Since February of 2024, when the Gene Friend Recreation Center at 270 6th St. was closed for demolition, hundreds of SoMa’s kids and teens have waited for the center — one of the few public places where area parents trust leaving their kids — to be re-opened.
The wait will soon be over. On July 22, San Francisco Parks and Recreation announced the center will re-open on Thursday, August 13, just in time for the beginning of the SFUSD school year.
For the kids in SoMa’s summer programs, it can’t come soon enough.
At noon, Victoria Manalo Draves Park in SoMa is packed with kids. In the playground area, five- year-olds scramble over faded red structures. In the basketball courts, middle schoolers yell “Watch out!” every 10 seconds, as basketballs fly through the air. Every nook and cranny in the park has a pod of high schoolers practicing TikTok dances.
“It’s so crowded,” said Angelina, an incoming 7th-grade student at Bessie Carmichael Middle School.“There’s not a lot of space here to run around and play.”
Victoria Manalo Draves Park is one of three public playgrounds in SoMa, and has been heavily utilized since it opened in 2006. It is the nearest green space to the only public elementary school in the district, the Bessie Carmichael Filipino Education Center, and its nearby middle school campus. The park is also one of the only outdoor play spaces available to SoMa kids and teens enrolled in summer and after-school programs.
SoMa has some of the lowest rates of open space and public parks in the city. According to the San Francisco Planning Department, Western SoMa, where the rec center is located, has 0.027 acres of open space per thousand residents and 0.23 acres of public parks. Neither of Bessie Carmichael’s campuses has its own sports field or gymnasium.
The park is also, like many parts of SoMa, not a particularly comfortable place for children. On a recent afternoon, several adults were sleeping in the park, and others were passed out next to discarded needles around the perimeter. Summer school program staff make rounds in the park and ensure gates to the playground remain closed so adults stay outside the play areas. Staff at the programs, run by United Playaz and West Bay Pilipino Multi Service Center, say they won’t let any of the young children walk to and from the park alone.
When the Gene Friend Recreation Center was open, many local kids visited every day, sometimes for hours. Kids went there for after-school programs, to do their homework, attend community events, or practice sports.
“It was the only place we could go to that had enough space for everyone from little Bessie and big Bessie,” Angelina said, using the local nickname for Bessie Carmichael’s campuses. “Now everyone meets here at the park, but it’s too many people.”
Local kids old enough to leave the neighborhood often do so once the park’s after-school programs are over, Angelina explained. Middle school students hang out at Pier 39 or at “The Mix,” an area of the public library’s main branch reserved exclusively for 12 to 18 year-olds.
Many high-school kids, said 18-year-old Jared Ines, hop on the bus and go south to Stonestown Galleria. “It’s just been more lively there. It’s the place to hang out now.”
Resourceful neighborhood kids had once used shopping areas like the Westfield Center as spillover hangout spaces, Ines said, but “downtown just kind of died in general. The area has been kind of inhospitable for kids.”
“There’s definitely a hole the rec center left,” said Ines, who volunteers every summer as a youth staff member at West Bay Pilipino Multi-Service Center. “There’s not many places we can go safely with so many students.”
The renovated rec center will include a double-court gymnasium, two large multipurpose rooms, a larger exercise room, a playground, outdoor half court, adult exercise equipment, and a new walking path and picnic area on the site of a former auto shop, which was purchased by the city and demolished in order to expand the neighborhood’s green space.
Rudy Corpuz, the executive director of United Playaz, is optimistic about what the reopening will bring to the community.
“We’ve been in talks and developing this for years,” said Corpuz. “We’ve built this center in a way where we know it’s safe for our people who live directly in this neighborhood. ”
The kids and teens of SoMa will be waiting eagerly.
“The neighborhood feels so small now,” Angelina said. “I just want to hang out with my friends in our old place. It feels like we’re missing our home.”
