The Freeway Greenway

Connect with Us!
For more information about supporting this project, please contact: chair@portolasf.org

How to Support the Greenway

This dynamic and evolving project is supported by the many volunteers who give their time to building and maintaining the Greenway. We depend on grants and the generosity of individuals and organizations for large and small projects alike and the tools to meet our everyday gardening needs.

A donation to the Portola Neighborhood Association supports the PGC and our work to create and maintain community greenspaces.

Read more about the Freeway Greenway:

• Greenway Press

• Introduction to the Greenway

• Project Studies, Concepts, & Goals

• Status & Timeline

• Funding Requirements: Past, Present, & Future

• History of the Greenway - How Roadways Created the Greenway Opportunity

• Greenway Community Partners

Press

Check out these articles about the Greenway and the Garden District:

• San Francisco’s Portola Neighborhood Just Got a 16-Foot Gothic Gate. See Where It Leads, SF Standard, 2023

• A Greenway Haven Grows Alongside the Highway 101 Soundwall, The San Francisco Chronicle, 2022

• Portola Garden District Returns to Its Roots, Knee Deep Times, 2022

• Signs of Life: From Union Square Style to Portola Soul, The San Francisco Examiner, 2021

Introduction to the Greenway

The Portola, San Francisco’s Garden District, continues to march forward in our effort and commitment to ensure a sustainable, healthy, affordable, and inclusive neighborhood. In line with this commitment, the Portola Neighborhood Association (PNA) has partnered with a diverse group of residents and stakeholders to create the Freeway Greenway Project (The Greenway/FGP)—the repurposing of an overgrown Caltrans easement located on a sliver of unused land between the West side of US-101 and the backside of the diverse San Bruno Avenue business corridor. In what was a dumping ground for years prior, the PNA is creating a dynamic neighborhood greenway that all members of the community will be able to access.

In collaboration with neighbors who live and work along this strip of unused land, the PNA intends to create a 4 block long multi-use space from Thornton Avenue to Woolsey Street. A volunteer-based project, The Greenway will provide our economically diverse and underserved community an opportunity to find natural tranquility within the layers of movement that have defined this transit corridor for over 100 years.

Extending the Greenway

Explore our recent research on community engagement initiatives set to influence the future aesthetics, ambiance, and activities of the next two blocks in Freeway Green. Discover the impact of your voice in action!

Project Studies, Concepts, & Goals

Spurred by the success of Burrows Pocket Park, community members mobilized to study greening opportunities by analyzing the Portola’s unique cultural assets, history, and potential. The Portola Green Plan (published 2015), a multilingual study funded by the city of San Francisco and prepared by SiteLab Urban Studio, was created with the intention of improving public access to nature, as well as providing ecological education and sustainable food sources. The study recommended creating physical, historical, and cultural connections across the neighborhood by means of the Greenway’s creation along with other neighborhood assets to form a cross-community green path from Alemany Farmers Market to McLaren Park, a regional park boasting 313 acres.

In 2018, SiteLab Urban Studio was hired by The Greenhouse Project and the PNA to conduct a multi-lingual outreach campaign to gather feedback on the first phase of the Greenway, from Burrows Pocket Park south along the Caltrans easement to Bacon St. By means of this study’s findings, along with other community conversations and data collection, the PNA has established the following project goals:

1. Address the negative impact on safety, beauty, and morale of the community by removing trash and overgrowth in the blighted sliver of Caltrans property not visible or accessible from the freeway.

2. Create a carbon-capturing natural setting to address community health and mental well-being. The San Bruno Avenue corridor has one of the highest concentrations of particulate pollution and asthma cases in San Francisco and has no green space to offset the effect of the transportation corridor 

3. Convert Caltrans parcels into publicly accessible green space, removed from the noise, pollution, and movement of San Bruno Avenue, for residents and businesses alike

4. Create an inclusive, durable and unique space, in partnership  with existing neighborhood groups, organizations, and businesses, that will be utilized and supported by the diverse community

5. Provide public outdoor seating for use by business corridor patrons, specifically food and drink purveyors, to directly support the economic growth of the business corridor which largely lacks outdoor seating opportunities.  

6. Provide a unique attraction with space for events, gatherings, and education in order to activate the eastern boundary of the Portola community and business district and reaffirm San Bruno Ave as the community’s “Main Street.”

7. Enhance gateways along Portola’s eastern boundary and activate neighborhood streets cut off by the freeway, to improve pedestrian access and encourage cultural and physical connections to adjacent communities and amenities. 

