Re: [SFPSociety] Digest for sfpsociety@googlegroups.com - 1 update in 1 topic
Robert Hall
San Francisco's Forgotten New Deal Gem Is About to Be Paved Over — Unless We Act Now
*A guest post from Keep Crocker Real (keepcrockerreal.com)*
---
Tucked into the Excelsior neighborhood near San Francisco's southern border, Crocker Amazon Park doesn't look like a place with a hidden back story — until you know what you're looking at.
The mature Monterey cypress trees lining its axis roads? Planted by WPA workers in the 1930s. The open grass meadows stretching nearly 40 acres? Graded and seeded by over 1,000 laborers employed through the New Deal's State Emergency Relief Administration during the Great Depression. The concrete bleacher buildings at the diamond fields? The only WPA-funded structures of their kind ever built in San Francisco. On a quiet weekday morning, a great blue heron picks through the outfield while red-tailed hawks circle overhead. This is a place shaped by history, sustained by community, and alive with the kind of unhurried urban nature that is increasingly rare on the eastern side of this city.
San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, in partnership with the San Francisco Giants and the Giants Community Fund, wants to radically and permanently transform it — and if they succeed, none of what makes Crocker Amazon remarkable will survive.
What San Francisco Built Here
In 1934, Mayor Angelo Rossi broke ground on what would become the city's largest dedicated recreational facility of its era. The project was designed by William G. Merchant (1889–1962), a master architect whose fingerprints are on some of San Francisco's most celebrated civic buildings. Working for the Recreation and Park Commission, Merchant laid out a sophisticated plan: four quadrants anchored by baseball diamonds, an internal axis road system, curvilinear pedestrian pathways, sport courts, and a defining perimeter of trees. Over the following seven years, more than $938,000 in WPA and SERA funding — the largest New Deal investment in any single San Francisco playground — brought his vision to life.
The park served as a beloved community recreation ground through World War II, when the Navy converted it into Fleet Hospital No. 113, a receiving hospital for personnel returning from the Pacific Theater. Tellingly, the Navy preserved Merchant's landscape intact — the fields, the roads, the trees — recognizing that the designed environment itself had restorative value for the men recovering there. After the war, the site returned to its community as a park, and it has remained one ever since.
The City and County of San Francisco's own Cultural Landscape Report, completed in January 2024 by Architectural Resources Group and Denise Bradley Cultural Landscapes, documents Crocker Amazon's historical significance under both National Register Criterion A/1 — for its association with New Deal–era park construction and its WWII naval hospital use — and Criterion C/3, as a distinctive example of the New Deal recreation facility type and the design work of William G. Merchant. The bleacher buildings, the report notes, retain integrity of location and association, and partial integrity of design, materials, and workmanship. This is, by any measure, a site of genuine historic importance.
What SF Rec and Park Plans to Do to It
SF RPD's proposed $45 million renovation — funded half by the Giants Community Fund and half by the City's 2020 Health and Recovery Bond — would fundamentally and irreversibly change this historic park. The plan calls for:
- **Replacing approximately 20 acres of historic natural grass with synthetic artificial turf**, covering three-quarters of the park's active recreation area in plastic;
- **Removing over 100 mature trees**, including the WPA-era cypress and eucalyptus that have defined the park's character for nearly 90 years and form part of the vital green corridor connecting McLaren Park to San Bruno Mountain;
- **Enclosing most of the park with chain-link fencing**, transforming what is today an open, accessible, multi-use community landscape into a restricted baseball complex that will be locked down outside of scheduled league play;
- **Installing stadium lighting** for night games, with light spill into surrounding homes and disruption to the nocturnal patterns of bats, birds, and insects;
- **Expanding the parking lot** from 81 to 145 spaces to accommodate out-of-town school buses and travel teams — not the neighbors who walk here daily.
If this project moves forward on its current timeline — construction targeted for 2027–2028 — the WPA-era trees will be felled, the historic meadows will be entombed under plastic, and the spatial character that Merchant designed nearly a century ago will be gone. Permanently.
This Isn't Just a History Story
The neighborhood surrounding Crocker Amazon is one of San Francisco's most diverse and most underserved. It sits within a formally designated Environmental Justice community — an area facing elevated pollution burden and a high proportion of low-income residents — and within the Pacific Islander Cultural District. The park's users reflect that diversity: Samoan cricketers, Thai Chi practitioners, senior walking groups, families picnicking on the open lawns, kids watching hawks, community groups hosting events for hundreds of neighbors at a time.
SF RPD's plan would take the park away from all of them. Baseball is played from mid-February to May. The rest of the year — and for all non-baseball users even during the season — the fenced, plastic turfed complex would simply be closed. This is a plan that’s been in the works since 2021 with no community involvement until 2025.
