The Tenderloin can be rough. But its parks are often a refuge.

Love what you read? Love that it was free?

Mission Local will never have a paywall. All our articles are free for everyone, always. Help us keep it that way — donate to our end-of-year fundraiser to make Mission Local free for your neighbors.

Donate today!

Sadie Davenport visits Boeddeker Park nearly every day.

Davenport, 24, moved to the Tenderloin from Yuba City in January for rehab. She lives just around the corner from Boeddeker, and her girlfriend lives nearby, too. Davenport often brings her girlfriend’s young daughter to the park at Eddy and Jones streets.

One of just a handful of parks in the Tenderloin, Boeddeker is their haunt of choice. Davenport’s favorite memory there is the first time she visited, when she was struck by just how neat and clean it was.

It wasn’t always so. The Tenderloin is one of San Francisco’s poorest neighborhoods: The proportion of Tenderloin households making under $20,000 annually was nearly three times the citywide proportion, as of 2022 data.

In 2020 and 2021, more than one in five accidental drug overdose deaths in the city took place in the Tenderloin. A stroll around the neighborhood reveals open-air drug use, scattered encampments and visible poverty on almost every block.

But the Tenderloin’s parks are, for the most part, a haven. Here, for instance, people look out for the kids, said Stephen R. Tennis, who grew up in the Marina but lives in the Tenderloin. “Kids can be kids at the park. Kids can’t be kids out on the street.” Same with older folks, he said: The parks are a place they can go without being harassed.

On a recent weekday afternoon, a few older visitors stretch, chatting in rapid-fire Cantonese; a younger couple strolls arm-in-arm with an older woman; a group of friends lights up the basketball court with a pickup game. Outside, skaters blast down Jones against a backdrop of construction noises.

Two older women chatted cheerfully as they strolled Boeddeker’s perimeter on another recent weekday afternoon. They come twice a day — once in the morning and once in the afternoon — to get exercise, fresh air and sunshine, they said in Mandarin. In addition to strolling, they like to play ping-pong and badminton.

At a nearby ping-pong table, two other women were engaged in a lively showdown. “We’re not professionals,” one of them said in Mandarin. “We just play to exercise.”

‘Every street was like a different drug’

In previous years, the Tenderloin’s parks reflected the neglect still apparent in much of the district. But, thanks to a slew of public and private investment, Boeddeker Park reopened in 2014 after a years-long effort to renovate the park. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, the Trust for Public Land, the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and a host of other neighborhood organizations partnered to reimagine the park’s appearance and activities. It paid off: In fiscal year 2023, Boeddeker’s maintenance score — calculated based on factors like graffiti, litter and plant conditions — placed it in the top 10 percent of parks citywide.

Like many San Franciscans, Tennis has fond childhood memories of visiting Golden Gate Park — his favorite park in the city — accompanied by his godfather. Tennis moved to the Tenderloin in the 1980s, and now lives a few blocks away from Boeddeker. He said the neighborhood’s parks have evolved “in a very positive way” during his time here.

“Back in the day, they were terrible,” said Tennis, citing a greater presence of drug dealers and users. “Every street was like a different drug.” He added that the inside of Boeddeker, which opened in 1985, used to be full of people “shooting up” or “passed out with wine bottles.”

While Boeddeker is Tennis’ favorite Tenderloin park, he takes great pride in work he did in front of Turk-Hyde Mini Park, handing out literature on housing and employment resources. The work was part of the Tenderloin Community Benefit District’s Safe Passage program, which places staff on sidewalks and intersections around the neighborhood to promote safer streets. “We helped a lot of people,” Tennis said.

Turk-Hyde, located at that intersection, was also renovated in recent years, reopening in 2020. Tennis was asked to speak at the reopening celebration. The park is “‘kid-tested, kid-approved,’” he recalled saying. “There were about eight kids yelling and screaming and having a whole lot of fun.”

Park captains keep watch

Sgt. Macaulay Park at Larkin and O’Farrell streets, frequented by parents and kids, features a table with arts and crafts supplies set up almost daily by Tenderloin Community Benefit District staff, who call themselves “park captains.” At both Macaulay and Turk-Hyde, kids can play with a dizzying array of carefully laid out toy bicycles, tricycles and cars.

Many of the toys are donated by community members. Patrick, 42, who just moved to the Tenderloin from Vallejo, told me he brings his 4-year old son, also named Patrick, to Macaulay every day. The younger Patrick loves to ride on a blue toy bike provided at the park. They’ve contributed a few toys to the collection as well.

Around 20 park captains are stationed across Boeddeker, Macaulay and Turk-Hyde for all opening hours. JaLil Turner, director of park stewardship at the Tenderloin Community Business District, said the goal of the program is to keep the parks “safe, clean and inviting.” The program also tries to keep park captains grouped, “making sure they are the same faces that people see every day when they come use that park,” to establish relationships with visitors and build a sense of community.

At the start of each day, the park captains set up their tables and clean up trash. When the park opens, they greet visitors at the gate. Turner said the greeter is important in a community where people can go days without being spoken to. “It’s just nice to have someone at the front just to show people, ‘You are a person. You matter. Hey, good morning, happy Monday, happy Friday,’” Turner said. “Maybe alerting people where they can get a hot shower or a fresh breakfast.”

John Britt, a park captain lead, loves seeing parents bring their kids every day. “When they leave, they say, ‘Thank you,’” Britt said. “Because they felt safe, and they know that we’re here to make sure that the park is safe and inviting.” A park captain lead at Macaulay agreed that interacting with parents and kids is a highlight of the job: “You’re watching the community grow up, and then they remember you, too, so you really do establish a rapport with them.”

While park captains wear many hats, they do not directly enforce park rules. Instead, park captains alert visitors if they are violating guidelines. If needed, park captains will call park rangers.

One parent at Macaulay, who was watching over her two daughters on the swings, said the family has been visiting the park since they moved to the Tenderloin about a year ago. But she lamented the surrounding environment. The parks are “nice, once you walk in,” she said, but “you just walk out, and it hits you.” And she expressed concerns about homeless individuals trying to enter the parks: “It’s never a safe space,” she said.

Our conversation is interrupted by a man shouting outside the park. “You see? That’s what I’m talking about,” she said.

The older women in Boeddeker praised park staff for maintaining the park’s cleanliness — with only minor complaints that they aren’t allowed access to the clubhouse bathrooms — but they, too, noted the stark contrast between the park’s inside and outside.

Park captains, for their part, don’t shy away from the tougher side of their work. Knowing how to interact with the broader community is important, because “they’re human beings, too,” said the park captain lead at Macaulay, who likes to pass along resources from community organizations whenever possible.

The Tenderloin can be “kind of wild sometimes,” park captain lead Nolan Jones said. “We keep everything flowing.”

Davenport, the 24-year-old parkgoer who moved to the Tenderloin for rehab, says San Francisco is a bigger place than what she is accustomed to, but she plans to stay for a long time: There’s “nothing for me but drugs and bad people back home,” she says. Still, she doesn’t think she’ll stay in the Tenderloin forever. But as long as she’s here, she’ll keep coming back to Boeddeker.