After years of fights, compromises, speeches, hearings, and a citywide vote, the Great Highway has officially become a park: Sunset Dunes.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony on Saturday sealed the deal, while hundreds of spectators cheered in the sunshine. But for a couple dozen zealots who came out to protest the grand opening, the fight isn’t over.
“Our supervisor betrayed us,” Jen Dougherty said from inside her SUV, shouting over the din of car horns.
She was one member of a motorcade that drove around the Sunset displaying Recall Engardio signs before stopping at Lower Great Highway and Noriega to rev their engines and honk during speeches by Supervisor Joel Engardio, Recreation and Parks Department Director Phil Ginsburg, and other Sunset Dunes champions.
“I’m here as a concerned citizen,” Dougherty continued. “This man [Engardio] needs to be held accountable.”
The protestors’ position is that Engardio caught his constituents off guard by putting Proposition K on the November 2024 ballot, and did not give voters opposed to the measure sufficient time to mount resistance. (Prop. K passed with 55% of the vote, although most precincts on the city’s west side voted against it.) Now, they want to see him recalled.
One family in the protest parade screamed in unison out of their open car windows, mother and children lending their voices to the cacophony. Another protestor, revving his motorcycle, declined questions, and revved only louder when a park supporter asked him to quiet down.
“I hate them,” said the supporter, Dee, who withheld her last name for privacy. The Great Highway neighbor and SFUSD paraeducator said she had been on the fence about the issue, but the protestors helped make up her mind.
“They have convinced me that they’re just a bunch of screaming, tantrum-ing 3-year-olds,” she said
She added that she hadn’t noticed a significant increase in neighborhood traffic since the road closed.
At a “Stand with Joel” tent, Engardio campaign strategist Josh Raznick said his boss “respects his constituents’ right to disagree with him,” and pointed out that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors could have unilaterally converted the Great Highway to a park without bringing it to voters at all.
Even so, the threat of a recall is real, and the campaign is preemptively promoting Engardio to the neighborhood.
“We are doing the basic work of politics,” Radzick said. “Explaining what Joel has done for the Sunset.”
Radzick and his team were certainly preaching to the choir at Saturday’s event, where the crowd applauded uproariously when the embattled supervisor took the stage. (A lone protestor waving a Recall Engardio sign seemed only to increase the crowd’s enthusiasm.)
Eventually, police arrived, and protestors dispersed. The revelers remained.
Among the attractions at Saturday’s grand opening were a traditional Samoan dance performance, a series of photography prints showing the Great Highway’s history, live music by the Sunset Community Band, bike valet parking courtesy of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, two inflatable bouncy houses from which The Standard was denied entry (just kidding), a now-permanent pump track and wooden slat ramps for mountain bikes, and a pop-up skatepark provided by RPD.
“Regardless of how you voted on Prop. K, we want you to enjoy the space,” RPD’s Ginsburg said, adding that there have been political fights over the opening of many now-beloved city parks. “Every cell in my body tells me five years from now, even those that voted against this are gonna say, ‘Yeah, it’s pretty great.’”
Sunset resident Colin Dyre, 40, said he was glad for the new amenity.
“I understand the concern, but I think having a park here is a lot better than a pseudo-highway,” he said, adding that Golden Gate Park’s JFK Promenade faced opposition, too, but ultimately prevailed. “It may be another one of those situations.”
John H., a Recall Engardio volunteer who asked to withhold his last name for privacy reasons, disavowed the noisy car parade, adding that it was not an official campaign action (Recall Engardio organizer Vin Budhai confirmed).
“I heard about it and thought, ‘That’s pretty stupid,’” he said, adding that fear of increased neighborhood traffic and noise was a common theme among those who oppose the Great Highway’s closure to cars. “I think a car parade is a little tone deaf.”
John, who was collecting signatures for the recall, said he wanted to maintain the compromise solution, where cars could drive on the Great Highway only during the week, but Engardio made that impossible. But John’s distaste is for his supervisor, not Sunset Dunes.
“It’s a great park,” he said. “It’s a lovely park.”