A couple in matching Rollerblades canoodled in a hammock at the western edge of San Francisco. The sun was warm. The vibe was cool. The office most certainly did not beckon, though it was 3:15 p.m. on a Monday.
“You can say this is my lunch break,” said Ryan LaBerge, 52, who works in sales when he isn’t canoodling.
This is Sunset Dunes, San Francisco’s newest park, where people lounge, ride their bikes or scurry in their wet suits to surf in the Pacific.
But there is trouble in this paradise.
The park sits on a road.
In California, people really love their parks. They also really love their cars. Here, these devotions have collided, setting off a heated clash over what some people call San Francisco’s “war on cars” that has prompted a recall campaign, a lawsuit and threats of an effort to undo the new park entirely.
The transformation of part of a road into the largest pedestrian project of its kind in California history is the latest move by the city to dismantle highways in favor of parks and plazas.
There was the tear-down of the Embarcadero Freeway after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged it. There was the removal of a damaged freeway off-ramp that became Patricia’s Green, a popular art-dotted park in Hayes Valley. There was the banning of cars from John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park during the pandemic, opening it up to roller skaters, joggers and toddlers learning to ride bikes.
Each time, there was some vociferous objection, followed by acceptance, but it’s unclear what the outcome will be from the battle over Sunset Dunes.
“Change is hard,” said Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the Recreation and Parks Department. “But these are some of the best things we’ve done from an urban planning perspective.”
For 96 years, this two-mile stretch running alongside Ocean Beach was known as the Great Highway. At first, it was the road to Playland-at-the-Beach, a long-gone amusement park, and then became popular among 1950s hot-rod racers and surfers.
In the spring of 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, the city closed it to cars to give people space to exercise while remaining socially distanced. As the pandemic eased and people returned to school and work, the city struck a compromise: Drivers claimed it on weekdays while exercisers got it on weekends.
That arrangement was set to expire this year. Drought and wind meant more sand blowing onto the road, requiring sporadic closures and expensive cleanups. The southern extension of the road was already closed because it’s crumbling into the ocean.
With all that in mind, five members of the Board of Supervisors placed a measure on the November ballot to close the road to cars always and forever. Nearly 55 percent of voters approved it, but a striking divide was clear. Those who lived farther from the road supported closing it to cars because of the appeal of an oceanfront park, while those who lived closer and drove on it to access everyday places like jobs and schools did not.
Sensing this rift, Mr. Ginsburg with the parks department adopted a strategy foreign to City Hall. He moved quickly.
San Francisco is a place known for bureaucracy and red tape. One public toilet was famously slated to cost $1.7 million and take two to three years to install. Mr. Ginsburg decided building the park as quickly and inexpensively as possible would get people near and far to more eagerly support it.
“We had a good plan, and we actually executed it really well,” he said, adding, “Bada-bing, bada-boom! It’s a far cry from the toilet.”
The city closed the road to cars on March 14. It still looks like a road — with two paved lanes going in each direction, still marked by white paint, still separated by most of a median.
But workers dismantled the traffic lights and hauled them away. They jackhammered a small part of the median to make way for exercise equipment. They held a naming contest and received 4,000 entries, including the Tan Line, Sandy Bottom and Karl’s Corner. (For the uninitiated, an anonymous Twitter account in 2010 introduced itself as Karl the Fog, claiming to be San Francisco’s well-known weather system. The name stuck, and was even once a question on “Jeopardy!”)
Volunteers helped install benches, a climbing structure shaped like an octopus and a pump track on which to ride bicycles. Private donors paid artists to paint murals. The entire endeavor cost roughly $1 million, split about evenly between city and private funds.
Sunset Dunes was dedicated April 12, and the park’s first month saw 150,000 visitors, measured by cellphone pings and sensors placed along the road. On weekends, 7,800 people have visited each day. During the week, 3,400 people have visited daily.
The numbers make it San Francisco’s third-most popular park on weekdays, behind JFK Promenade in Golden Gate Park and the Marina Green on the northern waterfront.
At first, Sunset Dunes was in the third-place spot on both weekdays and weekends, even beating out Dolores Park, a palm-tree-studded expanse in the heart of the city’s Mission District that heaves with people on sunny days. But it slipped after Easter Sunday, when Dolores Park hosted its annual Hunky Jesus contest, where men long on hair and short on clothing vie for the crown before giant crowds.
Small businesses near Ocean Beach are reporting increased revenue since Sunset Dunes opened. Kathryn Grantham, owner of Black Bird Bookstore, a couple of blocks from the ocean, said her sales are up 35 percent. The Outer Sunset, never a must-see neighborhood for tourists like the Castro or Haight-Ashbury, is booming, she said.
“It feels like, ‘Oh gosh, we’ve been discovered.’”
Lauren Crabbe, the chief executive of the popular local coffee chain Andytown, said sales at her shop near the beach are up 20 percent since the park opened. She added that she loves the new park, but not the heated neighborhood conflict it has caused.
“There is certainly part of the neighborhood that is grieving the road,” she said.
Some of those park critics walked into City Hall on Thursday, carrying cardboard boxes filled with what they said were about 11,000 signatures of Sunset District residents seeking to recall their supervisor, Joel Engardio, who spearheaded the ballot measure that created the park. If the Department of Elections determines 9,911 of those signatures are valid, a special election will be held within three months. A preliminary count pointed to the likelihood the recall will take place.
In a twist of fate, Mr. Engardio won his seat representing the moderate Sunset District in large part because he backed the successful 2022 recalls of the far-left San Francisco school board and district attorney. But now those same voters could recall him because he helped close the highway on which they relied.
Selena Chu, a social worker who lives in the Sunset, said she worked on the campaign to elect Mr. Engardio and used to consider him a friend. Now, she said, she considers him a traitor.
“He acted against the very people who elected him,” she said. “He broke the public trust.”
Alyse Ceirante, a Sunset District resident and recall proponent, said it does not make sense to make it harder for families to get to their jobs and schools to make way for art, a word she uttered while forming air quotes.
“This whole city is anti-car,” she said. “We’ve had enough.”
If the recall of Mr. Engardio is successful, Mayor Daniel Lurie would name his replacement, but Sunset Dunes itself would not be affected, and the Great Highway would not return.
Meanwhile, other park opponents filed a lawsuit against the city, seeking to revert the road back to cars, and a hearing is scheduled June 2. Supervisor Connie Chan, who represents the Richmond District just north of the Sunset District, has said that if the recall of Mr. Engardio qualifies, she will try to add a citywide measure to the same ballot to undo Sunset Dunes. She did not return requests for comment.
Mr. Engardio said whatever happens, he is glad he helped create the park. He takes long runs there and said he and his husband have agreed they will spend much of their retirement at the park, a retirement his detractors hope comes soon.
“How can anyone be against this joyful experience?” he asked. “What is there to be mad about?”
In the battles over work versus leisure, road versus park, car versus pedestrian, it was no surprise which side Mr. LaBerge, the Rollerblader in the hammock, was on.
“Driving it was great,” he said, “but having it like this is the coolest thing in history.”
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
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