A Digital Journal - San Francisco Public Works
In the Works
May 2025
The San Francisco Fire Department has had to make do with undersized, inadequate training facilities for years. An ambitious and imaginative Public Works-led project in the Bayview, expected to break ground this fall, aims to change that.
FEATURE STORIES
New Fire Department Training Campus Gets Real
The new San Francisco Fire Department Division of Training campus – a $145 million, Public Works-led project – will include state-of-the-art training facilities, offices, classrooms and more.
Dozens of New Street Trees Take Root in the Bayview
Under deep blue skies, Public Works led a productive Love Our City: Neighborhood Beautification Day event that successfully capped efforts to get 79 young street trees in the ground across the Bayview and other District 10 neighborhoods.
Public Works Week
We hosted our annual Public Works Week celebration with open houses, project tours, an employee recognition ceremony and a special acknowledgement of our 125th anniversary serving San Francisco.
Planting an Idea to Curb
Illegal Dumping
Keeping Chinatown vibrant and welcoming takes a team effort. The recent work on Ross Alley exemplifies the good that can come when the City and the community join forces to make a difference.
After Bay to Breakers,
a Race to Clean Up the City
This month, San Francisco hosted the annual Bay to Breakers race – although some people would describe the May 18 event more as a roving street party. Out street cleaning crews tailed the race with a tightly choreographed operation to get the impacted neighborhoods back in good condition.
A rendering of the new San Francisco Fire Department training facility shows its proximity to the Bay.
New Fire Department Training Campus Gets Real
Just south of Yosemite Slough in the Bayview, on a lot that less than a century ago would’ve been mostly submerged in frigid Bay water, a new mini neighborhood – including a high-rise apartment building, a Victorian home and a four-story structure with commercial and residential space – is expected to start construction this fall.
The training campus will include a so-called scenario district for live-fire exercises.
But even though the community will look and feel like a typical San Francisco neighborhood, with fire escapes along building facades and a sloped intersection, nobody will move in. In fact, some of the structures will appear partially collapsed when they are finished – almost as if an earthquake had rattled, tilted and contorted them.
That’s because the carefully crafted San Francisco microcosm will be a training ground for the next generation of City firefighters and emergency medical technicians. The 50,000-square-foot scenario district will be part of the new San Francisco Fire Department Division of Training campus – a $145 million, Public Works-led project spanning 8 acres that will include state-of-the-art training facilities, offices, classrooms and even space to practice operating unwieldy fire trucks.
Partially collapsed training structures will emulate the aftermath of an earthquake.
The faux city block will incorporate some of San Francisco’s quirks and idiosyncrasies – from an underground cistern in the middle of the intersection to staircases with little space to maneuver and narrow hallways.
“This is a really once-in-a-generation project,” said Public Works architect Matt Jasmin, whose team is designing parts of the campus.
Alongside the seven-building training district for live-fire exercises, the rectangular lot at 1236 Carroll Ave. – not far from where the Candlestick Park stadium once stood – will include an administrative building with classrooms, lockers and offices; wood and metal shops to fabricate training props; a covered ladder training structure; storage for training vehicles and equipment; a fueling and utility yard; and even a rubble pile to train for search-and-rescue operations.
A rendering shows where the original shoreline (blue line) is located in relation to the project site.
Financed through the City’s voter-approved Earthquake Safety and Emergency Response Bond program, the project represents a much-needed upgrade for a force that currently has to train new recruits and veteran staff at outdated facilities on Treasure Island and in the Mission District.
The new campus will replace the Fire Department’s original training facility at 19th and Folsom streets, which opened in the 1950s, said Scott Moran, who is managing the Division of Training project for Public Works and working closely with the Fire Department team.
“It’s woefully undersized for the Fire Department and most of their classroom facilities are actually temporary trailers and have been for a long time,” he said. In addition, the training tower there, where firefighters learn how to access and fight fires in tall buildings, doesn’t meet today’s needs.
The same goes for a Treasure Island training campus that the Fire Department inherited from the U.S. Navy, which operated a naval station there for more than half a century, until 1997. “That training facility was built a long time ago specifically to simulate fires on naval ships,” Moran said. “So it’s not a great fit.”
Instead of training on Treasure Island and in the Mission District,
new recruits and veteran staff will head to the new Bayview campus.
Additionally, a redevelopment project on Treasure Island – including new housing and parks – requires the Fire Department to vacate the island.
