San Francisco’s newest park, Bayfront Park, is an exquisite exercise in upcycling … repurposing old parts of the Bay Bridge into handrails, canopies, and more.
San Francisco is in its novel public greenspace era. Following this weekend’s grand opening of India Basin Park — a $220 million biophilic asset to the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood — Tuesday saw the ribbon cut for Bayfront Park with local notables in tow.
Called Bayfront Park, the sloping 5.5-acre greenspace nestled next to the San Francisco Bay opened today, October 22nd, offering pathways directly across from the multi-use arena that, just two nights prior, hosted Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s Sweat Tour. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the park also saw the reintroduction of retired rusted steel support beams once used on the Bay Bridge’s original eastern span that were disassembled and upgraded in 2016.
The sprawling waterfront space is owned and managed by the Port of San Francisco, the property of which must comply with San Francisco’s practices around future sea level rise. Per the newspaper, the sea around Bayfront Park is expected to rise as much as 14.5 feet by 2100 — a waterline that will only be exaggerated (and perhaps surpassed) during king tides.
Bayfront Park hosts a long list of niceties and outdoor decor in line with environmental sustainability.
All of the landscaping in and around the park includes drought-resistant flora and flower and plant beds were designed around sea level rise; repurposed steel from the defunct section of the Bay Ridge was used to construct handrails along waterway’s viewing vistas and pedestrian bridge, bases for the parks numerous picnic benches and tables, and elsewhere — like the towering entryway canopies — throughout the greenspace; a massive, rust-ridden anchor now sits along the waterfront as a bit of brutalist public art.
Mayor Breed, who was among the public notables in attendance for the grand opening, commented that the park was “designed with flexible spaces for gathering and recreation” and features BBQ pits for public use that are backdropped by spellbinding views of the San Francisco Bay.
The design studio behind Bayfront Park, Surfacedesign Inc., was granted access to the eastern part of the Bay Bridge when it was being torn down and allowed to harvest the steel beams and antiquated parts they would later repurpose for the park. “It was crazy being on the bridge picking steel out,” Surfacedesign partner James Lord told the Chronicle. “We handpicked it from the trusses.”
At $32 million, the construction of Bayfront Park has one of the most expensive per-acre costs of development for a City park in recent memory; at $5.8 million per acre, Bayfront Park dwarfs India Basin Park’s cost-per-acre development figure of $3.3 million.
But these new views and access to Mother Nature for the millions of people expected to come to and from the Chase Center over the next three years? Invaluable.
It has been quite awhile since I lived in The City yet Hunters Point was known for being a place to avoid due to High Crime in this area. I hope the area is far different than it once was.