The plastic turf itself poses serious health and environmental risks that fall disproportionately on this already-burdened community: PFAS "forever chemicals" and microplastics leaching into stormwater blended with the municipal water supply; toxic volatile organic compounds off-gassing in the summer heat; surface temperatures up to 40-70°F hotter than natural grass, creating heat hazards for the children playing on them. With the historic tall trees felled, shade will be at a premium. Los Angeles, New York City, Maine, and Massachusetts have all passed bans or moratoriums on new artificial turf installations. San Francisco is moving in the opposite direction, and it's communities like Crocker Amazon that pay the price.
The Giants, for their part, play on natural grass. So do 25 of the 30 MLB teams. The NFL Players Association has formally recommended replacing all artificial turf with natural grass. The "gift" being offered to this neighborhood is one that no professional athlete would accept for themselves.
What Preservationists Can Do
Crocker Amazon does not have the institutional advocates that protect the landmarks downtown. It has a grassroots group of neighbors — Keep Crocker Real — and it has the broader preservation community: people who understand what it means when a 90-year-old designed landscape is about to be demolished in the name of progress.
Here's how you can help before it's too late:
**1. Contact the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission.**
The HPC has jurisdiction under Article 10 of the Planning Code — the citywide framework for landmark designation of buildings, sites, and landscape features. We are calling on the Commission to place Crocker Amazon on its agenda, assess the site's eligibility for City Landmark designation, and advise SF RPD that demolishing these character-defining features would be inconsistent with the Secretary of the Interior's Standards. Email the Commission Secretary at Commission...@sfgov.org and CC the Landmark Designation Program at CPC.La...@sfgov.org.
**2. Contact your Supervisor and the Mayor.**
District 11 Supervisor Chyanne Chen has acknowledged community concerns and called for additional public forums. Mayor Daniel Lurie's office needs to hear from San Franciscans citywide that this matters. The Board of Supervisors has final approval authority over the project — their votes will decide whether Crocker Amazon is saved or demolished.
**3. Sign the Keep Crocker Real petition.**
Our petition calling on the Supervisors, Rec & Park, and the Giants to stop the artificial turf plan and pursue a natural grass solution is available at **www.keepcrockerreal.com**. Every signature counts.
**4. Attend the public hearings.**
The project still requires approval from the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission and the Board of Supervisors. When hearings are scheduled, showing up matters. Sign up for updates at keepcrockerreal.com to be notified when hearings are announced.
**5. Spread the word.**
Most San Franciscans — including most people in the surrounding neighborhood — don't yet know what is being proposed for Crocker Amazon. Share this post. Talk to your neighbors, your colleagues, your preservation networks. The people who built this park with their hands during the Great Depression couldn't have imagined that it would one day need to be defended. But here we are.
---
Crocker Amazon Playground has survived the Depression, a World War, and nine decades of San Francisco's relentless cycles of change. It has done so because the people who designed it and built it, and the communities who have used it ever since, understood that a park is not just a field. It is a record of who we were, and a gift to who we might become.
San Francisco Recreation and Park's proposal would erase that record — trading 90 years of living history for plastic grass and chain-link fences. We believe San Francisco can and must do better by this community.
*Keep Crocker Real is a grassroots organization of San Francisco residents dedicated to preserving Crocker Amazon Park as an open, accessible, multi-use community space. Visit us at keepcrockerreal.com.*
On Apr 6, 2026, at 3:10 AM, sfpso...@googlegroups.com wrote:
- News: The Clay Theater may be coming back - 1 Update
Andrea Jesse <2sueno...@gmail.com>: Apr 05 03:48PM -0700
https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/clay-theater-san-francisco-22185916.phpPlan
to revive S.F.’s Clay Theatre clears key hurdle
By Laura Waxmann <https://www.sfchronicle.com/author/laura-waxmann/>,Staff
WriterApril 3, 2026
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=137086563877087&link=ht tps%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2Frealestate%2Farticle%2Fclay-theater-san-francisco-22185916.php%3Futm_campaign%3DCMS%2520Sharing%2520Tools%2520(Premium)%26utm_source%3Dfacebook.com%26utm_medium%3Dreferral&name=After%20backlash%2C%20plan%20to%20revive%20S.F.%E2%80%99s%20Clay%20Theatre%20clears%20key%20hurdle%20on%20Fillmore&description=A%20venture%20capitalist%20secured%20a%20key%20endorsement%20this%20week%20for%20the%20first%20of%20several%20San%20Francisco%20properties%20he%20aims%20to%20revitalize%3A%20the%20shuttered%20Clay%20Theatre.&picture=https%3A%2F%2Fs.hdnux.com%2Fphotos%2F01%2F42%2F03%2F62%2F25705654%2F6%2FrawImage.jpg&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfchronicle.com%2Frealestate%2Farticle%2Fclay-theater-san-francisco-22185916.php%3Futm_campaign%3DCMS%2520Sharing%2520Tools%2520(Premium)%26utm_source%3DUTMSOURCE%26utm_medium%3DUTMMEDIUM>
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After more than two years of neighborhood anticipation, quiet deal-making
and public backlash over a plan to reshape a stretch of Fillmore Street
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-investor-fillmore-businesses-19659568.php>
in
Pacific Heights, venture capitalist Neil Mehta
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/neil-mehta-fillmore-street-revitalization-20285063.php>
secured
a key endorsement this week for the first of several properties he aims to
revitalize: the shuttered Clay Theatre.
