potrero view

March 2010

GreenTrustSF Champions Eco-Friendly Vision for Dogpatch

By Lori Higa

Dogpatch is an eclectic mix of historically significant waterfront industrial structures, stately Victorians, humble shipyard worker cottages, and gleaming new live-work lofts and condominiums.  The neighborhood has been ground zero for locals versus developer fights for decades.   Now, with the massively-scaled University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Mission Bay research and medical complex at its doorstep, Dogpatch residents are working to address the challenges associated with living in an urban area.  

Founded in 2006, GreenTrustSF (GTSF) is leading the fight to improve one of Dogpatch’s main drags, 22nd Street, with hopes of spreading its green gospel throughout the eastern neighborhoods.  Like many San Franciscans, Janet Carpinelli, one of GreenTrustSF’s founders and current chair, is a New York transplant who fell in love with the City while visiting, and never left.  She had lived in a number of neighborhoods – from Pacific Heights to Cow Hollow, Clement Street to the Avenues – before finding “the sun” and settling in Dogpatch, where she’s tended her garden for the past two decades.

GTSF’s five-member board of directors is comprised of neighborhood residents, small business owners and developers with projects in the central waterfront area.  Members include architect, vice chair and secretary Stephen Antonaros; local attorney, Pennyslvania Street resident and treasurer Mark Walther; member-at-large and developer Loring Sagan, a Build, Inc. partner; and Texas Street resident and webmaster Ralph Wilson.  San Francisco Parks Trust (SFPT) serves as the group’s fiscal sponsor.

After leading the charge to successfully clean and green Agua Vista Park and Warm Water Cove, GTSF is now focused on greening 22nd Street between Third and Pennsylvania.  “Twenty-second Street is really the commercial hub of Dogpatch and the central waterfront,” said Carpinelli.  “It’s a five-block stretch that connects Potrero Hill to Dogpatch and the waterfront, bringing travelers to and from the neighborhood from Third Street and the light rail as well as the 22nd Street Caltrain station.”  

In 2008 GTSF began to gather ideas from residents about how to improve the corridor after receiving grants from UCSF and the Eastern Neighborhoods Public Benefits Fund. The latter of which is administered by former Dogpatch Neighborhood Association president Susan Eslick, Potrero Hill Association of Merchants and Businesses president Keith Goldstein and Carpinelli’s husband, real estate consultant Joe Boss.  GTSF hired Dogpatch-based landscape architectural firm Fletcher Studio to develop plans for a pilot, which would implement “temporary concepts that if successful and get a thumbs-up from the community can be made permanent,” said David Fletcher, principal of his eponymous firm.  

Earlier this year GTSF held a community meeting where it unveiled several greening alternatives designed by Fletcher Studio.  Refreshments were provided by 22nd Street restaurants Cup o’ Blues, Dogpatch Saloon, Just For You and Piccino, in space donated by Rickshaw Bagworks.  “Our goal isn’t just to beautify and green 22nd Street,” Carpinelli explained. “It’s about improving quality of life and safety as well as expanding and enhancing open and green space.”

Fletcher’s concepts for enhancing 22nd Street include dedicating parts of sidewalks to native vegetation and trees, redesigning an existing, disused Muni mini-park, improving water quality and drainage, reconfiguring parking and traffic calming.  A key design element is the deployment of temporary chicanes or bulbouts – artificial features which slow cars – and planters, which would allow the neighborhood to try out ideas. “We want to do it chunk by chunk, take it a half block at a time, try things out and see what works,” said Carpinelli.

“GreenTrustSF has great leadership, a talented designer and a very ambitious, great plan,” remarked Maria D’Angelico, SFPT’s program manager for fiscal sponsorship.  “It’s an opportunity to build partnerships with City agencies and coordinate the creation of a local project.  It’s exciting to attend GTSF’s community meetings,” recalled D’Angelico.  “People have different needs, and depending on their perspective, whether it’s bike lanes, parking or open space, there are definitely special interest groups. The process works well as long as everyone is heard.  GreenTrustSF does a good job of trying to accommodate different perspectives and needs.”

Fletcher agreed.  “They have a well-balanced board, with two architects, a lawyer, who are very creative, give good feedback, and are dedicated to appropriate transformation in Dogpatch,” he commented.  “They’re sensitive to existing character, vegetation, land use and activity, and enhancing, rather than obliterating or replacing them.”

Bulbouts increase pedestrian safety because they decrease the distance across streets and corners.  Carpinelli noted that “Twenty-second street has long had a problem with speeding cars.  People already congregate outside Piccino, so a temporary bulbout for that corner is proposed.”   Bulbouts aren’t cheap, costing $100,000 to $200,000 each, with a dozen bulbouts in the proposed plan.  “We want to leverage funds from Muni, DPW, Caltrain, Caltrans — all are stakeholders and property owners here —as well as grants and fundraising, especially now that we have a plan in hand,” said Carpinelli.   “It could be a bureaucratic nightmare.  But we are determined to do it, with or without funding from them.  We will get it done…with donations, volunteers, neighborhood involvement.”

The potential loss of parking represents another challenge to achieving GreenTrustSF’s vision.  The UCSF-Mission Bay campus will soon include a large women and children’s hospital, requiring an estimated 21,000 additional parking spaces.  GreenTrustSF has conducted studies to determine how greening might affect the number of nearby parking spaces.  “We’ve done a couple versions of the plan, some with more, some with less parking,” noted Carpinelli.  “The studies we did found that we could actually increase parking in the neighborhood by converting parallel parking to 90 degrees on some streets,” Fletcher said.

The nonprofit has been working with the San Francisco Public Utility Commission on improving storm water run-off management.  “We want to get a grant to open up the sidewalk and re-route storm water.  Water often backs up and clogs the drains on 22nd Street during storms,” Carpinelli recounted. “That’s because 22nd street is a low point and during rainy season, all winter long, businesses here have sand bags in front of their buildings.  Water runs downhill from 20th to 22nd Street.  We’d like to see water captured before it gets down here to lessen storm drain overflow.” Another concept is to turn a storm drain into an open pond or stream with greenery.  Temporary planters would  help gather rainwater.  “We’ve already seen very imaginative re-use of rejected DPW concrete pipe stock for planters, such as the temporary pavement-to-park created at the Axis Café,” mentioned Carpinelli.  GreenTrustSF has studied permeable sidewalks that improve storm drainage, allowing rainwater to filter into the ground rather than onto the street.  The concept of flexible, permeable parking spaces/times along 22nd Street is also being studied.

GreenTrustSF’s is examining the feasibility of adding a staircase at the western end of 22nd that connects to Missouri Street and a re-developed Potrero Annex-Terrace housing complex.  The nonprofit plans to work with Bridge Housing – the developer for the Annex-Terrace project – on the stairway, which would be constructed near Sierra and Texas streets.  “People already use the area as a shortcut and it’s dangerous,” Carpinelli said, pointing to a Sunset District stairway at 16th Avenue that features a mosaic mural as a model.  “It would be exciting, fun and a great thing for the neighborhood.”

Over the long-term, Carpinelli hopes that the greening effort expands to Tennessee, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, and Pennsylvania streets, from Mariposa south to 23rd Street. “It’s important to develop 22nd Street the right way,” Carpinelli asserted.  “With more people here, there’s a need for more amenities, street furniture, lighting.  It really is about improving quality of life.”

 

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