8. Rethink the uses of underutilized public land along polluting transit corridors and model how communities can rebound, reclaim, and negate decades of negative cultural, health, and economic impacts.

These 8 goals are in lockstep with San Francisco’s Mayor and Board Of Supervisors (Greenhouse Gas Emissions Ordinance) and Governor Gavin Newsom (SB27), all of who helped enact separate 2021 legislation around nature-based carbon sequestration on public lands. We intend for The Greenway to be San Francisco’s model for conversion of public lands to carbon-sequestering green oases.

Status & Timeline

As of Spring 2022, we are currently under construction with Blocks 1 and 2. 

Past milestones marking how we arrived here and where we are going next:

• 2011 Alemany Island Beautification funded and completed

• 2014: Burrows Pocket Park funded and completed

• 2016: Silliman & San Bruno Welcome Garden & Mural, funded and completed 

• 2017: Greenway Block 2: Phase I funded and completed

• 2018: Green Plan Coordinator funded for 2 years

• 2019: Greenway Block 1 “Workspace” construction commences

• Winter 2022: Funding announcement for Block 1: Final Phase

• Spring 2022: Greenway Block 2: Phase II construction commences

• Spring 2022: Greenway Community Presentation: Block 1 & 2 Updates

• Spring 2022: Funding announcement for Block 2: Final Phase

• Summer 2022 - Spring 2023: Construction for Block 2: Final Phase

• Fall 2022 - Spring 2023: Greenway Block 1: Final Phase construction commences

• Winter/Spring 2023: Greenway Community Meeting: Park Operations

• Summer 2023: Greenway Blocks 1 and 2: Ribbon Cutting

• Spring 2024: Greenway Blocks 3 and 4: Planning Begins

Funding Requirements Past, Present, & Future

Greenway funds received to date: 

1. 2012: Burrows Pocket Park hardscape construction: $65,000 Community Challenge Grant awarded to Portola Steering Committee, completed

2. 2016: Portola Welcome Garden & Mural: $64,550 Community Challenge Grant awarded to The Greenhouse Project, completed

3. 2017: Thornton Pocket Park Construction, $135,00 OEWD, underway

4. 2017: Greenway Block 2: Phase I site clearing, $97,750 Community Challenge Grant awarded to The Greenhouse Project, completed

5. 2018-2020: Greenway Block 1: Phase I hardscape construction & Greenplan Coordinator Position: $50,000 MOHCD Grant awarded to The Green House Project, completed

6. 2019: Greenway Block 2: Phase II hardscape elements: $75,000 Community Challenge Grant awarded to the PNA, completed

7. 2020: Greenway Block 2: Phase III landscape elements and plantings: $35,000, The Campbell Foundation grant awarded to the PNA, underway

8. 2021: Greenway Block 2: Phase III landscape elements and plantings: $87,926 Community Challenge Grant awarded to the PNA, underway

9. 2021: Greenway Block 1: Phase I hardscape, plantings, and murals: $91,776 Family Connections Centers, completed

10. 2022: Greenway Block 1: Phase II hardscape, fencing, and plantings: $115,000 OEWD Economic Development Grant, awarded

11. 2022: Greenway Block 2 construction funding: $150,000 Community Challenge Grant, awarded

Estimated Funding to complete & maintain the Greenway:

1. 2022: Portola Green Plan Manager position: $75,000 annually in perpetuity, unsecured funding source

2. 2022: Operating support budget for PNA’s greenspaces: $20,000 annually in perpetuity, unsecured funding source

3. 2024: Caltrans encroachment permits for Greenway Blocks 3 and 4, undetermined budget

4. 2025-2035: Greenway Blocks 3 and 4 Caltrans freeway sound wall, undetermined budget

5. 2025: Greenway Blocks 3 and 4 construction funding: $750,000, unsecured funding source

6. 2026: Wayland St. Pocket Park design, permitting and funding, undetermined budget

7. 2026: Woolsey St. Pocket Park design, permitting and funding, undetermined budget

How Roadways Created the Greenway Opportunity

In 1858, what is now the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco, was a largely undeveloped landscape of waterways, rolling hills, and grazing pastures through which stagecoach passengers traveled on the newly beaten path of the San Bruno Toll Road. This unpaved route was created as a shortcut from the historic El Camino Real trail to the booming gold-rush-era downtown San Francisco. To ease this rough and dirty passage, “Mile Houses” were established to serve travelers, marking a century of settlement and growth along this burgeoning transit corridor.

