Let’s hear from a Yelper:
“This park has turned into a dump. I walk my dog here everyday and have watched it deteriorate rapidly over the last year. I’ve found used needles in the grass, heard a junkie tell a tourist not to use the public toilet because they’ll get Hep-C, and watched the playgrounds turn into homeless encampments. I really don’t understand why the city has turned such a blind eye to the problems here.”
Here’s how things stand now:
And here’s a little history, complete with an artist’s conception of what the anti-graffiti fence would look like – keep reading down, through the webpages of time.
You know, fundamentally, this is the big landmark at the gateway to Golden Gate Park. I don’t like the fence idea but I also don’t like people coming by to see giant KKK letters on the base of this statue for days, weeks and months. And the Rec and Parks and Arts Commission people say it’s a real expensive PITA to keep the graffiti off.
So I don’t know…
Take a look here, from about a week ago, from a time just before the recent mini-slides shut the place down for the next ten days:
Imagine the trail before the big slide of long ago. Imagine a flat road connecting the foreground to the background hundreds of feet away – that’s what used to be there before, but now the trail goes up and around this location.
Lands End is just like Devil’s Slide.
It’s a tough place to maintain a road…
I took my love and took it down
I climbed a mountain and I turned around
And I saw my reflection in the mud-covered hills
‘Til the landslide brought me down
long-suffering playground [IRL, it’s an extremely popular playground. Its current Yelp rating is 4.5 stars, which is the very definition of almost perfect, right? And hey look, what about the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Yelp rating – it’s much lower, it’s actually just 2.5 stars, right? Is RPD “failing?” Should we simply fire everybody and start over? Hey, why don’t we start using objective measurements, like asking the playground’s existing customers what they think? Is that too radical a notion?]
finally [This “framing” assumes 100% of what the millionaire-run Parks Alliance nonprofit says is accurate]
Victim to time [Well sure, you could replace this or that at this location, but what’s so wrong with it? What makes it a useless tear-down?]
frequent wear and tear [Because it’s popular? We’re going to change it because it’s popular and it gets used?]
grown-up play [Turns out it was sixth-graders who busted the slide, per the word on the street]
the playground pales in comparison to other high-tech kids’ play areas in the city. [What on Earth could make a playground “high tech?” Like, “sure this playground is great, but I feel it doesn’t employ the most recent application of science?” Like, who says that? IRL, it’s perfectly fine.]
“failing playgrounds” [But the Panhandle Playground isn’t “failing,” right? Ask all the people who use it and try to find one person who would give it a letter grade of “F“]
“low household income” [Is this area a low household income area? WTF to that. In fact, the 94117 is an extremely high household income place, right? It’s off the charts, actually, nationally speaking. And even locally, it’s anything but a low household income area.]
low Parks Alliance Report Card grades and rankings. [Oh, here we go, here’s the problem. What’s the PARC and why does it matter?]
“an early holiday gift to District 5.” [London Breed is thinking “CHRISTMAS” but she says holidays – good for her. But who’s paying for this gift? Oh, we are? So it’s not really a gift, is it, London Claus?]
high-tech play matting [I have no fucking idea what this means. Currently, the joint is basically a giant sand box. Is this a bad thing? One supposes that some think so, but one doesn’t know.]
What would you like to see improved upon in our small neighborhood playground? [Keeping it the same, except for maintenance, which, if it’s lacking, then whose fault is that? Cough RPD, cough]
Wouldn’t it be ironic, dontcha think, if the Yelp ratings of the Panhandle Playground go down after we spend all those millions of dollars on this simple, functional playground?
We’ll see.
Here you go, here’s the former “Save Stow Lake” website – this is where the “evil” language comes from.
One problem is that old vendor, the entity that the Save Stow Lake people wanted to “save,” charged too much money, starting about five or six years ago. For example, the old vendor would charge $19 per hour for some pretty busted up row boats.
The current rate is back down to $14 per hour:
And this is the cafe seating area, which doesn’t seem to get used too much. (The worry some people had was that this would become a high-end destination restaurant with concomitant traffic and parking hassles.)
Rec and Park has a lot of issues, IMO, and I’m unafraid to criticize it, certainly. But I didn’t see what the big beef was about putting the boat house contract out for bid. And of course, I still don’t.
I just caught a sneak peek of the sixth season of Rec and Park and boy, it’s a doozie:
Parks Chief Phil Ginsberg et. al. have cooked up a batch of white powdery chemicals…
…and they’ve applied it to the now-drained Quarry Lake / Lily Pond in Golden Gate Park.
Here’s what the place looks like now:
It’s a powdery wonderland, filled with all kinds of urban flotsam and jetsam…
…but there’s nary a peep out of those troublesome frogs.
Check this one-minute video of the place – it would be a good place for a seance or some kind of Wiccan ceremony this Halloween.
Here it is, a vast wasteland with the silence broken only by the occasional the calls of Belted Kingfishers (and, for all I know, Everdeen’s Mockingjays as well):
It’s hard to see, but this curb on MLK is mostly red, so it looks like a towaway zone.
But the signs say forget all that and park for free for four hours:
Prolly the RPD or DPW or SFMTA or some sort of ALPHABET SOUP org should clean off the red / reddish paint but if you say anything about that, then they’ll start begging you for more, ever more money, oh well.
Also note the fresh broken glass on the sidewalk, oh well
One assumes it was somebody’s first time, what with all the coughing:
Is there a 5 MPH speed limit for RPD vehicles on paved paths in the parks of SF?
I think so.
All right, here are the two photos – they were taken at least a sixth of a second apart, you kids do the math:
Oh wait, Gentle Reader, I’ll do the math and I’ll do it without Roman numerals. Today’s lesson is brought to you by the numbers Nine, Five and Six:
Nine feet per second > Five miles per hour, right? [Trust me, Gentle Reader.]
And my aging SLR camera takes shots at Six frames per second maximum.
So Nine feet per second divided by Six frames per second equals one point five feet of movement per frame, exactly.
See how that works? If this truck can be seen to be moving more than 1.5 feet per frame then that means it was moving more than 9 feet per second and that means it was moving more than 5 MPH and that means that it was speeding per RPD policy, right?
I’ll note that this is the Panhandle “bike path,” which some people don’t even consider a part of Golden Gate Park – perhaps the rules are different here? IDK.
And perhaps “GPS records” would indicate that this truck was merely going 3 MPH. If that were the case, then I’d know that RPD was mistaken. Or lying. Again.
Your pick, Gentle Reader.
Of course, nobody died here and it’s not like this truck was going 15 MPH down the Panhandle bike path on a rainy night. But RPD workers violate RPD rules all the time, right? So, what to do?
Some race car drivers have a speed limiter button to use while pitting. As long as it’s engaged, then a racecar can’t go more than, say, 15 MPH or something, you know, for crew safety, even though the gas pedal is mashed all the way down. Could something like this work for the speeding workers of the RPD? IDK. Implementing a program like this would be expensive, but, of course, letting RPD workers speed along has been expensive and problematic and tragic (in many ways, in many ways) up ’til now, right?
