[timbad]

India Basin Park breaking ground

S.F. is about to break ground on the most expensive park in city history

Sam Whiting
Updated: June 17, 2021

The old boatyard known as 900 Innes in Bayview-Hunters Point in San Francisco has been locked up and fenced off for 30 years.

But on Tuesday, Recreation and Park Department general manager Phil Ginsburg drove through the gate, exited his car and yelled out, “It’s really happening!” Then he yelled it three more times to the gathered park and construction staff, adding emphasis with each repetition.

What has him excited is the forthcoming India Basin Park, which will transform 900 Innes into the centerpiece of a chain of parks and easements linking 1.7 miles of southeastern shoreline and 64 acres of open space. The project has been in the planning stages for at least 10 years and is budgeted at $140 million, the largest for a city park project, ever, according to Ginsburg.



“This is the most important park project in modern San Francisco history,” he said...

About $29 million in funding for the park will come from a 2020 San Francisco bond measure, and $25 million more comes from an allocation from the state budget. The Pritzker family — heirs to the Hyatt Hotel fortune — also donated $25 million. The remaining $60 million will be covered by grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Bay Restoration Authority, the state and the city itself. Private philanthropy has chipped in $1 million already with a major campaign in the rollout process.

The waterfront renovation will be completed in 2025, at which point “you will be able to walk in a park from the tip of Heron’s Head (owned by the Port of San Francisco) to Northside Park,” Ginsburg said, referencing the final parcel at the entrance to the Hunters Point Shipyard condo development. “The design is extraordinary. It will have waterfront access, which has always been lacking in this community.”...

One group that got access were the filmmakers of “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” a critically acclaimed feature which shot scenes on the broken-down piers at 900 Innes in order to convey the lost jobs in the shipyards and the urban decay left behind when the yards closed.

Site preparation is expected to take until the end of 2021, and then construction of the park will begin. ...

The system will open in three phases, with the first being 900 Innes, in 2023. The shipwright’s cottage will become a welcome center leading to a cove of paths, decks and boardwalks extending past a gravel shoreline.

Once 900 Innes opens, the adjacent India Basin Shoreline Park, which opened in 2003, will close for a complete makeover to match its neighbor. In the end, a rusted chain-link fence separating the two properties will be removed and the two parks will be joined as one.


A rendering of the refurbished India Basin Shoreline Park, which opened in 2000. Courtesy Gustafson Guthrie Nichol design

There will be entrances on Hunters Point Boulevard and on Innes Avenue. It can be confusing and the best way to avoid getting lost is to ride the outbound 19-Polk, which goes right past both entrances. Another way will be to look for the familiar concrete letters that once spelled out India Basin Industrial Park on the corner of Third and Evans streets.

Erected in 1978 and taken down last year, those 24 individual sculptures were donated to Rec and Park and put in storage. The letters forming the word “Industrial” won’t make the cut, but the other letters will be reset along Hunters Point Boulevard and spell out “India Basin Park” in a sign 50 feet long and 6 feet tall.