The new training facility in the Bayview – expected to be completed by summer or fall 2028 – is being built against the backdrop of a neighborhood undergoing a transformation of its own. Public Works recently helped build the new Southeast Family Health Center and Southeast Community Center there.
A drone shot shows the 8-acre lot in the Bayview.
The newest major addition to the community landscape cuts to the core of what the Fire Department does, said Moran, whose career has been all about building unusual things – from theme park rides to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. The new training center will welcome both new firefighter recruits and EMT trainees, as well as existing staff completing recertification exercises throughout their career.
“Anybody who is in the Fire Department has to go through this facility,” Moran said.
Toothpicks and Jell-O
The project is both vitally important for San Francisco and – thanks in large part due to its location on precarious soil and tricky terrain – a highly complex, challenging undertaking, requiring an all-hands-on-deck approach from Public Works and its partners.
Public Works is managing the project and construction on behalf of the Fire Department. Our Bureau of Architecture is managing the design for the main administrative building and the Bureau of Landscape Architecture is handling the landscape and hardscape design of the campus.
Due to the size and scope of the project, an outside executive architect – DLR Group – is responsible for the rest of the buildings, alongside the architecture firm Kuth Ranieri as the associate architect. A Texas-based subject matter expert and former firefighter who has built dozens of training facilities for fire and police departments also is involved.
For a project of this nature, finding a suitable site in a city like San Francisco was no small feat. But even after the 26 individual parcels were pieced together to form the final footprint for the campus, challenges remained.
The site for the future training campus is located on difficult terrain.
“The site has very poor soil,” said Tina Kwan, Public Works’ structural engineer on the project.
The area was filled in with loose soil decades ago, permanently altering the original shoreline while at the same time masking a steep drop in bedrock.
“This site has a high water table and loose, sandy layers in the soil profile, which makes it susceptible to soil liquification during a major earthquake,” Kwan said.
Liquification is when the soil behaves like a liquid, a geological phenomenon that can cause significant damage to structures. During the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, for instance, liquefaction of the soils and debris used to create land on what was once a lagoon caused major problems in the Marina District, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
To deal with the subpar soil at the Bayview site, the project team used a two-fold approach:
For one, the campus was designed to cluster the main occupied buildings as close to the original shoreline as possible, where the underlying ground is more stable.
Secondly, the team will use more than 350 piles, driven deep into the ground, to make the buildings more resilient in the face of a major earthquake. “We'll be driving piles up to 100 feet deep and up to 15 feet deep into bedrock in some locations,” Kwan said.
Side-by-side images show how much of the site used to be underwater.
Moran likened it to toothpicks being pushed into Jell-O until they reach the stable surface below.
“It’s a casserole dish of Jell-O and it’s all kind of even,” he explained. “And if I take this full coffee cup and I set it on the Jell-O, it’ll just start eventually sinking into the Jell-O. If I shake the table, it’ll sink faster – that's like an earthquake. But what we end up doing is you end up saying, ‘OK, I’m going to take a toothpick that is the length of the Jell-O, poke it straight down into the ground and it hits the bottom of the dish’... And I do a whole bunch of them and then I can actually set the coffee cup on there and the toothpicks are holding them.”
Taking it one step further, the piles will be drilled into the bedrock, anchoring them, while the top of the piles are connected via concrete grade beams, ultimately tying into the structural foundation. By arranging the occupied buildings as close to the original shoreline as possible, the team aims to cut down on the depth needed for the pile foundations to reach bedrock.
“So that even if we’re not getting the original shoreline, we’re catching the bedrock that’s below it, even if we have to go a little deeper, so that the buildings are all stable,” Moran explained.
Building earthquake-resilient structures is always paramount in San Francisco, but especially so in this case. The new facility will function as the Fire Department’s backup operations center for emergencies in the City. It also will serve as a space for Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training, a community-based, free program dedicated to teaching residents the basics of personal preparedness and disaster skills.
But solving the site’s challenging terrain wasn’t the only hurdle Public Works and its partners needed to overcome. Another lurked below: utilities.
The site is bounded by three so-called paper streets – streets that were mapped but never built – and as a result, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission located huge underground wastewater infrastructure systems there, Moran said.
A sewer main, built decades ago, travels under one of the paper streets. A second, even bigger structure carries stormwater and wastewater underneath the site.
Moran and his team, in conjunction with the Fire Department and SFPUC, developed a whole set of rules and guidelines about what can be done during construction and afterward to protect the underground assets.