As transportation shifted into the automobile age, the need for expanded roadways increased and in the early-1920’s construction of the four-lane Bayshore Highway began alongside the 2-lane San Bruno Ave, no longer a toll road. This highway linked the city to the growing communities of the peninsula and the parallel alignment of highway to neighborhood mainstreet created a symbiotic relationship in which both streets supported one another’s growth. Fueled in part by a traveler focused service economy, San Bruno Ave, or “The Road” to locals, became the backbone for a thriving immigrant community, which attracted large-scale cultural investments such as the Avenue Theatre, built in 1927.

Heavily traveled, undivided and prone to deadly accidents, Bayshore Highway earned a dark reputation as “Bloody Bayshore” and the need for changes quickly became apparent, paving the way for the fully divided and fenced Bayshore Freeway/US-101 in the mid-1950’s.  While this new design greatly reduced traffic deaths and injuries, communities to either side were cut off from their neighbors. The freeway’s new speed friendly design ignored the established urbangrid, creating unusable triangular gaps between the roadway edge and the abutting private properties, formerly the back gardens of San Bruno Ave’s residents. These newly created pockets of land that now belonged to the state were locked in limbo for decades, largely inaccessible for maintenance and inevitably collecting debris and overgrowth. In the Portola, many structures were razed or relocated through eminent domain and properties that survived on the east-side of San Bruno Ave lost their backyards.

From the 1960s into the 1990s, the community, now bisected and bypassed by the freeway, adjusted to the many challenges felt by disadvantaged urban areas of the time. As new influxes of immigrants and multi-generational families arrived, San Bruno Ave began to serve an increasingly populated and diverse community that stretched beyond the immediate neighborhood. In recent years, the City of San Francisco has upgraded and relocated public transit lines along the corridor, carrying thousands of transit riders up and down the street, many of whom shop and use the services. Despite ongoing economic challenges, today San Bruno Ave is a vibrant albeit sometimes chaotic urban business and public transit corridor, a far cry from its dirt path beginnings.

In the mid-2000s, the emergence of a grassroots movement, centered around Portola’s unique cut-flower agricultural history, began with local residents introducing a series of community-based projects and events to celebrate the neighborhood's agricultural roots.  In 2006, the Portola Garden Tour was launched to encourage neighbors and visitors alike to visit one another’s gardens, trade cuttings, and swap growing tips over glasses of lemonade. During the same period, Portola artist team Book + Wheel applied for and received multiple grants to carry out their Portola Cognito Project,  where they researched and mapped Portola and adjacent greening agendas future and past, among them the creation of McLaren Park and Daniel Burnham's 1905 green-filled Plan for San Francisco. In 2009, the PNA in partnership with local artists created the Alemany Island Beautification Project to address an overgrown roadway greenspace at the intersection of San Bruno Ave and Alemany Blvd. This project was the first in the community to directly engage with the freeway infrastructure. Utilizing an overpass support column, a mural celebrating San Francisco's native flora and fauna was installed.

In 2013 The Greenhouse Project was formed with the intention of saving and transforming Portola’s last greenhouse block, the Rose Factory, into an urban farm and education center. That same year, the Portola Garden Tour, The Greenhouse Project, and the PNA partnered on a pilot project to address another byproduct of the freeway: the blighted dead-end streets along San Bruno Ave. In 2014, after four years of planning and over $200k in public and private fundraising, Burrows Pocket Park was completed, becoming the first greenspace along the Caltrans easement. Today this parkspace, entirely maintained by volunteers, provides community event space just off San Bruno Ave and has attracted a local neighbor to invest in the opening of a cafe.

Greenway Community Connection Concept Map

References:

1. Portola Green Plan Outreach & Opportunities, published by SiteLab Urban Studios, 2015

2. When The Bayshore Freeway was the Bay Area’s “Highway of Tomorrow”, Bill Van Niekerken, The San Francisco Chronicle, July 11, 2017

3. A Historic Line - the Fine 9 San Bruno, Jeremy Menzies, February 18, 2016

4. Map Shows Which SF Neighborhoods Are Hit Hardest By Air Pollution, Rachel Swan, The San Francisco Chronicle, September 4, 2017

5. The Portola Neighborhood Association

6. The Greenhouse Project

Thank you to our supporters

Our projects are supported by the PNA memberships, donations and funding from the Community Challenge Grant and Shine on SF.

Community Endorsements