A Digital Journal - San Francisco Public Works
In the Works
February 2024
Public Works helped usher in the Year of the Dragon with work in Chinatown that often began pre-dawn and continued deep into the night – steam cleaning sidewalks and alleyways, sweeping up litter, wiping out graffiti and adding a fresh coat of paint to decorative lamp posts – to ready the historic neighborhood for its busiest holiday season of the year.
FEATURE STORIES
Chinatown Spruce Up Ushers
in the Year of the Dragon
Public Works crews have been out in force in Chinatown throughout the month of February for our annual deep-cleaning and beautification operation during the Lunar New Year holiday season.
New Golden Gate Park Golf Course Clubhouse Hits an Ace
City officials, community leaders and golf enthusiasts gathered for the grand opening of the new Golden Gate Golf Course Clubhouse.
Storm Response!
The 6-plus inches of rain that fell in San Francisco this month kept our Operations teams busy handling storm-related incidents.
#Love Our City
Nearly 100 volunteers jumped into action for February’s Love Our City: Neighborhood Beautification Day event that boasted multiple greening and cleaning projects in Duboce Triangle, Diamond Heights, Glen Park and other District 8 neighborhoods.
Black History Month:
Inspired and Inspiring
February marks Black History Month, which Public Works began celebrating in 2016 as a means of promoting cultural understanding and Black heritage.
Hang Ah Street, a Chinatown alleyway, gets a deep clean before the start of the Lunar New Year.
Chinatown Spruce Up
Ushers
in the
Year of the
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Public Works crews have been out in force in Chinatown throughout the month of February for our annual deep-cleaning and beautification operation during the Lunar New Year holiday season, which draws big crowds to the historic neighborhood for a panoply of shopping, eating and cultural festivities.
Chinatown’s alleyways serve an important role in the high-density neighborhood: part travel corridor, part open space. Our cleaning crews give them an extra scrub-down leading up to the Lunar New Year season.
Crews provide courtesy graffiti removal on private property during the Lunar New Year season.
The Year of the Dragon work often began pre-dawn and continued deep into the night – steam cleaning sidewalks and alleyways, sweeping up litter and wiping out graffiti on a daily basis – to ready the historic neighborhood for its busiest holiday season of the year.
As dawn breaks, the Dragon Gate at the southern edge of Chinatown gets a thorough washdown.
Public Works also runs more specialized operations, including power-washing the iconic Dragon Gate at Bush Street and Grant Avenue and touching up the paint on the three-color decorative dragon lamp posts along Grant Avenue.
Our pro painters touch up the colorful lamp posts that line Grant Avenue in Chinatown.
Our street repair team conducted a proactive pothole sweep to ready the roads for the Chinese New Year Parade, which followed a roughly 1.3-mile route that started at Second and Market streets, snaked around Union Square and Chinatown and wrapped up at Kearny Street and Columbus Avenue.
The parade, which took place on Feb. 24, is one of our largest event cleanup operations of the year and calls for a highly choreographed effort. We deployed more than three dozen employees, broken up into three teams.
Part of the Public Works team assigned to the Chinese New Year Parade operation, which lasts deep into the night.
Assistant Superintendent Jonathan Vaing (photo, left) goes over the parade plan with street cleaning supervisors. After the last float takes off, our fleet of street cleaning trucks rolls into action (video, right).
They used push brooms, grabbers, rakes, shovels and leaf blowers to clean up water bottles, spent firecrackers, food wrappers, lost shoes and other detritus left behind by those in the parade and those watching. We then sent through mechanical sweeper trucks, followed by flusher trucks to wash down the streets.
The cleanup wrapped up before dawn, less than 12 hours after the first parade contingent took off.
A flusher truck serves as the tail of the street-cleaning operation, with a thorough washdown of the road.
It’s traditional before the New Year to do a deep cleaning to get rid of any bad luck before starting fresh. Our team at Public Works takes tremendous pride in helping keep the custom alive and ensure that Chinatown remains one of the most vibrant and dynamic neighborhoods, not only in San Francisco but the world.
A welcome sign greets visitors to the new Golden Gate Park Golf Course Clubhouse.
New Golden Gate Park Golf Course Clubhouse Hits an Ace
Against a backdrop of overcast skies and neatly manicured greens, scores of City officials, community leaders and golf enthusiasts gathered for the grand opening of the new Golden Gate Golf Course Clubhouse this month – celebrating the unveiling of the 1,560-square-foot facility at the west end of San Francisco’s largest park.
Built from the ground up, the completely redesigned clubhouse replaces a previous one that was badly damaged in a fire in 2018 and had to be demolished. Public Works handled the project design, engineering and construction management on behalf of Rec and Park.
To applause from the crowd, Mayor London Breed – who helped cut the green ribbon at the Feb. 16 event – lauded the work of Public Works and Rec and Park staff and everyone else involved in the project.
