own.
whatever…
It’s ridiculous to imagine the entire park closing for more than a year. And it’s a public relations nightmare to release this information while the project is in the early planning stages (from what I can see on the graph).
I have to imagine there are reasonable ways to stage the project to keep large grassy areas and paths open, because a lot of the effort will be on the more “built” items in the park. Putting a chainlink fence around the entire park for an extended period of time is ludicrous.
Take a lesson from how streetscape work is done from nearby Valencia Street….they are working on extending sidewalks on a block by block basis, and not doing both sides of the street at once. It’s still a major impact, obviously, but it is mitigated, and time-limited to the greatest degree possible.
Dolores Park is one of the great success stories in urban space use in SF (despite the deplorable conditions of some of its facilities). And it would be a shame to kill off the really wonderful use that happens there.
And where would I get my truffles?
I’m assuming they’re updating the bathrooms as part of this?
I certainly hope so. That bathroom is possibly the grossest bathroom I have ever seen or smelled in my life. I consider it a health hazard.
I would personally rather have them close the whole park down and get the project done ASAP as opposed to a super long staged renovation. But I’m not sure that they can do it ASAP, thus a staged renovation may be better.
They often do this in the midwest. (close down an entire park and bang out the renovation and then re-open quickly). But things are easier to do in the midwest for a multitude of reasons.
this obviously does not mean that the midwest is always better than SF at this sort of thing (trying to thwart an argument here)
Oh no, where will all the greasy hipsters and homeless people go? This is terrible, they might have to go contribute to society until their favorite place to hang out and collect the free benefits to which they’re entitled for doing nothing…
There is a ton of community involvement re Dolores Park. There are like 8 community groups which all focus on a different (or the same?) aspects of the park (safe clean green, friends of the DP playground, dolores park works, and the list goes on and on), and the general hope in the community (as i understand it) is that cleaning up the park will eliminate some of the less desirable things that happen there.
I think the neighbors are probably happy to see the park close for a period – they complain a lot about the noise, trash, people hanging out there.
In fact, Dolores Park is one of the key issues in this neighborhood…
That bathroom is possibly the grossest bathroom I have ever seen or smelled in my life. I consider it a health hazard.
not been to many music festivals or the Indian subcontinent than I take it ex SF-er!
I’d take the city’s time estimate and double it.
This is Just more of the same bs being pumped out to placate the city’s activist class who live ‘2007-land’ despite all that’s changed since
Sure the “Two Year Park Closure” headline is alarming. But please.. the so-called “Project Status Report” own schedule shows Planning has yet to start and a $7mil budget generated from 3 sources that do not even exist!
And then there’s a little thing called history.. The playground history. Now approaching ten years and $3.5 mil (yet 3.5!) of nanny-state dullness. – – If you dare, check out the playgrond renderings..give ya the creeeps.