On a chilly weekend in mid-September, the wind-blasted dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach loomed over the Great Highway — two lanes that run alo

San Francisco’s Uphill Battle to Transform a Historic Highway Into a Park

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2024-11-02 14:00:02

On a chilly weekend in mid-September, the wind-blasted dunes of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach loomed over the Great Highway — two lanes that run along the Pacific coast in either direction separated by a median of sand and ice plant succulents. In a section of the southbound lanes, the Autumn Moon Festival reverberated with a DJ’s tunes. Birds squawked in formation overhead, and squealing children tumbled down the dunes and scribbled the road with chalk. From the top of the sandy bumps, between clumps of beachgrass, you could see massive container ships sailing out of the Golden Gate and into that famous fog.

The evening represented a compromise. In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, the city of San Francisco closed the Great Highway and turned it into a promenade, much as other cities blocked off roads to let people roam freely and resist the urge to gather indoors. When lockdowns eased and life returned to a new kind of normal in 2021, the city reduced the closure of the highway to holidays and weekends, beginning every Friday at noon and ending on Mondays at 6 a.m. Drivers got to keep a traffic artery in western San Francisco, and pedestrians, rollerbladers, and cyclists got their weekend fun.

Just off the highway, Joel Engardio stood atop a small bump of a sand dune, dressed in a black jacket and blue jeans, and watched his constituents gather around a traditional Chinese lion dance. The Autumn Moon Festival was just a sampling of what Engardio, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, wants to see. When San Franciscans go to the polls on November 5, they’ll vote on Engardio’s Proposition K, a bid to permanently close a 2-mile stretch of the Great Highway to create 2,000 acres of continuous recreation space.