Sunday Streets

On an incredible spring day with temperatures in the 60s, thousands of people descended on the Embarcadero in San Francisco for the first Sunday Streets of 2010, riding, skating, dancing, hula hooping, and swinging in the coolest bicycle-powered amusement park ride I've ever seen.

As if the lure of playing in the street wasn't enough, city leaders and organizers gathered at City Hall yesterday afternoon to promote the first of nine Sunday Streets events this year, which will run along the Embarcadero up to Fisherman's Wharf [route map PDF] this Sunday.

With just over a week to go before the first Sunday Streets ciclovia of 2010, organizers are working overtime to get all the details squared away for the March 14th street closure, which is expected to draw tens of thousands of cyclists, pedestrians, skaters, and bladers to the Embarcadero and Fisherman's Wharf.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced the dates and locations for nine Sunday Streets events for 2010, starting on March 14th along the Embarcadero and finishing October 24th around Civic Center.  Building off the tremendous success of the events in 2009, Mayor Newsom announced the events will expand to new communities and run for an extra hour, eventually becoming a permanent San Francisco tradition.

Throughout San Francisco's history, from the early street grid to the more recent expansion of freeways, slivers of land that don't fit into the master plans of architects and designers have been cast aside, lumped into a category the Department of Public Works (DPW) refers to as "unaccepted streets." These "paper streets" are mapped but not maintained by any agency. As Chris Carlsson so beautifully chronicled in his Ghost Streets tour, many of these alleys and street stubs are cared for by neighbors and transformed into small gardens or pocket parks.  Many more, however, are forgotten urban scars and latent public space.

Despite a blanket of fog, the last Sunday Streets of 2009 was, from all accounts, a smashing success, one of the most popular so far, with thousands of people enjoying four activity-filled hours of pristine car-free space through Golden Gate Park and the Great Highway.

On the weekend eve of the final Sunday Streets of the year, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the seasonal events creating wide swaths of car-free space will become permanent in San Francisco.

One of the ongoing dilemmas for landscape architects, city planners, and yes, even transit geeks, is the chicken-and-egg question regarding public space. If you build it, will they come? Is there a “public” demanding wider sidewalks, public squares and plazas, pocket parks, and depaving, and who, exactly, are they?

The final Sunday Streets for 2009 has been officially announced, complete with a proclamation from Board of Supervisors President David Chiu declaring September 6, 2009, the day of the event, "Sunday Streets Celebration Day in San Francisco."