“This is when San Francisco works at its absolute best and I couldn't be more proud to be with all of you here today to celebrate this extraordinary milestone,” she said.
Mayor London Breed leads the ribbon cutting at the clubhouse's grand opening.
The new clubhouse features a multifunctional lounge, enhanced public restrooms, a new golf pro shop, food and beverage concessions, additional storage space and an outdoor patio with seating that overlooks the freshly refurbished course. Additional improvements include two accessible parking spaces and an ADA pathway that connects the outdoor patio to the putting greens and driving range.
The popular public nine-hole course closed temporarily last year, as construction on the $5.9 million clubhouse project got underway. It was financed by the City's Open Space Fund, General Fund and 2020 Health and Recovery Bond.
To plan for a tighter construction schedule on the project and have it blend in seamlessly with the park’s natural beauty, Public Works architects opted for a mass timber roof system. The roof beams and roof decking were erected in just a few days.
Some of the wood inside the clubhouse was inspired by a Japanese technique that gives it a charred look.
Mass timber construction – a building technique gaining popularity because it is more environmentally friendly than traditional steel and cement projects – can handle quicker turnarounds because the parts arrive in huge, prefabricated slabs that are then put in place by crane or forklift.
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“They’re screwed together like an Erector Set and everything fits nicely,” said Paul De Freitas, the Public Works project architect.
The new clubhouse is a hybrid mass timber building, combining steel columns with a cross-laminated timber roof, glulam roof beams and wood frame shear walls for the lateral system. It uses Douglas fir.
“The project team hit a hole in one with the new clubhouse,” said Public Works Director Carla Short. “The design and materials incorporate smart green-building practices, such as the use of climate-conscious mass timber, and the building and patio serves as a welcoming home base for golfers before and after they play a round.”
City officials, community leaders and golf enthusiasts mingle after the clubhouse's ribbon cutting.
From the shape to the construction material, Public Works architects designing the building drew inspiration from the clubhouse’s distinctive surroundings. The rolling topography of Golden Gate Park and the proximity to the Pacific Ocean, for instance, helped influence the contours of the butterfly roof.
“It just kind of continues this undulating effect coming from the ocean into the park,” said Eric Fura, a Public Works architect who worked on the project.
When approaching the building from the parking lot, you’d be looking at what you’d consider to be the backside of the facility, Fura explained. But that side is also the front of the building, because it then opens up out to the golf course on the other side, a generous glass façade offering views of the course and helping illuminate the clubhouse’s interior.
“So there really isn't a front or back of the building,” Fura said.
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The building’s butterfly roof not only complements the landscape, it also discreetly collects rainwater by funneling it toward the bottom of its V-shape and then directing it toward the roof’s edge where it flows into gutters that are concealed within the wall. It then directly goes into the City’s stormwater system.
The idea, Fura said, was to shroud all the mechanical functions of the building. That includes metal security rolldown shutters on the outside and remote-controlled roller blinds for the windows on the inside – both hidden within a transom that runs along the midsection of the building.
“So everything is concealed within this one little area,” Fura said.
White dots on the clubhouse windows keep birds safe.
Not only do the building’s glass façade and windows – which are marked with little white dots to make them bird-safe – help maximize the view, they also offset the facility’s relatively limited footprint.
“We wanted to make it feel like it was bigger than it is,” Fura said.
That’s also why architects opted for an expansive patio outside of the glass front – giving it the feel of one big space even though one part is outdoors and one is indoors.
The clubhouse’s charcoal-colored elements, meanwhile, are a throwback to the reason the project exists in the first place – the old facility burned down. Some of the wood on the inside was inspired by a Japanese technique called shou sugi ban – known in Japan as yaki sugi-ita (or yakisugi) – that finishes wood by charring it.
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The color palette on the building’s outside looks to evoke the same feel.
“It's sort of a moody setting, because it's so foggy out at that point of the park that it just felt appropriate to be sort of dark,” Fura said, adding that the lighter wood highlighting the underside of the cross-laminated timber roof plays off of the park’s Monterey cypress trees.
The golf course – one of six public golf courses in the Rec and Park portfolio – and the clubhouse site share a rich history.
The municipal golf course and previous clubhouse were both built in 1951. The course’s original design incorporated the surrounding cypress trees and was heavily influenced by the natural rolling sand dunes. Recently, Golf Magazine rated the course “among the finest par-3 courses in the country.”
But once upon a time, the site was considered for a drastically different project.
“The original plan was for this to be the Palace of Fine Arts,” Rec and Park General Manager Phil Ginsburg told attendees at the clubhouse’s ribbon-cutting ceremony. “Didn’t happen. Instead, the plan was to make it a golf course.”
And though construction began in the early 1910s, the golf course wouldn’t open for about another 40 years.
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A longtime golf club member takes a ceremonial swing.
