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Not that we have anything against kids -- they're great, for realz, we just don't have/want one -- but in a city with possibly the lowest percentage of families with children of any major city in the country (15% last time we checked), we sometimes wonder if the pro-kid populace isn't getting too much of a say about how we adults get to play in this town. Take, for example, Dolores Park: our friends at Mission Mission first alerted us to an apparent crackdown on "adult behavior" in the Park last year (including semi- and full nudity and drinking) and now there's plans to expand the damn playground up into previously grown-up dominated territory?
We may stop short of declaring war (also, we hate public meetings), but at the very least we're calling bullshit. We prefer our parks -- especially wacky and popular Dolores Park -- to be half-naked, drunken, sun-shiney dumbshows where kids are easily frightened away. But maybe that's just us.
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As a parent I sit firmly on both sides of this issue. I want good places to take my kid and good places to drink and have fun. And come on, if a parent in the bay area (especially IN the city) is not okay with nudity and drunkenness... move somewhere else. I don't see a problem here except for the police cracking down, both worlds can and should coexist happily. I didn't become some boring conservative person simply because i had a kid.
you don't see a problem with remodeling dolores park for kids like this? maybe you just redefined conservatism rightward for yourself as you started resembling it.
seriously. as far as i can tell the park is ALREADY very kid-friendly, and it really isn't all that bad in terms of nudity and drug abuse. yeah, there are stoners there a lot of the time, but you don't see crackheads or anything bad light that.
i would have loved rolling down the hills at dolores park when i was a kid.
Delores Park is a big bit of open grass, so therefore it's kid-friendly enough already. What's with building these childrens' adventure fantasy things? When I was a nipper we could have eight hours of fun with a piece of shit stuck to a stick. Then the pubs would close and our dads would come home and hit us with said shitty stick, thus two uses in one. Young boys, jumpers for goal posts, shirts versus skins, peado in the bushes, marvelous.
This has been in the works for 10+ years, even before the current playground group was formed. By the time it's actually completed, my kids will be drinking beer in the park and you'll be one of the old people complaining about them.
There are plenty of places in this town other than a public park to get drunk and/or naked (some even outdoors!).
Come on, this post is weak! Dolores Park is all about live and let live, which includes kids--increasingly an endangered species in SF. Hats off to the neighbors and the parks supporters who are getting off their assess to make this City a better place. BTW, nudity is fine, so long as it doesn't involve urine or shit.
Schooner, I'm going to make that last sentence into a plaque and put it on my front door.
Isn't it the point of the post that BECAUSE kids are an "endangered species" in San Francisco (i.e., there aren't many of them) that it doesn't make sense to remodel the park to suit them?
I personally don't care whether the park has a bigger playground or a smaller playground. You can just as easily get naked and drunk in a playground as on some grass. It all just seems like a waste of money to me.
So you wont be coming to my "German Film Festival" then?
Don't worry Jay, I'm sure it will be like Alamo Square park where the children are fenced in and dogs run free.
15% of the families in SF have kids. Of course most of those families live in neighborhoods (Mission/Noe) that abut Dolores Park...
Until they move to Berkeley or Marin.
Because they live in a town where people think playgrounds in a public park are an imposition to their ability to get publically intoxicated and act "wacky."
Fair enough, I suppose.
and are instantaneously replaced with another couple with an infant...
This is the second time in a week you've made this comment. What's with the fixation/obsession on parents moving to "Berkeley or Marin"? Did your parents leave you on the side of the road en route to the East Bay?
No, it's just the reality that many young SF parents with babies move to cities with better schools by the time said babies are ready to go to school.
SF population is steady or slightly increasing, yet SFUSD enrollment continues to decline. This is the main reason why.
true, because public schools in sf suck.
Actually I'd wager most families with kids in SF live in the Sunset, Richmond, and Balboa Park/Ingleside areas. Noe Valley isn't that large comparatively.
Screw making Dolores more kid friendly, it's fine as is. Just give us more bathrooms already! And maybe a hipster sweep. In fact, why don't we just napalm the entire area by the tennis courts?
Making the park "kid-friendly" is a hipster sweep.
Done and done.
This post can't be serious. Really, you were never a kid? Really, you never went to the park and enjoyed it? Have you actually gone to Dolores park and not stepped in feces, human or canine? Making the park more kid friendly sounds great to me. Bring on the improvements.
San Francisco is filled with people who moved here after growing up in some shitty small town where they weren't understood and got picked on for being smart or artistic or whatever. It weirds me out when these same people who's lives could have been different had they grown up in a city like ours get all picky about having to look at children growing up here. What gives?
Looks fun to me.
it's not just you :)
hell, just get naked and smashed in the playground. there's room enough for everybody.
I want to stick up for the pro-drunk/nudity/stoner cause (call me, drunk naked stoners!), but then I think about poor Roisin Isner, who got her hand blown off there one July 4. I realize July 4 in Dolores Park isn't everyday, but as someone who was there that day, and has been back a couple of other times, there really should be some kind of better control over the people there. It's a park, not a zoo, so, yeah, kids and families!!! I'll just have to find someplace else to get drunk outdoors on a nice day. (Maybe the zoo?)
Between "dog-rights" proponents and anti-kid activists bitching about their needs in public spaces, Ess Eff is just as lame as a suburb populated by the whiny, entitled, self-absorbed, NIMBY bridge and tunnel denizens regularly mocked here.
It's a playground in a park, for crissakes. It's not like it's the hell-spawn of pure evil that is American Apparel...