“We cannot build any buildings or structures or have any trees over the utilities,” Moran said. “We can have roads – and then there are limits on that. You can’t store equipment or stage materials or anything like that on top of these utilities.”
THE PAST MEETS MODERN-DAY NEEDS
Designing for the future of San Francisco’s firefighters and EMTs, Public Works and its partners first looked toward the past.
The initial idea for the campus buildings centered around red brick – a nod to the Fire Department’s rich history and iconic look.
“It made sense for the kind of representation of the Fire Department, but also for historic buildings along the waterfront and also just the industrial kind of quality of the project,” Jasmin, the architect, recalled. “Doing something that is timeless in a way.”
But there were concerns from fire officials. Chief among them: graffiti.
“They showed us pictures of a lot of their facilities where it’s a brick building and it’s painted over multiple times to cover graffiti, so you kind of kill the brick,” Jasmin said. “And they really didn’t want to have that be the outcome.”
That’s when Jasmin and his team turned to the Public Works maintenance pros. The designers gathered a bunch of materials to test and headed to the Operations Yard to consult with experts at Public Works’ Bureau of Building and Street Repair.
“They spray-painted them and wrote with Sharpie (permanent markers) and then ended up just testing a bunch of different graffiti removal products, but also that sacrificial graffiti coating,” Jasmin said. “And we also just talked to them about the reality of what they would do.”
Experts from Public Works’ Bureau of Building and Street Repair helped find the best material to use for the building facades.
The battery of tests – including gouging materials with a knife, as if to carve words into it – produced a clear winner: porcelain tiles. Not only do they allow for graffiti to be easily wiped off, they also enabled the design team to retain a brick-like feeling for the buildings.
“It’s an interpretation of that – still that same concept, but it’s a bigger scale,” Jasmin said. “Similar proportion to a brick, but it’s just bigger and easier to clean. The size of it is also tied to that ease of cleaning. You don’t have as many grout joints, which are also a problem with graffiti removal, but it still has sort of echoes of brick.”
A tower with translucent glass will serve as a visual marker and a nod to the Fire Department’s past.
There are other campus features, too, that are meant to celebrate the Fire Department’s legacy in San Francisco. Among them: a stair tower with translucent glass that aims to be a beacon from afar and a reference to traditional fire station hose towers.
Back in the day, Jasmin said, fire stations had hose towers to hang and dry their cotton hoses so they wouldn’t mold and fall apart. Nowadays, firefighters use synthetic hoses so there is no need for that anymore and a lot of the City’s hose towers have been taken down because they posed seismic hazards.
“But it’s still a lot about how people recognize a fire station,” Jasmin said. “So we were looking at how do we incorporate something like that.”
A covered structure will provide space for ladder drills regardless of weather.
What’s more, fire officials will be able to light the top of the tower to commemorate certain dates that are important to the department, such as 9/11, for example, he said.
But despite the eye-catching visual markers, learning, training and functionality remain at the center of the campus.
“The main goal with this facility is to be able to have simultaneous training happening on various parts of the campus,” Moran said.
A rendering shows firefighters during live-fire exercises.
Vertical bifold doors along the ground-floor classrooms allow recruits to easily transition into more hands-on training outdoors. A covered structure provides space for outdoor training and ladder drills regardless of weather. Generous glass facades on the second floor give command staff a view of the training activities.
“In addition to training in the classrooms and at the scenario district, the roads within the campus have also been designed to accommodate the required driver training cones courses for the recruits,” said Matthew Wong, a Public Works architectural associate involved with the project.
The scenario district will include a mix of buildings that first responders routinely encounter in San Francisco.
Much like a traditional educational campus, the site is organized around quads and plazas. The most unusual sector perhaps is the scenario district in the northwest corner of the lot.
A seven-story tower will represent high-rise apartments, complete with a simulated elevator to practice rescues. A four-story commercial-residential building will be designed to emulate a structure one would find in Chinatown: a ground floor of businesses with apartments above, including smaller, single-room occupancy spaces. A “Junior Five” with a garage on the lower level is also in the mix.
“It is specifically tailored,” Moran said, “to the unique firefighting and EMT challenges in San Francisco.”
The campus also will provide space for recruits to practice operating fire engines.