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For the past decade, First Tee San Francisco, a nonprofit organization that empowers youth with life and social skills through golf, has operated the course. The organization provides programming for underserved youth.
“Golden Gate Park Golf Course is an important program location for First Tee - San Francisco. It has been and will continue to be a vital resource in our ongoing efforts to provide impactful programs for underserved children,” said First Tee – San Francisco Executive Director Dan Burke. “Investing significant funds to upgrade the facilities for the benefit of our participants and the San Francisco community is a win-win for so many today and for generations to come.”
An arborist cuts up a storm-toppled street tree on Forest Side Avenue in West Portal.
Storm Response!
The series of winter storms that swept through San Francisco in February opened potholes, downed trees and led to localized flooding – unfortunately a common occurrence during heavy rains and high winds but nothing our skilled and determined crews can’t handle.
The 6-plus inches of rain that fell in San Francisco this month kept our Operations teams busy handling storm-related incidents.
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Street repair crews patched 990 potholes and street cleaners responded to 228 blocked storm drains or flooded intersections that needed clearing.
A mudslide on a hillside above Market Street near 18th Street brought down this towering tree on Feb. 4.
Our tree crews responded to 439 service orders for trees that toppled over or lost large branches, in some cases blocking roads, bringing down overhead wires or landing on cars. While many folks hunkered down when the weather was at its worst, our chainsaw-wielding arborists climbed high in bucket trucks amid howling winds and torrential downpours to remove hazardous trees and limbs.
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The February storms were far from the worst we’ve seen in recent years, but they still caused damage and inconveniences. When the service requests come in at a breakneck pace, the dispatchers, on-duty supervisors and field staff triage the incidents, giving highest priority to those that pose an immediate safety risk or shut down a transit corridor with no easy detours available. And while everyone wants the problems fixed immediately, our top priority is to keep our crews and the public safe.
We’re not yet through the rainy season, but when the next storm hits, we’ll be ready to respond.
Mother Nature works her magic, with a splendacious rainbow arching over the City on Feb. 1.
Volunteers, in orange vests, work alongside Public Works staff to plant street trees.
#LoveOurCity
Nearly 100 volunteers jumped into action for February’s Love Our City: Neighborhood Beautification Day event that boasted multiple greening and cleaning projects in Duboce Triangle, Diamond Heights, Glen Park and other District 8 neighborhoods.
With the help of our tree, landscape, graffiti, street cleaning and community engagement crews, volunteers planted trees, weeded medians, wiped out tags and worked hard to make the neighborhoods even more welcoming. A big thanks to District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman for joining us.
The Diamond Heights Boulevard median gets weeded and fresh mulch during February’s Neighborhood Beautification Day.
Next month, on Saturday, March 9, we’ll be in the Tenderloin, Haight, Western Addition and surrounding District 5 neighborhoods for our yearly Arbor Day celebration. We’ll be planting 100 trees – an ambitious undertaking to help beautify neighborhoods and combat climate change with the trees’ natural ability to sequester carbon.
Some of the tree species that we will plant include Lophostemon confertus, Lyonothamnus floribundus aspleniifolius and Magnolia grandiflora.
Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, black jacket, center, joins forces with volunteers and Public Works staff to kick off the District 8 greening and cleaning workday.
Arbor Day also means free family fun with our Arbor Day Fair. It will feature exciting hands-on activities, including bucket truck rides and building and planting flower boxes as well as educational opportunities centered around urban environmentalism.
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The Arbor Day Fair will be held at New Traditions Elementary Schoolyard, 2050 Hayes St., and will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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As the official steward of San Francisco’s 125,000-plus street trees, Arbor Day is one of our favorite days of the year at Public Works.
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We hope you can join us.
Black History Month:
Inspired and Inspiring
February marks Black History Month, an annual observance to highlight the contributions of Black Americans. As an organization, Public Works began celebrating Black History Month in 2016 as a means of promoting cultural understanding and Black heritage.
Over the past eight years, we have featured significant contributions of Black people in the development and advancement of the global community through various sectors, such as engineering, architecture and creative invention. The department’s staff-led Black History Month Committee produced a wonderful roster of events this year, with the theme: African Americans and the Arts.
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Clockwise from top: Alvin Ailey, Josephine Baker, Selma Burke, John Lee Hooker
A highlight has been the daily “Did You Know” email that lands in employee inboxes first thing in the morning, where we get to learn more about Josephine Baker, Melvin Simmons, Alvin Ailey and others.
There’s also been an offering of joint in-person and virtual lunch-time talks throughout the month featuring special guests – among them local civil rights leader, the Rev. Arnold Townsend; jazz musician Sam Peoples, Jr.; artist and curator Karen Seneferu.
Black History Month is just one of our many heritage month initiatives – organized by Public Works staff – that lift us up individually and collectively, and advance a broader understanding of our diverse communities.