Look the problem isn't parents, and it certainly isn't kids. It's the parents that have started complaining and want to imagineer Dolores Park into some sort of Noe Valley yuptopain fantasy, and I know they read this blog, so I'm gonna be harsh.
I grew up as a kid in San Francisco, and saw plenty of crazy stuff in the park as a kid - my mom had to explain to me why not to insult Hells Angels for being dirty when I was 8, and then I stumbled upon the pre-late 90's (still raunchy) Folsom Street fair as a Jr. Highschool lad. Being attacked by a goose in GG park was far more upsetting and scaring.
I turned out fine, other then a brief interest in hard drugs and a decision to pursue a legal career. Similarly, the naked manshelf, the fixee mafia and the weed treats vendors at Dolores park are not going to damage any kids psyches.
Being a San Franciscan is about being nonplussed and jaded. If you want your children to be easily shocked 'well I nevers' raise them in Mountain View like everyone else.
PS. For you Noe moms and pops - stop bringing your kids to mid range eateries and coffee shops unless they can behave themselves. I live there, and if I wanted to take care of a screaming 7 year old ball of egoism I wouldn't use birth control - maybe you should have?
"Being a San Franciscan is about being nonplussed and jaded. If you want your children to be easily shocked 'well I nevers' raise them in Mountain View like everyone else."
Seriously man, I'm a parent and I gotta say its one thing to realistically bring up a kid in an urban environment, its another to go out of your way to make life hell for them. Some stuff about this city needs a little polish and to try to hang on to every bit of dirt and grime as a sign of "authenticity" is childish at best.
"PS. For you Noe moms and pops - stop bringing your kids to mid range eateries and coffee shops unless they can behave themselves."
See, I know you're bitching for the sake of it when I read this. After six years in this city, 4 without a kid, I can count the number of times my meal or coffee has been disturbed by screaming kids. And I HATE screaming kids. If you have to invent a problem to make your point then you don't have a point to begin with.
I'm anti-kid and even I have to agree with this. More often my meals are interrupted by an incredibly loud group of twenty-somethings who have no concept of public spaces or inside voices.
Yay! Now the drunk hipsters have a larger playground to get all rowdy in after last call!
Seriously, WTF is all the whining about?
1. this is not a kids vs drunks issue. There are already both kids and drunks. If the playground is renovated the rest of the park will still be there for the drunks.
2. the time to whine about this would have been any time over the last ten years, but if you really want to get your Grinch on and come out as opposed to kids having fun, there is still another public meeting on May 14th.
Who says playgrounds and drunks are mutually exclusive?
Every one of us has gotten drunk one night and had a good time on the swings and the slide.
Uh, I wonder why we have the lowest number of families in this city? Maybe it's because everyone in this city is so family hostile it's hard to bring our kids up here. Just read this article? Parents are getting too much say? Maybe we should be doing more to entice parents back to the city. Maybe that's what this project i about.
All you idiots complaining about families, I wonder what your parents would think if they read this. Or how you'd feel if someone talked to your parents like that.
Nice guilt trip. That's constructive.
My parents would hit me with a stick with some poo on it, but I've already explained that.
While the crackdown on "adult" activity is definitely a problem I think we can maybe try to find a compromise here. I mean, I know one of the many things I love about this city is not having to put up with children or have people constantly pushing "think of the children" nonsense. One of my concerns is that this will impact on the already fairly small dog play area in the park. I think far more people in this city prefer dogs to children and as such we should have at least an equal amount of space.
The greater issue is that when something in this city becomes listed as a playground that suddenly makes it off-limits to adults. Not just because of intent, but because of those big signs that insist you need to be accompanied by a child to be around them. You want a bigger playground? Make it adult-friendly as well as child-friendly and allow us to use it as well. That way instead of just walling off part of the park and insisting that only a small minority can use it we expand the opportunities available to everyone.
More to the point, a centralized kids area, although nice on paper and make look aesthetically pleasing is not a reasonable plan. Unless of course the plan is to use the kids area as a wide buffer to prevent other "questionable" activity, which is pretty shitty, not at all surprising but ultimately a fail. It will inevitably result in a passive turf war, more conflicts and associated support costs and likely would result in kids/parents not using the area except within a narrow time-frame, collectively deemed safe due to numbers or daylight.
These are known factors and outcomes. Stupidvisors, go figure.
I dont like the idea that the only way to make it more kid friendly is to extend the playground. Cant kids play in the grass like everyone else?
There is no "plan" to "make the park more kid-friendly," despite the way this post makes it appear.
In the SFGate article that MM links to (which SFist in turn linked to), it seems pretty clear that this is a process to renovate an existing old playground (with lead paint, yikes) that has been going on involving the community and parks and rec for a long while. The connection between this renovation and a months old article about how to possibly deal with noise at the park is tenuous at best.
This stuff is the reason I like things like 'Critcal Mass'. A big party happening, kids included at times. Now a days with the rules being placed on all the 'Adult Friendly' Stuff, 'Bay to Breakers' for instance and the 'Street Fairs', which are slowly disappearing.... all we have left at this rate to wake up to is our day to day grind and what??? Watch the 'Boob tube' and 'Blog'. Oh this is a great future to wake up to and to tell the kids to look forward to.
It's all just more Blah,Blah , Blah !!!!!!
As I read it, the reason why more neighborhoods are having problems with these street fairs and Bay to Breakers is the behavior of all these so-called adults. I'm all for independent local activities, but I and many others have only a certain tolerance for vomit on my doorstep. As annoyed as I am at times with the "what about the children" mob, I do have to say they tend to enforce a certain civility, by which I mean non-tolerance for public puking, as well as a desire for certain already existing laws re: public nudity and drunkenness to be enforced.