April 13, 2005

Small Park Represented Big Dreams

By Daniel Porras
Special to the Neighborhood Newswire

Less than a hundred yards from the drawbridge at Third Street and Cargo Way in Southeast San Francisco, rare chorus frogs used to chirp and edible pickle weed grew. School children learned natural history on a tiny parcel of land - Muwekma Ohlone Park - named after the Native Americans that once inhabited the surrounding hills. The miniature preserve, a microcosmic reminder of a once lush and wild peninsula, is now a freshly bulldozed dirt plot awaiting the installation of a controversial new bridge.

“It all went under the plow yesterday,” says David Erickson, the park’s ‘father’. It’s hard to hear him over the roar of tractors, but I can tell he’s livid. After all, he helped put in an irrigation system to feed the park, and secured a thirty-thousand-dollar environmental grant to develop it. “I’ve been through a lot of different emotions,” he says, “I even threw up.”

Here, between buildings, earth movers, and fences on the south end of Illinois Street, I’m having trouble envisioning a vibrant ecosystem. So David takes me inside his warehouse, about fifty feet from where the bridge will be built, to show me pictures of the park before it was destroyed. It was a lush patch of green in an industrial desert, “literally the last frontier of San Francisco,” says Erickson.

A hundred years ago, “this was all marshland”, says Francisco Da Costa, Director of Environmental Justice Advocacy, pointing across Islais Creek toward Portrero Hill. Da Costa says the Muwekma Ohlone tribe “lived on the hills and came down to fish. Shrimp, eels, and herring flourished here.” Then came the settlers, and the city. After the 1907 earthquake, thousands of tons of debris were dumped into what was then called Islais Swamp, and a new section of ‘land’ grew to accommodate booming San Francisco.

David Erickson says the park grew from his and neighbors’ “guerilla gardening.” Native frogs, insects, and plants found their way into the park, and a vibrant ecosystem, surrounded by cement, factories and warehouses, flourished. “Just a little bit of planting can do a lot to kick-start an ecosystem,” says Erickson, who received a habitat restoration grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for Muwekma. “I’ve never been a tree hugger,” he explains, but the battle to save his prized garden from the claws of development turned Erickson, a man who has bounced from Alaskan fishing boats to movie sets to painting faux-finishes, into an activist. After creating and maintaining a nature preserve, he says, “I connected with my community and became aware of other issues, like environmental health and justice.”

Muwekma Park was first threatened when a busted sewage pipe destroyed a third of it in the fall of 2001. As part of work to install conduits for electrical transmission lines, MUNI drilled into the unstable earth beneath the park, causing the ‘force main’ – a giant pipe that carries 80% of San Francisco’s treated sewage – to sag and rupture. The park was flooded with effluent. To fix the busted main, MUNI dug up a large section of the small park, says Da Costa, and Muwekma was left in ruins. The park would be revived, and destroyed, several more times over the next few years, until its final demise on April 6th, when construction began on the Illinois Street Intermodal Bridge Project.

Francisco Da Costa seems more angered by the building of the Illinois Street Bridge -- which he says is illegal and unnecessary – than by Muwekma’s destruction. The bridge project is proceeding without a site-specific environmental impact report (EIR), he says, and will result in unsafe pressure on the force main, which runs below the site. David Beaupre of the San Francisco Port Authority, however, asserts that as part of the larger development plan for the Southern waterfront a proper EIR was done for the bridge project.

Bridge or no bridge, the small parcel of dirt nestled between warehouses and a viaduct illustrates nature’s resilience, and the human tendency to nurture – and destroy - ecosystems. Through a chain-link fence atop a landfill in what used to be wild wetlands, I watch a group of six ducks swim slowly toward the tractors, wondering what happened to their urban sanctuary. Someday, when the pavement is gone, maybe the ducks, and the chorus frogs, will return.