Sunday Streets

Head out to the Avenues for some car-free action this weekend at Sunday Streets in Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway. Don't forget: the route through Golden Gate Park is slightly different this year. At Transverse Drive, the route switches over from John F. Kennedy Drive to Martin Luther King along the western section.

The fifth and biggest year of Sunday Streets launches at the Embarcadero this weekend, opening up the street for everyone to enjoy a car-free waterfront from Fisherman's Wharf to Mission Bay.

Sunday Streets keeps on growing, with 10 car-free events coming to neighborhoods around the city this year.

The 2011 slate of Sunday Streets wraps up this weekend in the Mission District, bringing car-free space back to the ever-popular Valencia and 24th Street route. This spring, an estimated 25,000 people came out for the year's first installment of Sunday Streets in the Mission.

San Francisco's Grant Avenue, the city's oldest street, was opened to pedestrians only yesterday in a milestone Sunday Streets event that drew thousands of people to the historic neighborhoods of Chinatown and North Beach on a sunny, 74-degree day. The city's first walking Sunday Streets on a thoroughfare that seems like one of the most ideal streets to pedestrianize was clearly a hit.

An estimated 10,000 people turned out to celebrate Sunday Streets in the Western Addition, NOPA, Fillmore and Alamo Square neighborhoods yesterday. By all indications, the event was a success, and the weather, well, perfect. And we're in for another treat this week.

Sunday Streets will grace the streets of Western Addition again this weekend, and bring lots of car-free activities to the Fillmore, NOPA and Alama Square neighborhoods. The event will coincide with International Artists Week, and promises to be great fun!

Mary San George was sitting outside her neighborhood flower store yesterday, facing the historic residential high-rise building on O'Farrell Street where she has lived for 27 years, and marveling at something she very rarely gets to experience in her Tenderloin neighborhood: a street full of people instead of cars.

Clear skies are in the forecast this weekend for the return of Sunday Streets to the Civic Center and Tenderloin neighborhoods after it was rained out last year. Families, merchants, and San Franciscans of all ages are geared up to experience the first dry afternoon of car-free space to play in on Golden Gate Avenue, Polk, Ellis, Jones, and O'Farrell streets.