PUBLIC WORKS
BY THE NUM83R5
2025 -YEAR TO DATE (as of May 2025)
4,572
POTHOLES
FILLED
2,759
TREES
PRUNED
271
CURB RAMPS
CONSTRUCTED
175
NUMBER OF BLOCKS RESURFACED
6,296
TONS OF DEBRIS COLLECTED
Neighborhood Beautification Day volunteers spruce up the Quesada Avenue gardens in the Bayview.
Dozens of New Street Trees Take Root in the City’s Southeastern Neighborhoods
Under deep blue skies, the Public Works Bureau of Urban Forestry and Community Engagement teams led a productive Love Our City: Neighborhood Beautification Day event this month that successfully capped efforts to get 79 young street trees in the ground across the Bayview and other District 10 neighborhoods.
Sixty volunteers, including many Public Works employees pitching in on their day off, rolled up their sleeves for a morning of hard work and fun in the sun on May 10.
“Today demonstrates our ongoing commitment to grow the urban forest in District 10 and throughout San Francisco’s least-leafy neighborhoods,” said Public Works Director Carla Short, who participated in the tree planting and neighborhood cleanup effort.
We were joined by District 10 Supervisor Shamann Walton.
Public Works Director Carla Short and Supervisor Shamann Walton rev up the crowd before the workday begins.
“Your teams do an amazing job of showing up for our residents and for our community and I just want to say thank you for that,” Walton told volunteers before they headed to different worksites. “I also appreciate all the volunteers from the department, as well as our volunteers from our neighborhoods and our community. This day is about more than planting trees. It represents the fact that we have folks in the Bayview and throughout District 10 who are committed to making sure we can show esteem in our neighborhoods.”
After the brief event kickoff, held at Bayview K.C. Jones Playground, eight teams of community volunteers and Public Works staff fanned out to plant 30 young trees throughout the Dogpatch, Potrero Hill and Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhoods.
The morning’s effort included picking up litter, hand-weeding Leland Avenue rain garden bulb-outs, pruning and removing green waste in the lush Quesada Avenue gardens with their iconic towering Canary Island date palms and colorful murals, and using power tools and sheer might to remove invasive ivy along 25th Street.
Volunteers weed the terraced Bridgeview Garden greenspace.
Ahead of the big volunteer event, urban forestry inspectors identified plantable tree basins and landscape crews visited the sites to make sure there were no old pipes or concrete in the basins that might pose obstacles during the workday. Meanwhile, our arborists planted more than 40 trees ahead of the event, to help us reach the 79-tree milestone.
Later that morning, in a residential neighborhood along the train tracks on Mendell Street, arborist supervisor Drew Landers walked volunteers through proper tree planting techniques, including placing the saplings at just the right depth (not too shallow, not too deep), loosening up the root ball to give the tree a head start and adding tree stakes and cross braces to protect it. As a final step, his crew added a 15-gallon watering bag, which our watering crews will fill once a week during the tree’s three-year establishment period.
“That watering bag has a perforated bottom, which lets the water slowly release into the soil,” Landers told the small group. “The key is you don’t want to put a lot of water on it because it just dries out. We want the water to get as deep and as uniform around the base of the tree as possible. That’s how a young tree establishes.”
The newly planted trees included Persian ironwood, western redbud, pink dawn, Japanese zelkova and bay laurel – sourced at the Public Works Street Tree Nursery in the South of Market neighborhood. Our certified arborists carefully selected each tree as suitable for District 10’s unique microclimate, where hills help deflect wind and fog, contributing to its sunny and warm atmosphere.
A team of volunteers and Public Works staff plant new street trees.
Short, the Public Works director, noted that while the Bureau of Urban Forestry and its tree-planting grant partners, including Friends of the Urban Forest, have made progress in their efforts to add street trees to District 10, the Bayview still has one of the smallest tree canopies, compared to other San Francisco neighborhoods, at 6.7%. The City average is more than double that at 13.7%.
The pollution-absorbing benefits trees provide are important everywhere, but especially in neighborhoods such as the Bayview, which bears the dual burden of being located near heavy industry and two major freeways. The neighborhoods of District 10 are also some of the most heavily paved. Asphalt and concrete surfaces absorb and re-emit heat, contributing to the overall increase in temperature in warmer summer months. Trees provide shade, which is increasingly important as global temperatures rise.
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Map of D10 planting locations.
“We’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far in District 10, adding hundreds of trees in recent years, but there’s more work to be done,” said Short, a trained arborist.