San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission on Wednesday approved
plans to restore the single-screen movie house, which Mehta’s team says
could reopen early next year.
The decision comes about a week after a Mehta-linked fund, Friends of
Fillmore LP, raised $50 million to advance the broader Upper Fillmore
Revitalization Project, or UFRP, public records show.
The new fund will “continue our work of investing nonprofit dollars with a
focus on small business grants and investments, including an investment in
the Clay Theatre,” Cody Allen, UFRP’s executive director and Mehta’s
associate, confirmed to the Chronicle. Mehta and Allen have repeatedly
described UFRP itself as a nonprofit initiative, though the Chronicle has
not been able to verify that claim through public filings.
Previous reports stated that the Clay Theatre’s renovation was expected to
cost $5 million. Allen did not respond to inquiries about whether UFRP
plans to purchase more real estate on Fillmore Street. Mehta has said in
response to backlash over his revitalization project that he plans to
provide financial support to new businesses that his team brings into his
buildings on the corridor, including below-market-rate leases
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-clay-theater-revitalization-fillmore-21055661.php>
.
The funding infusion represents the second significant capital raised
toward the sweeping project, which so far has involved entities connected
to Mehta purchasing half a dozen properties on three blocks of Fillmore
between Clay and Pine streets, including the forsaken theater. The
Chronicle previously reported that a private equity fund called Aegis
Reserve Partners LP raised $100 million from a single undisclosed
investor — likely Mehta, who has confirmed publicly that he is funding the
effort — in January 2024.
That same month, a limited liability company registered to Allen purchased
the theater for $11 million, with a patchwork of similarly stealthy
companies buying five other aging buildings on the retail corridor in
subsequent months, spending close to $40 million in the process.
Together, the real estate acquisitions form the backbone of UFRP, an
ambitious effort to reposition Upper Fillmore as a more cohesive retail and
cultural district, with a mix of legacy businesses, new storefronts and
community-oriented spaces. Supporters say the strategy could invigorate a
corridor that has struggled with vacancies in recent years, while critics
have raised concerns about transparency, rising rents and the potential
displacement of longstanding neighborhood merchants. At least one
restaurant that operated for decades in a building purchased by Mehta
shuttered
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/vc-hostile-takeover-fillmore-neighborhood-19719260.php>
when
its lease was not renewed, and its space remains vacant, while two other
businesses closed due to expiring leases or unknown reasons after their
buildings were purchased.
At Wednesday’s hearing, that broader debate gave way, at least momentarily,
to widespread support for the Clay Theatre’s revival. Commissioners and
public speakers alike voiced strong backing for the rehabilitation plans,
with many framing the restoration of the historic cinema, which has been
closed since 2020, as a clear point of consensus in a sometimes contentious
redevelopment effort.
Commissioner Gayle Tsern Strang thanked Allen for being “receptive” to
feedback from the commission, a sentiment that Commissioner Dan Baroni
shared. He characterized the stakeholder engagement conducted in recent
months as an “excellent sign of the future that you have with this project
and its future in the community.”
The renovation aims to bring the Clay back as a single-screen theater while
updating it for modern use. Plans call for restoring its historic facade
and signage, replacing the current storefront with a more contemporary
system, and making modest exterior changes, including new cladding, windows
and rooftop equipment.
Inside, the theater would get upgraded lobby and auditorium spaces, a new
balcony level, an elevator and added amenities like a new kitchen and
upstairs bathroom. The design also preserves key historic elements — like
the curved ceilings and sloped auditorium floor — even as the stage area is
reworked to accommodate modern projection and sound systems.
Mehta’s team has tapped veteran cinema curator Ted Gerike
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/realestate/article/sf-clay-theater-revitalization-fillmore-21055661.php>
to
run the Clay, which is expected to offer a mix of programming once it
reopens — including more than 500 screenings a year with 4K digital and
35 mm projection, a slate of first‑run films and repertory classics, live
events and filmmaker talks, and a bookstore‑style concession area designed
to make the venue a community destination, not just a movie house.
Allen said during Wednesday’s hearing that the theater was purchased with
the “express purpose of returning it to its former glory as a neighborhood
theater and the cultural cornerstone of the upper Fillmore area.”
In a message to the Chronicle, Allen said that, in the coming weeks, the
team will file for building permits and hopes to “start building as soon as
possible.”
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