Neighborhood coalition plans mural and ice cream pop-up as street-closure plans face delays on top of delays
by ELENI BALAKRISHNAN July 15, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
The Golden Gate Greenway, a one-block stretch of Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, was envisioned as a vibrant, car-lite community space in one of the most densely populated, treeless and park-poor neighborhoods in the city.
Renderings from 2022 show rows of tree-shaded benches for locals to sit and enjoy fresh air in a series of parklets.
The Greenway would be closed to most cars on the block between Leavenworth and Jones streets, and anyone could take a seat or a stroll: office workers, residents of the 111 Jones St. apartments, seniors from Vera Haile Senior Housing, and parents and children going to and from De Marillac Academy, Golden Gate Early Learning Center, Wu Yee Children’s Services and 826 Valencia’s Tenderloin location.
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Three years later, the “green” in the Greenway’s name remains aspirational. It’s closed to traffic from 6 a.m to 6 p.m. daily, but more than $2 million allocated by the city and a pending federal grant has gone unspent. Today, with minimal shade and no place to sit, the Greenway is mostly an empty road and truck-loading zone.
The project leaders’ main priority, for now, has scaled back to street activations like pop-up events and, in the future, a mural.
“This work requires experimentation,” said Larry Kwan, the CEO of St. Anthony’s, the nonprofit leading the project. “People haven’t paid attention to the neighborhood … You need to be here and try, and see what works.”
In San Francisco, and in the Tenderloin in particular, those awaiting the Greenway say even small projects can become never-ending challenges.
Nils Behnke, the former St. Anthony’s CEO who saw the first few years of the project from its inception, called it “death by a thousand cuts;” permits and city funds are slow to come, community meetings take time, and the Tenderloin’s built environment offers some particular challenges.
Neighborhood conditions force pivot in plans
The first version of the Greenway began during the pandemic in 2020. Then, the block was closed off to serve as a temporary space for St. Anthony’s and other organizations to offer services like food distribution and COVID-19 testing.
In December 2021, then-Mayor London Breed declared a state of emergency in the Tenderloin, and soon after allocated $3.5 million toward neighborhood programs, including $200,000 to build three parklets for the Greenway.
The new trees never materialized. Greenway representatives were told by the Bureau of Urban Forestry that most of the Tenderloin, despite having some of the lowest tree coverage in the city, has no capacity for digging new tree wells.
A major challenge, according to Chris Buck from the bureau, are basements extending under sidewalks, which are common in the city’s downtown and oldest neighborhoods.
The next best thing is to add trees in above-ground planters.
The fire department stalled the initial parklet plans in 2022, reportedly refusing to sign off on the widely supported project, at least in part because of street-clearance requirements for emergency vehicles.
Finally, the coalition of nonprofits operating on the Greenway in 2024 launched a pilot project with a single parklet, adding bench seating surrounded by plants at Golden Gate Avenue and Jones Street.
But the parklet often filled with people openly using drugs and blocking the sidewalk, according to workers on the Greenway.
“We couldn’t control for conditions at night,” said Geoffrey McFarland, the senior community engagement manager for St. Anthony’s, who leads the Greenway coalition, explaining why the community no longer wants parklets with permanent seating on the greenway.
“It was just unsafe, unhelpful, congregating at night, so it wasn’t serving the purpose of keeping the street green, clean and safe.”
Richard Rose, one of St. Anthony’s security and outreach workers, said people would lift the wooden planks off the benches to stash drugs and paraphernalia. Residents at the nearby apartment building complained.
Conditions got so bad that the city blocked access to the parklet in April by surrounding it with gates, McFarland said.
The parklet was deemed a failure and, earlier this month, it was taken down. Ironically, all that remains along the side of 111 Jones St. today is a gate the city uses to deter gathering and loitering.
As we spoke, Rose noticed someone paused on the sidewalk looking at their phone, and interrupted our conversation to tell them to move along. It might have looked innocuous, he said, but the person was known to openly consume drugs in the vicinity.
Forward progress?
The main objective to limit traffic on the Greenway has been put on the back burner as the necessary environmental review takes place. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson Erica Kato said that won’t be complete until 2026.
In the meantime, promises of $1.35 million from the San Francisco County Transportation Authority and a street safety federal grant of $1 million in 2023 for the road work remain on hold.
This year, McFarland said, the plan is to test smaller-scale ideas — a mural, tree planters, lights and other “activations” of the area — before the real infrastructure work can begin. Those, too, will likely cost tens of thousands of dollars.
St. Anthony’s hopes to spend $90,000 in unused parklet funds to buy movable tables and chairs that can be put out during the day, but taken back and locked up during the evening.
That means residents and visitors can use the space, hosting events like the monthly Read, Ride, Explore event for children or the yearly Eid Street Fair, but the area will return to functioning as a regular street at night.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood hopes to draw neighborhood businesses to hold pop-up markets on the Greenway, both to support them and create a better image for the neighborhood, similar to the way the skate park has helped to transform nearby UN plaza during the day.
Later this summer, Hometown Creamery will park an ice-cream truck on the block on Thursdays for a temporary pop-up, according to St. Anthony’s.
A stopgap to closing the road will be a mural painted on the asphalt road to more visibly mark the area as a safe gathering space. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not as easy as it sounds.
Mahmood’s office is working to create a new permit for the mural in the middle of the street. It is, says Mahmood, not straightforward; what he describes as “no-man’s land” in the municipal code.
It would seem simple enough to paint a mural on a street that is already closed to traffic for most of the day, but so far, similar murals have only been permitted for streets that are officially designated as “slow streets.” The Greenway is still officially a mixed residential-commercial corridor.
“We’re going to focus on beautification of the street and continued activations of the street to hold the street closure,” said McFarland, who hopes the mural will be complete by October. “We truly believe it will make everything else roll out better.”
At least in the interim, he said, studies have found that asphalt art can slow traffic, too.
“The need is certainly there, and the idea is good,” said Behnke, formerly of St. Anthony’s, of creating community-focused open space in the Tenderloin. “Maybe the first iteration … didn’t quite get there. Should we therefore give up? I don’t think so.”
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ELENI BALAKRISHNAN
Eleni reports on policing and criminal justice in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @miss_elenius.More by Eleni Balakrishnan