Over at Bancroft and Carroll avenues, members of GEO Reentry Services – a program for individuals on probation or parole and pretrial defendants – heaved 15-gallon trees out of their nursery buckets into empty basins in the mixed industrial-residential neighborhood. The muscular effort included gently working the soil, covering the trees’ root balls, pounding stakes into the ground and adding protective cross braces.
A newly planted street tree gets a wooden brace for stability and protection during the early years of growth.
After the work was complete, the group of men gave each other fist bumps and headed for a box lunch hosted by Public Works as a thank you for their help.
If you’re interested in getting involved with future street tree plantings in District 10 or would like to become a tree steward – reporting damaged trees or trees that may need more frequent watering – please email urbanforestry@sfdpw.org with the subject line “I Want to Support Trees in D10.” For more information on caring for your street tree, please visit our website.
Every month, Love Our City: Neighborhood Beautification Day focuses on a different supervisorial district, bringing together residents, community groups, merchants and Public Works employees to improve San Francisco neighborhoods. Please join us next month as we green and clean Glen Park, Bernal Cut, Diamond Heights, Noe Valley and more District 8 neighborhoods.
The June 7 workday will kick off at 9 a.m. at the James Lick Middle School yard, 4161-25th St. Advance registration is encouraged. You may sign up here.
Our Paint Shop team set up a staining station for students to coat the planter boxes they built with our carpenters at the Operations Yard open house.
PUBLIC WORKS WEEK
2025
We hosted our annual Public Works Week celebration with open houses, project tours, an employee recognition ceremony and a special acknowledgement of our 125th anniversary serving San Francisco.
The series of events ran from April 28 through May 2. A highlight was the open house at the Operations Yard, which drew a record 500-plus very enthusiastic students, from grade school through community college.
There were a lot of great hands-on activities with our urban forestry, street cleaning and trades crews – from building, staining and planting planter boxes and crafting metal toolboxes to painting out graffiti and smoothing out cement. Bucket truck rides, glazier demonstrations and a chance to work the equipment used by our plumbers were among the other offerings.
A variety of activities greets young visitors at our Operations Yard open house.
We also had representatives from various crafts unions who were on hand to talk to visitors about possible careers in the trades.
Our other open house was held at our 49 South Van Ness Ave. offices, drawing about 130 grade-schoolers who worked with our architects, landscape architects, engineers and project delivery teams to build model cities and then place them on what we call shake tables to see how they’d fare in a simulated earthquake.
Shake shake shake! Grade schoolers at the open house with our design teams simulate an earthquake to see if the model city they just built can withstand oscillation.
We hosted tours of the historic Third Street Bridge, our Materials Testing Lab and the Animal Care & Control building that we designed and delivered.
We also held our annual employee awards and pin ceremony. The top awards were Project of the Year, which went to the Better Market Street team for the recently completed streetscape project and infrastructure improvements in the Mid-Market area, and Employee of the Year, which went to Alejandro del Calvo from our street inspections team who has been at the forefront of our illegal vending enforcement operation. We also honored Stanley DeSouza, who retired from Public Works after 40 years of service.
The Better Market Street team (above) wins Project of the Year honors; street inspection supervisor Alejandro del Calvo is named Public Works Employee of the Year.
DeSouza started with Public Works as a chemist at the Southeast Treatment Plant testing water quality. He retired earlier this year as manager of the Site Assessment and Remediation Team that checks for possible contaminants, such as lead and asbestos, in City projects and buildings and maps out plans for proper mitigation and disposal.
Mayor Daniel Lurie gives Stanley DeSouza a 40-year Public Works service pin for his four decades of public service.
Founded in 1900 as the Board of Public Works, the department remains a 24/7 operation with a vast portfolio that touches every neighborhood in San Francisco. Once a year, we step back to take stock of our work and our employees with a week-long celebration.
Each spring, Public Works Week is marked nationally by public works departments across North America to recognize accomplishments and milestones and showcase how public works services and projects improve our communities. This year’s theme: “People, Purpose, Presence.”
Delightful planter boxes installed on Ross Alley discourage illegal dumping.
Planting an Idea to Curb Illegal Dumping
Ross Alley, one of the oldest of Chinatown’s famous alleyways, once was home to brothels and gambling dens during the Barbary Coast days in the 1800s. Today, the well-traveled lane boasts a barber, florist, boba shop, gift emporiums, a fortune cookie factory and other ground-floor businesses that serve residents and visitors. The one-block alley – tucked between Stockton, Grant, Washington and Jackson streets – is a favorite destination on tours of the historic neighborhood.
It also, unfortunately, has been a hot spot for illegal dumping where scofflaws surreptitiously leave behind rotting food, piles of cardboard and bags of trash, blighting the beloved alleyway and detracting from the work of community-driven, City-supported investments under the Public Works Chinatown Alleyways Renovation Program.
Decorative pavement, colorful murals and informational plaques enliven Ross Alley. Smelly, ugly trash blemishes the good vibes.
And Peter Huang, manager of the Chinese Christian Mission at 14 Ross Alley, is fed up. Earlier this year, he reached out to Public Works staff asking for help to curb the illegal dumping.
Working with Rain Wong, an outreach coordinator with the department’s Outreach and Enforcement (OnE) Team, the duo began brainstorming ideas. Huang suggested installing planter boxes to deter persistent dumping at the north end of the alley, near Jackson Street.
An empty storefront on Ross Alley serves as a makeshift carpentry shop for building the planter boxes.
Wong got to work, getting scrap wood from her colleagues at the Public Works Carpenter Shop to build the boxes and soil from our Bureau of Urban Forestry to fill them. Volunteers from the Rotary Club of San Francisco Chinatown helped plant them with succulents donated by Vince Yuen of the civic stewardship group Refuse Refuse.
Then, volunteers from 41 Ross Artist-in-Residence, a program under the Chinese Culture Center, spent the last weekend of April painting the boxes with colorful designs. Before they arrived, Public Works street cleaning crews conducted a special deep cleaning of the area.
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Volunteer artists paint whimsical designs on the planter boxes.
In the month-plus since the boxes went in, illegal dumping on Ross Alley hasn’t disappeared altogether, but there has been noticeably less.
“The positive effects were quickly shown: Illegal dumping decreased and the space began to feel more cared for,” said Huang, who hatched the idea for planter boxes.
Meanwhile, Wong, the Public Works outreach coordinator assigned to Chinatown, is working with Ross Alley businesses and property owners to install alley-facing security cameras with the goal of catching the illegal dumping culprits in the act and allowing the City to use the footage to take enforcement action against them.
One exasperated Ross Alley proprietor even went so far as to post surveillance camera screenshots of someone dumping trash on Ross Alley and asking people for help identifying the offender.
Before and after: Illegal dumping on Ross Alley (left) was an everyday occurrence until the planter boxes (right) went in.
Wong also doesn’t shy away from donning a pair of gloves to comb through the illegally dumped trash for identifying clues of who might be responsible for sullying the neighborhood.
Keeping Chinatown – and for that matter any neighborhood in San Francisco – vibrant and welcoming takes a team effort. The recent work on Ross Alley exemplifies the good that can come when the City and the community join forces to make a difference.
Today, the historic Chinatown alleyway looks much more inviting.
A flusher truck washes down the race route after Bay to Breakers revelers wrap up.
After Bay to Breakers,
a Race to Clean Up the City
This month, San Francisco hosted the annual Bay to Breakers race – although some people would describe the May 18 event more as a roving street party.
Nearly 25,000 people – many bedecked in costumes, some wearing nearly nothing at all – participated in Bay to Breakers, with thousands more on the sidelines watching.
The 7.45-mile route starts near The Embarcadero and ends just short of the Pacific Ocean. As always, Public Works cleaning crews tailed the race, picking up discarded t-shirts and empty water bottles, feather boas, candy wrappers, pom-poms, beach chairs and banners.
Our focus was on the neighborhoods heading into Golden Gate Park – the Financial District, South of Market, Hayes Valley and the Western Addition. Our work stops at Stanyan Street, with cleanup duties turned over to the Recreation and Park Department for the final leg.
A fleet of Public Works street cleaning trucks follow the popular footrace.
Public Works had 60 street cleaners and truck drivers in the field.
Our crews manually cleaned the route with brooms, rakes, blowers and shovels. They were followed by mechanical sweepers and flusher trucks that washed down the roads. They did a tremendous job getting the City back in shape. Their work wrapped up around 1:15 p.m., just a little more than five hours after the race started – and an hour and a half faster than last year.
A week later, the specialized street cleaning operation moved to the Mission District for the Carnaval festivities during Memorial Day weekend. Next month, we’ll take on our biggest special event cleanup of the year with the Pride Parade.